The Last Stand

by Jay Allan

  Chronos didn’t know much about the Highborn, who they were, or why they had come. But he didn’t believe they were xenophobes come to annihilate humanity. They were conquerors, almost certainly, and though they had shown brutal ruthlessness in the destruction of some lesser worlds, they had occupied others. He didn’t know what life under enemy occupation would be like. Not particularly pleasant, he guessed. But very possibly survivable…until the fleet managed to return and retake the planet.

  If that happens…

  He tried to remember that Tyler Barron had reclaimed Megara, but that was fairly cold comfort. The situations were different, and he had a grim feeling that his last glimpse of Calpharon before his ship entered the tube would be his final look at his homeworld.

  He took a deep breath as the comm unit crackled back to life. He was several light seconds from Dauntless, and that was enough to be disruptive to a discussion.

  “Chronos, I understand the need to complete your evacuation, but we don’t have three hours. We probably don’t have two either. The enemy is closing, and I’ve got to order Colossus, at least, to break off and start a run for the point now. The battle line might hold for another…hour, maybe? But that’s all you’ve got.” There was a hesitation, and then Barron’s voice returned, his tone strained. “I’m ordering Colossus to pull back at once, to the battle line’s position. Before the enemy can bring enough force to bear to cripple even that behemoth. And in one hour, my forces will begin a retreat to transit point two. I urge you to have your forces ready at that time. I do not relish the thought of fighting this war without you…but whatever you do, I have my own duty, to the Confederation, and to my spacers. And staying here, allowing them all to die in a hopeless defense, serves no purpose.” A pause. “You can’t win, Chronos. Calpharon is going to fall whether or not your fleet is destroyed here.”

  Chronos stared at the comm unit for a few seconds. He’d come to know Tyler Barron fairly well, and he respected his new comrade’s opinions. Perhaps more, he had reaffirmed something he’d known since Barron was his enemy. The Confed admiral was no coward. If Barron thought there was any chance to prevail in the current battle, he would fight to the end.

  “Tyler…” Chronos hesitated. He knew Barron was right. He also knew he couldn’t leave without Akella and his children. And he was still waiting for confirmation the ships had departed from Calpharon. “…I don’t know if an hour will be enough. I have to wait for Akella…and for the Council.” In truth, he realized he wouldn’t mourn too much if half the Council got left behind. “Ninety minutes,” he finally said. It was a guess, but he knew he wasn’t going to get more out of Barron than that.

  Perhaps more importantly, he knew he couldn’t wait any longer either. He couldn’t leave Akella and the others…but they would all be killed or captured anyway if they didn’t escape now. Barron was inarguably right about one thing. Even with all three fleets combined, even with Colossus on the attack…they weren’t going to stop the Highborn forces. And Admiral Winters wasn’t going to manage to hold the flanking force for much longer either. Chronos hoped against hope he wouldn’t be forced to make the decision to pull the fleet out of the line and make a run for it before Akella and Ajia and the others he cared about had left.

  He didn’t know what he would do if it came to that. He wouldn’t know until he had to make the call.

  “Seventy-five minutes, Chronos. We’ll hold for that long. That’s not arbitrary, my friend…it’s the longest we can wait and still have a reasonable chance to escape.” A pause. “You won’t save anybody by dying here, by losing your fleet. The only good you can do now is to survive, escape to fight another day.”

  Chronos knew Barron was right…but she still had no idea what he would do if Akella and the children were still on Calpharon in an hour and fifteen minutes. But he wasn’t going to get any more out of Barron, and it wouldn’t matter if he did. His own calculations matched Barron’s. Seventy-five minutes. It was all they had.

  “Agreed. Seventy-five minutes. Stand with me for that long, and I’ll pull back with you.”

  He wasn’t sure if he was lying to Barron or not…only time would tell him that.

  He turned as he waited for Barron’s response, and he shouted out an order across the bridge. “Get me an update on Number One and the evacuation on Calpharon.”

