by Rick Partlow
“Reminds me of the time I had to regrow most of my left leg,” Deke Conner commented, hopping out of his chamber and heading forward to the ship’s only shower.
Bastard, I thought. We would be popping out of T-space in less than four hours and all of us needed to cycle through that one shower; he was only able to recover fast enough to be the first because he had all that implanted shit.
So do you, I reminded myself. Not as much as him, of course. I probably resented him because I still didn’t trust him, or Murdock. This whole plan sounded like the stupidest damned thing I’d ever heard.
“What the hell do you mean Cowboy is guiding the fleet?” I’d demanded of him back in the office above the hangar nearly two weeks ago.
“It’s complicated,” he’d offered, throwing up his hands. “It comes down to this: Cowboy used his connections to the Glory Boys to get a hold of Murdock through Mat M’Voba, then he clued us into the location of Petra, Damiani’s bolt hole, to get himself included on the mission.”
“But Murdock knows he works for Uncle Andre!” I’d been fairly shouting by then, and I noticed Al Amari eye me warily when I’d said “Uncle Andre.” “I told him myself, for Christ’s sake!”
“Of course he knows,” Deke had shot back in his damned condescending, smart-ass tone that reminded me too much of Calderon. “But Cowboy doesn’t know he knows. And neither does your fucking uncle.”
“Shit,” I’d murmured, understanding now. “The main fleet is a Judas goat.”
He’d nodded, looking satisfied.
“And West will never expect it. He’d never believe the Bulldog---General Murdock,” he’d added in case we weren’t aware of the nickname, “would potentially sacrifice a full wing of Attack Command cutters, a half dozen Ranger transports and two of the Glory Boys, including his own XO, just to bait a trap.” He’d shook his head. “If this battle’s gonna’ be won, we’re gonna’ be the ones to win it.”
“How’d you get lucky enough to be on this team?” I’d wondered.
“I drew the short straw.” It had taken me a moment to realize he was being serious. “Some of my friends are part of that distraction. Only they don’t know they’re a distraction.”
“Jesus,” Victor had muttered. “That’s pretty fucking cold.”
“That’s the Bulldog.”
That still ate at me, even now that we were about to drop into realspace and probably into combat.
If he’d do that to people he liked, what the hell would he do to us?
I turned out to be third in line for the shower, which put me geared up and in the cockpit just behind Al Amari, who’d arranged to wake up first, and Conner. Al Amari was in the navigation station, while Conner was strapped into the pilot’s position, which surprised me.
“You’re a pilot, right?” Conner asked me. At my nod, he gestured to the co-pilot’s chair. “Take a seat and jack in.”
That surprised me, too.
“Doesn’t this bird have a designated co-pilot?” I wondered, fastening the harness and negotiating clearance with the computer via my implant ‘link and headcomp.
“Welcome, Designated Co-pilot Munroe,” the AI answered my question and I shrugged acceptance.
“As the backup plan, we have a bit of latitude about such things,” Captain Al Amari said, tongue in cheek.
“Tell me something, Munroe,” Conner asked, his eyes fixed straight ahead in the kind of thousand-meter stare that pilots got when they were ‘linked with their ship’s computer, “you were the Marine Recon guy that got left behind on Demeter, right?”
“That’s me.” I hoped he wasn’t going to apologize for leaving me there. I’d got enough of that back in the day.
“You must have had to do some nasty shit, fighting the Tahni with just a bunch of civilians,” he said instead. Then he turned and his eyes focused on me. “How’d you ever come to terms with it all?”
An image flashed into my head unbidden, an image I’d never really been able to shake, of a mother shoving her husband and children down the trail away from her, then begging me to kill her because the Tahni had planted a tracker inside her and she couldn’t make herself pull the trigger. I saw my gun flashing, felt it push back against the web of my hand, saw her spin to the ground with most of her head missing.
“What the hell makes you think I have?” I responded flatly. He nodded, didn’t say anything else. I thought maybe he was disappointed, and I wondered if that was because he’d been looking for an answer himself.
