by M. D. Cooper
“Still, I thought I’d have known that our main financial backer was a serious badass,” Eve said while signaling two of the Marines to advance.
Terrance winked at the commander. “We all have little secrets. Jason and I got up to some fun stuff back in the day.”
Corsia didn’t reply, as a pair of arachnid-like combat mechs skittered around the corner, spraying rail pellets down the passageway.
The Marines moved in front of the rest of the group, their armor absorbing the enemy fire—mostly. The sergeant grunted as a rail pellet tore through his knee at the joint, spraying blood and cartilage across Corsia’s thighs.
“Suck this,” Eve roared as she pulled a pair of burn sticks from the sergeant’s back and threw them at the mechs.
The sticks sailed through the air, both striking the mechs’ bodies, the thermite in the weapons igniting and burning through the things’ ablative plating. Once weak spots were exposed, concentrated fire from the Marines slammed into the robots and tore their bodies to shreds.
“Faaaaaawwwwk,” Rama whispered in a drawn out voice, staring at the blood sprayed across her body.
“You hit?” Corsia asked.
“I…don’t? No?”
“Good.” Corsia grabbed Rama’s arm and pulled her along, staying close to Eve.
Five minutes later, they had reached the level the pinnace was on, and were carefully advancing down a broad corridor with little cover.
Corsia tapped into Eve’s connection and saw that the squad of ISF Marines in the bay were holding back a platoon of enemies who had taken up positions at two of the entrances.
The pinnace had its stasis shields up, but wasn’t firing on the IPE troops.
Corsia finally understood the urge to slap oneself in the forehead.
“Am I missing out on some good combat jokes?” Terrance asked, as the team continued to creep down the corridor.
“No,” Corsia said with a shake of her head. “Just me spacing out.”
“Is it wise to be talking aloud?” Kendrik asked from Terrance’s side. “Won’t they hear us?”
Eve shook her head. “Not yet. We deployed a nanocloud to dampen our sounds. The lot of you walk so loud they’d have heard us a minute ago, otherwise.”
Kendrik’s mouth formed an ‘O’, and he nodded silently.
They reached a bend in the corridor, and the soldier in the lead held up his hand, halting the group. Commander Eve and the Marines passed hand signals, getting ready to rush out and clear the passage ahead.
Corsia watched their plan take form, while keeping an eye on the feeds of the enemy around the bend.
There were nine IPE Marines clustered around the forward entrance to the docking bay. The pinnace’s feeds showed another ten enemies within the bay, clustered behind cover near the entrance.
Eve coordinated her plan with the squad of Marines inside the bay to hit the enemy from both sides. With luck, they’d kill them all…worst-case scenario, the IPE troops would fall back to the bay’s aft entrance.
Corsia, Terrance, and the sergeant with the blown-out knee held back with Kendrik and Rama. Terrance tried to stand at the front of the group, but Corsia gave him a stern look and pulled him back before taking a position behind the Marines.
With an unseen signal, Commander Eve led the Marines forward, and Corsia moved up to the apex of the corridor’s bend, ready to provide any cover for the Marines.
A flurry of weapons fire was exchanged between the two groups in the corridor, and the ISF Marines inside the bay shifted their focus to the enemy at the forward door.
Corsia saw Eve take a shot to the shoulder, and another Marine was hit in the leg, but the enemy fared worse; two minutes later, the four surviving IPE soldiers fled aft, clearing the way for Corsia to lead her group to the bay.
She pushed Terrance ahead first, and fell into the rear of the party, anxiously looking over her shoulder as she pushed Rama ahead of her, the woman half-frozen with fear.
“You OK?” Corsia asked Eve when she reached the commander.
“Fucking Ippies! We gonna blow the shit out of this ship once we’re clear?” the Marine growled through clenched teeth.
“Seems like a solid option,” Corsia replied as they reached the bay’s entrance.
She saw that Terrance and Kendrik were already at the pinnace, Rama a few paces behind them, ducking low as the IPE Marines at the aft doors intensified their fire.
A moment later, a series of straight lightning bolts shot from the pinnace’s dorsal cannons, tearing through the enemy’s cover—and no small number of the IPE troops.
“We gotta move!” the Marine at the door shouted, gesturing for Corsia and Eve to make the run to the pinnace.
Eve put a hand on Corsia’s back, about to guide her through the doorway, when the Marine beckoning to them exploded.
The force of the blast flung Corsia and Eve a dozen meters down the corridor, sending them sliding along the deck until they hit the bulkhead at the curve.
Corsia was on her feet in an instant, but realized that Eve had been stunned, her head lolling to the side. She pulled the Marine backward around the bend while searching the feeds for the source of the deadly fire.
Then she saw them. A pair of heavy assault mechs were moving down the passageway, while another trio had entered the bay.
Another explosion shook the ship, and EM interference cut off Corsia’s comms. The thud of mechs was shaking the deck.
Corsia bent over, screaming in Eve’s face, “On your feet, Marine! We gotta move!”