  * * *

  Reg stared at the row of screens, becoming more frantic with each passing second. Each second of nothingness, of no contact at all. No hint at what had happened to Jake Stockton.

  Raptor…

  She’d searched everywhere she could, brought herself deeper behind the enemy line. She had to break off, at least try to get back to the fleet. They’re going to pull out soon…they’ve got to retreat, and if I don’t get the hell out of here now, they’ll leave without me....

  She knew the realities of the battle, and the brutal certainty that the alternative to breaking off would be total destruction. And she knew full well what they’d pounded in her head since the first day of flight school. The battleships always come first. If saving one of the big vessels meant leaving pilots behind, a battleship’s captain would send flowers to the memorial service…but he would get his ship out of there.

  It was fleet policy, and it had been as long as there had been a Confederation navy. It was common sense, too. A battleship took years to build, and it carried a thousand or more as crew. No number of fighters could match that.

  I can’t just leave him…

  She knew she could be looking for a dead man, that she probably was. The likeliest reason she couldn’t find Stockton’s ship was because it didn’t exist anymore, at least not as anything but a quickly cooling and dissipating plasma. But she couldn’t believe that. It seemed impossible. For all the analysis telling her that was very likely just what had happened, she couldn’t make herself accept it. She’d come up in the shadow of Raptor’s legend, and every time she’d climbed into her fighter, she had strived to follow in his path. She was painfully aware of the bitter mortality of pilots…but it seemed impossible to reconcile with the idea that Jake Stockton was dead.

  Her eyes were moist, the tears moving ahead of her tortured mind, realization coming to her aching guts and shaking hands before her mind could grasp it. She’d been determined to remain where she was until she’d found Stockton. But if she didn’t break off soon, she knew she never would.

  They’re probably comming me right now, trying to order me back…unless they think I’m dead, too.

  She was too far from the fleet, too deep past the enemy ships and their strange emissions to pick up any communications from the fleet, or even the forward squadrons. No comm signal could reach her, nor would the fleet receive hers. Unless she went back immediately, her first notice of the fleet’s withdrawal would be when she saw the ships pulling back.

  And then it would be too late.

  Still, she couldn’t give up on Stockton, couldn’t accept that he was gone. Save for one thing a heavy weight hanging on her soul like a chain.

  Duty.

  Stockton had left her in command, and he had placed upon her the responsibility to look after the wings. ‘Take care of my people,’ he had said. She would only be failing him by continuing the futile search. If he’d been able to give her one last order, she knew exactly what it would have been.

  And she would obey it as though she heard it from his lips.

  The moisture in her eyes pooled up, and tears streamed down her cheeks as she gripped her controls, willing her hand to move, to angle her vector back toward the fleet.

  To give up on Stockton. To accept that the greatest legend the fighter corps had ever known, the legendary Raptor, a warrior with hundreds of kills, was dead.

  She sat for a moment, frozen…and then she jerked her arm to the side, blasting her thrusters back toward the fleet. Toward escape.

  Assuming she could make it back past the enemy line. It would be easier for a single ship coming from behind, but th
at didn’t mean it wasn’t going to be a wildly dangerous trip. She wondered if she would make it back.

  Then she flipped a coin in her head.

  * * *

  “I need another hour, Admiral…at least.” Stara Sinclair’s voice was hoarse, raw, as it echoed in Barron’s headset. He couldn’t imagine the tension she was feeling, struggling to get the returning fighter wings back onboard the tortured battleships…and also with the growing realization that she might need to leave some of them behind. That would be a nightmare, no less for Barron, and he imagined the tsunami of messages coming in from pilots who knew they were being left behind to die. War was full of soul-killing misery, but few things could top that kind of torment.