“This is the Ombre,” I said, changing the subject. “That means ‘shadow’ in German. Who here speaks German?”
“I’m from Greater Frankfurt, originally,” Al Amari volunteered. I suppressed a chuckle, wondering what he would have thought of Koji’s restaurant. “My family has lived there since before the Sino-Russian War. You?”
“Trans-Angeles,” I told him.
“Ah,” he said with a nod. “The city of fallen angels.”
“Something like that.” I ran down the Transition checklist and saw we had less than two hours till we came out. Then I checked the ship’s systems, including weapons, and felt an eyebrow raising at what I saw. “So, we have the Skrela weapon set up on this ship, and that’s all we’ve got. What’s the plan if the damned thing doesn’t work?”
“You a praying man, Sgt. Munroe?” Al Amari asked, smiling slightly.
“Not especially,” I admitted.
“Don’t worry,” he assured me. “I’ll say one for you.”
***
“We are at ten seconds and counting to Transition,” Conner announced tautly.
No one in the cockpit said a word. Besides me and Conner and Al Amari, we had Al Amari’s senior NCO and a junior officer who was the weapons specialist for the Skrela device. She was a lean, dark-eyed, competent-looking young woman who seemed nervous, and uncomfortable because she wasn’t used to being nervous. I didn’t blame her; she’d had all of maybe an hour’s introduction to the alien weapon, which made her about as much of a specialist with it as I was.
My guys were buckled into the fold-down seats on the other side of the cockpit hatchway while the rest of Al Amari’s command team were strapped into the bunks in the cabins. I wouldn’t want to be spending a battle lying in a bunk, but I guess it was better than being tossed around from bulkhead to bulkhead when we maneuvered.
“Five seconds.”
We’d left 82 Eridani two hours after the main effort had jumped to T-space. That could mean anything from arriving twelve hours later to hours earlier than they did, thanks to the vagaries of the relative passage of time when leaving and re-entering a whole universe.
“Four.”
If we got there too early, it wouldn’t be a major problem; we were arriving in a direct line with the system’s primary, which should wash out our warp corona, and we could just coast in on coldjets and wait for the right moment.
“Three.”
If we got there too late…well, we could conceivably still carry out our mission, but it would suck for the main fleet.
“Two.”
They might already have been destroyed. I didn’t think Cowboy would risk his own life, so maybe he and Uncle Andre had a way of forcing a surrender, but that was taking a whole shitload on faith.
“One.”
Was it too late to pray?
“Transitioning.”
Reality lurched and I lurched with it and then we were somewhere else and alarms were sounding in my head and in my ears and sensor data was flooding into my eyes and my thoughts.
“I have positive confirmation of squadron Transition,” Conner said. That meant the rest of the Stealth-ships had arrived with us. That was the way it usually worked, but you never knew with T-space, even leaving from a common location in spacetime.
“Contact at 13.34,” Al Amari announced. “Three bogies engaging…looks like all of the friendlies and I am picking up a course heading for Petra.”
More estimates and announcements g
oing back and forth between Conner and Al-Amari and the weapons specialist and the other ships in the squadron and I tried to tune it all out and let my headcomp explain what the hell was actually happening. The star in this system was a yellow dwarf, a G-type that glowed sullenly, too far away to look impressive. It was a lonely system, with an outer ice giant, an asteroid belt…and a single, dense, rocky terrestrial around the size of Venus.
We were late, relative to the main fleet, not by a lot, but at least a couple of hours, based on their current position and the planned entry point into the system. According to the long-range scanners, all but one of the ships in the attack force were gathered in a cluster not very far from the planet I assumed was Petra, maybe three or four light-minutes away from us, their formation globed by three bogies that the sensors couldn’t identify, while farther away there were several of what looked like CSF lighters. Other than that, we had no clue what was going on and everyone seemed to be yelling reports and not accomplishing much. I had no idea what I should be doing, so I kept my mouth shut.