VALKRIS
STELLAR DATE: 09.06.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Interstellar Pinnace, 5AU Stellar north of Maitreya
REGION: Valkris System, Vela Cluster, Transcend Interstellar Alliance
Fifty minutes later, the pinnace’s sensors picked up the Airthan fleet as it entered the Valkris System. Of course that had all happened fifty minutes earlier, thanks to light lag. If all had gone well, by now the battle would already be over.
And if it had gone well, then Admiral Kira would have already sent word back to Airtha via jump gate. Though she hoped for that outcome, Sera steeled herself for the possibility that the EMG had failed, and her fleet was in ruins.
Settling into her seat in the cockpit, Sera pulled up a view of the Airthan fleet, placing it on the pinnace’s holodisplay. She noted with approval how Admiral Kira had arrayed her ships around the EMG in a near-sphere. The woman understands how important the weapon is. Good.
The ships advanced on Maitreya, their progress seeming unimaginably slow on scan, though even without the thrust indicators, Sera could see by the engine flares that the fleet was burning hard toward Valkris.
While she’d eaten, the pinnace’s sensors had identified five of the ships in a wide orbit around the planet as Khardine vessels, at least one of which was likely to have stasis shields. Thus far, this configuration had seemed to be the modus operandi for the separatists: leave bait ships around worlds, while fleets laid in wait nearby.
The Khardine fleets’ ability to get ships into a system so quickly still baffled the Airthan tacticians—and even Sera’s mother. The onl
y explanation that made sense was that they set up fleets just beyond a star’s heliosphere, and then the bait ship called for their aid via FDL transmitters.
Of course, if Khardine had a fleet for each bait ship, the size of their overall fleet was mind-numbingly large.
Which didn’t pass the smell test with Sera. Even with New Canaan’s ability to grow starships, there was no way that Khardine could field thousand-ship fleets around every world they’d claimed. That would require them to possess ships numbering in the hundreds of millions.
And if the enemy had a fleet that large, they’d have won the war before it even started.
Something else is afoot.
Sera quieted her thoughts as sixty-two enemy ships formed up around Maitreya —the five Khardine vessels bolstered by fifty-seven local ships. The separatist vessels began a slingshot maneuver, arcing around the planet on an intercept course for the Airthan ships.
At their fore were three cruisers.
Stasis ships, Sera thought with a nod. That would be the only reason for those ships to be at the fore with the rest in a narrow cone behind them. She was surprised that there were three here, but then again, Valkris was a special system.
Admiral Kira must have come to the same conclusion regarding the nature of the cruisers. The EMG pivoted, aligning with the approaching enemy, and fired.
Sera counted the seconds as the focused EM wave sped across space toward the enemy formation. She held her breath for the last ten seconds, shifting onto the edge of her seat in anticipation.
A brilliant light shone as the wave hit the foremost enemy ship, then more light flared, blinding the pinnace’s passive sensors. When the interference finally cleared, she saw that the first cruiser was nothing more than a slowly expanding cloud of debris, while the other two were drifting hulks, their engines offline.
The remaining enemy ships spread out, firing a barrage of beams and missiles at the EMG, most of which were deflected by point defense provided by the surrounding Airthan fleet, as well as the shields on the EMG itself.
The EMG fired twice more before the enemy fleet dispersed too much for the massive weapon to track. The Khardine ships passed by the Airthan fleet, spreading out over several light seconds, jinking to avoid the attacking fleet’s beams.
Sera wondered where the Khardine backup fleet was. Usually by now, they would have jumped in and engaged the Airthan ships.
She supposed it could be that the enemy did not have a force outside the Valkris System, or at least not one capable of destroying the five thousand ships in Admiral Kari’s fleet—especially not with the EMG in play.
Airthan Fleet Tactics and Analysis had estimated that even if the EMG wasn’t viable, it would take over five hundred ships to defeat Admiral Kari’s battlegroup. Now that the EMG had delivered on its promise, the size of the opposing fleet would need to be much larger.
Still, one EMG was not a viable offensive weapon, and Sera began to wonder if the gamble of sending it with such a small escort had been wise.
Seconds turned into minutes, and minutes into half an hour. Still enemy ships spread further and further away from Admiral Kari’s fleet—which was braking on its approach to the planet of Maitreya.
What’s your game? The planetary defenses hadn’t engaged, and no other local military vessels had moved in to the rescue.
“Has Maitreya surrendered?” Sera wondered aloud. “Now that would be a coup!”
Just as Sera uttered the words, a group of ships appeared only twenty kilometers above the EMG—within the Airthan fleet formation. She instantly recognized them as ISF cruisers.
Dammit…they sent in the Caners.
The ISF ships fired atom beams into the EMG, the massive particles punching through the EMG’s shields, and then through the weapon itself.
Seven seconds later, four-thousand ISF ships appeared around the Airthan fleet.
“Motherfuckers!” Sera swore, slamming a fist into her chair’s armrest.
She didn’t even bother to wait and see what happened next. With the EMG offline, Admiral Kira wouldn’t have a chance. The battle was lost.