  But he knew there was something else, even worse perhaps, drilling into her consciousness. There had been no sign of Jake Stockton. Barron hadn’t worried about it at first, no more than usual, at least, but now a dark feeling was growing. Stockton was always likely to be one of the last ships to return, but the survivors were mostly accounted for. And there had been no sign of the strike force commander’s ship.

  For that matter, no sign of Reg Griffin’s either. Had he lost both of them? Had the fighter corps he would need to badly in the next fight sacrificed its two top commanders?

  And had he lost one of his few true friends?

  He shook his head. He didn’t have time for any of that. He had a fleet to command, one that would be withdrawing in exactly forty-two minutes, regardless of how much time Stara Sinclair needed.

  Regardless of where Jake Stockton was.

  “Stara…” His voice was soft, sympathetic…but then he realized, that wasn’t what she needed. Not just then. Thousands of lives were depending on her, and he had to take the burden off of her. He had to assume it himself, allow her to simply follow his own, ruthless, orders. “You’ve got thirty minutes, and not a second more. That will barely give us time to batten down the bays, and prepare to thrust out of here. And we’re doing that in forty minutes, no matter what the situation.” No matter who is still out there. He kept that last part to himself, but there wasn’t a doubt in his mind Stara was just as aware there had been no sign of Stockton.

  “Yes, Admiral.” Her voice was stony, cold…but Barron could hear the pain she was trying so hard to hide. “Get them in, Stara, get them all in. If anybody can do it, it’s you.” He cut the line. Then he turned and looked at the display.

  Colossus. The massive vessel was almost back to the battle line’s position, after cutting a bloody swath through the enemy’s flank. Colossus had proven more than a match for the enemy’s vessels, but now it was being pursued by at least three dozen Highborn ships. The great battleship had taken more hits than he could easily count, and it was clearly damaged. But Sonya Eaton was driving her giant battleship hard, a relentless effort to bring it back toward the fleet.

  Barron just wasn’t sure she was going to make it.

  “Atara…second and third divisions, break off from current targets. Divert all fire to the ships pursuing Colossus. Let’s turn that space on her tail into a fiery version of hell!” Eaton very well might not make it back alone. But she wasn’t alone, by God! The fleet was with her.

  “Bring us around, too. All remaining batteries lock onto the nearest pursuer.” Dauntless’s primaries had once again lost the battle against the relentless pounding the ship had endured, and despite Anya Fritz’s wizardry that had thrice restored them to action, they were finally blasted almost to scrap. It would take weeks, if not a trip to spacedock at a class one shipyard, to fix them now. But the secondaries packed some punch too, and the ships chasing Colossus showed the damage their prey had inflicted during the chase. And Barron knew just what he had to do.

  “Gun them down, Atara. Every one of them.”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  20,000 Kilometers from CFS Dauntless

  Sigma Nordlin System

  Year 323 AC (After the Cataclysm)

  The Battle of Calpharon – The Sledgehammer

  “I’m coming in…” Reg stared at the screen in front of her, trying not to notice how wobbly and unstable the image appeared. It looked like the whole system might give up the ghost any second, leaving her blind. That would be the end. She wasn’t sure she could land her battered fighter anyway, not with Dauntless blasting away at full away from the battle.

  She was sure, however, there was no chance at all if her scanner suite bit the dust.

  “I’ve got you on my screen, Reg. Sending you a beacon now. Just follow it in.”

  Stara Sinclair sounded hard, determined. Reg knew about Stockton and Stara, and she could only imagine what the fleet’s flight control commander was feeling just then. But it wasn’t creeping into her voice, not one bit. Sinclair was a stone-cold professional and a veteran of many battles. And the fact that she was personally directing Reg in on her final approach told the pilot just how bad her situation truly was.

  “Picking it up now, Stara.” As long as my comm holds out, at least. Her audio was staticky and scratchy—more battle damage from her desperate run past the enemy line. Still, she figured her comm was in better shape at least than her scanners.

  That was something, wasn’t it?

  Her ship shook hard, and she moved her hands back and forth, redirecting her main engines and firing small pulses. She would normally use her compressed gas positioning jets for minor adjustments, but the last enemy shot, the one she figured had come about ten centimeters from finishing her then and there, had scraped off all of her starboard side jets.

  That wasn’t going to make landing any easier either.

  Still, she should be glad, she thought, that the beam hadn’t ripped open her cockpit. It couldn’t have been far from doing just that.

  She reached out, punching a series of instructions into the AI interface. The computer system seemed to remain functional, but the voice communication circuit was definitely out. She stared down at a tiny screen, reading the system’s responses. The computer would do some of the work involved in the landing, but if she was going to make it into Dauntless’s bay in one piece, it was going to be her piloting skill and her intuition that got the job done. Matching velocities with a battleship blasting at full thrust while implementing heavy evasive maneuvers was something on the order of hitting a bullet with another bullet.

  But since freezing to death as she watched the fleet race toward the transit point was the only other option, Reg was ready to give it her best.

  She tapped the controls again, readjusting her vector. Then she hit the thrust again, pushing it almost up to maximum. Dauntless had altered her course, and she had to match it...quickly. There was no room for error.

  Jake Stockton pushed his way into her thoughts again, as he had every few minutes for the past three hours. It was almost reflex. For as long as she could remember, whenever she’d been in a tough spot in her cockpit, she’d thought of the fleet’s legendary pilot, imagined how he would handle the situation in her shoes, and drawn inspiration from that. But this time, as she was fighting to make it back, Stockton himself had not. She was still trying to understand, to accept that it was all real. The fleet had lost thousands of people in the battle, and it faced a difficult and uncertain future, even if it managed to escape from the system. But no loss matched that of Jake Stockton, and perhaps none could, save only for Admiral Barron himself. She couldn’t imagine the darkness that would settle over fighter country in each of the fleet’s battered battleships as the word spread.

  And if you don’t stay focused, you’re not going to make it back either. And they will need you to get through this. Jake trusted you to take care of them…

  She narrowed her gaze, staring at the display in front of her. She was less than a hundred kilometers out. Her vector was spot on, but her velocity was still a bit too high. She tapped the controls for the port jets, swinging the ship around, and she let out a burst of thrust, decelerating slightly. The AI was feeding her data on the screen, displaying Dauntle
ss’s velocity next to her own. It would have been simplicity itself to match up with the battleship…at least if it hadn’t been changing its own thrust and vector every few seconds to avoid enemy fire. Reg knew Stara would patch her into the ship’s nav system when she got closer, and then her AI would adjust her own maneuvers to compensate for Dauntless’s.

  Assuming her comm held out.

  She slipped under fifty kilometers. She was still moving faster than Dauntless. She had to be if she was going to catch up. But she was watchful not to approach too quickly. Her systems were all in rough shape, and she didn’t want to rely too much on her ability to decelerate quickly.

  “You’re under twenty kilometers, Reg. Plugging you into the main nav system.”

  Stara’s voice was still solid, but Reg was edgy anyway. she could feel there was something else. A few seconds later, Stara confirmed that suspicion.

  “Reg…we’re going to bring you into beta bay. I know you usually fly out of alpha, but beta’s in a little better shape.” A pause. “It’s still pretty battered, so you’re going to have to be pinpoint your landing. We’ve cleared as much space as possible, but we had a couple…rough…landings, and some of the debris is heavy. We have to clear space to get the cranes in, but that’s not going to happen before you reach the ship.”

  “Understood.” Reg hardly reacted. She had fought like crazy for almost two straight days, gone without sleep, almost without food and water. She had seen a friend, and a mentor she’d almost worshipped, lost in battle along with thousands of her comrades. If it hadn’t been for the deep survival instinct that drove most successful pilots, she might have given up, just blasted straight out into the system to spend her final hours pondering the beauty of deep space.