Still, it wasn’t a complete failure. The EMG had worked, and enough of them would create a viable defense for Airtha.
Initializing the gate, Sera turned the pinnace and waited for the negative energy emitters to activate, all the while wondering how the ISF had four thousand ships on the periphery of the Valkris System.
It was becoming all too apparent that the enemy possessed a faster means of communication than FDL. She considered the possibilities as the gate activated and she fired the pinnace’s engines.
Her ship was a hundred meters from transitioning through the jump gate when Sera saw the unthinkable: an ISF cruiser, just off her pinnace’s port side. The ship fired on the jump gate, its beams tearing into the energy emitters.
Sera watched in horror as the gate was destroyed, knowing that the wave of energy from the antimatter explosion would obliterate her pinnace.
What the…?
The explosion flowed around her ship as though held back.
A stasis shield?
Alarms flared across her console, registering a grav beam pulling her ship toward the ISF cruiser, a bay door on its hull opening up to take her in.
Sera jumped up from her console and ran to the pinnace’s armory. They may be able to take her ship, but they’d find taking her to be much more of a challenge.
Nothing further crossed Sera’s mind as the ISF cruiser placed her entire pinnace in a stasis field and set a course for the nearest jump gate.
TANIS & JOE
STELLAR DATE: 09.06.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: 7km North of Jersey City
REGION: Pyra, Albany System, Thebes, Septhian Alliance
“That’s where we hid for an entire day, as the Niets moved an armored column through the region,” Tangel said, pointing at a half-destroyed farmhouse. “Twice, scouts came through, and I thought we’d be found for sure, but we managed to stay out of sight. Brandt—” Tangel paused for a moment, still feeling sorrow at the loss of her long-time friend. “Brandt and I draped ourselves across Ayer and Johnny, covering them just enough with our stealth systems to keep them out of view.”
“Pretty harrowing,” Joe said as he stepped over part of a shuttle…a skid, from the looks of it. “A part of me is amazed you survived so long down here, and another part isn’t surprised at all.”
“You know how it is,” Tangel said as she surveyed the Pyran landscape around them. “You survive because you have to. Giving up isn’t an option.”
“Not for you, at least,” Joe said with a soft laugh. “Either of you.”
“There’s no either of us anymore,” Tangel corrected her husband.
“Well, yeah, but back then there still was. I was speaking about past yous.”
Tangel snorted. “I see. Well, past mes were pretty determined to get back to past you and the past girls. Would take a lot more than a planet full of Nietzscheans to stop former mes.”
“Too bad no one told them that,” Joe replied as they crested a hill and looked down on a once-green valley, now blackened from fires that had swept across the region.
Though the Nietzscheans were responsible for most of the destruction on Pyra, Tangel was relatively certain this fire had been started from the energy she had blasted through the city the night Rika and Priscilla had found her.
She was glad that so few Pyrans were in the area when that happened. And also glad that a lot of Nietzscheans were.
Of course, this one small patch of desolation was negligible when compared to the vast swaths of Pyra that had been destroyed by the departing Nietzschean ships, the wash from their fusion engines dumping massive quantities of ionized plasma and radiation into the planet’s atmosphere, igniting fires that had raged for days—even with the ISF’s fire-control ships on site.
“Well, the longer we can keep the Niets in the dark, the better. Though that will soon fall to
the locals—once I convince the Septhian government that they need to join our alliance, not continue to grow their own.”
“I think they’ll come around.” Joe shrugged. “Especially now that you broke off Kendo and Thebes, and are setting up the latter to be a major player in the region.”
“These people deserve a hand; I’m glad to do what I can to help.” Tangel wondered how many of the Pyrans would eventually come back to their planet. She glanced up at the lights flashing in the sky—the construction of the world’s new ring—and wondered if the displaced peoples would remain there, or return to the world’s surface once it was safe.
Joe leaned in close, and his hazsuit’s helmet touched hers. “They do, but they still have a world. That’s a lot better than what the Niets planned to leave them with.”
Tangel nodded as she looked over the burned out valley, watching the brown, ash-filled water creep along in the streambed at the bottom of the slope.
“Why did you want to come down here, anyway?” Joe asked.
“I just wanted to go for a walk on a planet,” Tangel replied, shrugging as she spoke. “I realized that the last time I’d done so was the day before we let the girls fly the Andromeda to the gamma base.”
Joe’s eyebrows pinched as he considered her words. “Really? That was years ago. Are you sure?”
“Well, I went for some walks on the palace grounds on Alexandria, but with half of Empress Diana’s court constantly tailing me, it wasn’t the same.”
Joe made a sound that was half cough, half snort. “I don’t think walking on Pyra’s burned out husk is really a step up from that.”
Tangel slid an arm around Joe’s waist. “You never got to meet Diana’s sycophants. I think Pyra’s husk is a step up.”
“Remind me to avoid—”
Joe’s words were cut off as Priscilla’s voice came to them from the ship above.