“I’ve got an emergency drop buoy,” Al Amari said, his eyes going wide. “It’s transmitting a narrow-beam signal right at us.” He scrolled through a stream of data on a haptic hologram. “It’s from the Scimitar, the command cutter. They launched it right after they Transitioned; someone on board knew we were coming.”
He passed a hand over the hologram and the display began to play back the recording.
Reality exploded onto the Scimitar’s view screen with a flash of polychromatic light as the ship Transitioned and it was obvious almost immediately that something was wrong. Proximity alarms were blaring across the bridge and I caught a brief glimpse of gleaming, green obelisks lined up across the forward screens before the viewers and everything else on the bridge went dark.
Everything was quiet for a moment, as the bridge crew tried unsuccessfully to tie into the ship's control net and found that the main computer control system was down. That revelation spurred an explosion of sound and activity as the pilot and crew sprang into motion, activating auxiliary systems, one of them springing from her acceleration couch and launching herself out of the command center towards the emergency periscope.
"Attention, Commonwealth ships!" A voice blared through the bridge's PA speakers, working despite the lack of power in any of the other systems, and the forward screens lit up with the image of one of the Predecessors. "We are representatives of the Resscharr Imperium," the creature announced in flawless English. "You have wrongfully invaded space granted to us by your government. Your vessels have been neutralized, and will be towed by our sentry ships into orbit around our base at the planet you call Petra. There, all military personnel will be held for return to proper government authorities for prosecution.
"Do not resist and you will not be harmed."
The screen of the Scimitar went dark again and you could hear a wrenching metallic shudder go through the hull.
"We're being towed!" The crewman who'd gone to use the emergency periscope flew through the bridge access tunnel, slamming her shoulder against the bulkhead with a grunt. Her eyes were wide, their whites clearly visible as she steadied herself to keep from spinning end for end in the zero-g. "I don't know how...there's no cable or anything, just a kind of blue glow around us. But those ships---they're pulling us toward them."
Then the recording ended and the holographic display went clear again.
“Shit, shit, shit,” the weapons specialist whispered harshly, staring at the blank screen.
“It’s nothing we didn’t expect, Lt. Gabbert,” Al Amari said evenly.
I didn’t know how he was being so calm, because I was having to clench my teeth to keep from gibbering. Put me on the ground in a firefight and I was good to go, but this deep-space combat stuff scared the crap out of me and being crammed into this little ship with a dozen of us was working hard on making me claustrophobic.
“All ships,” he went on, using the tight-beam transmissions to the rest of the Stealth-ships, “there are three alien-tech vessels surrounding our fleet, using some sort of gravitic fields to immobilize them and tow them towards Petra, while the rest of the CSF ships run cover. The Ombre will go after the Predecessor ships; when we do, I want all of you to hit the CSF lighters. Keep them busy at least long enough for our ships to recover and engage.”
“You ready for this shit, Marine?” Conner asked me, grinning.
“I’m ready to get my damn feet back on the ground,” I told him with fervent honesty.
He chuckled at that, but I began to wonder if it wasn’t just the unusual circumstances that were unnerving me. When Bobbi had been with us, I’d always felt like I had to stay calm and unflappable to match her fearlessness. Could I do this anymore without her?
You don’t have to do it anymore after today, I told myself. It all ends today, one way or another.
“We’re doing one more micro-Transition closer in,” Al Amari said. “When we exit T-space, engage immediately. All hands prep for quick Transit in ten.”
I made myself think about Calderon. He was down there somewhere, I was sure of it. I didn’t concentrate on Cowboy; he was out of my league and he already had his own kind after him and I didn’t think they’d need my help. I didn’t waste time plotting revenge against Uncle Andre, either. He hadn’t done any of this out of personal spite; we were all numbers to him. He’d probably thought he was doing me a favor. I’d put him down if I had the chance, but more like a dangerous predator that’s learned that humans are tasty and slow and needs to be dealt with.
But Calderon was more than dangerous, more than callous and manipulative. He was a mean-spirited, short-sighted, narcissistic son of a bitch who didn’t care about killing civilians and wouldn’t hesitate to kill my wife and son if he got the chance. I wished I’d killed him when I’d had the chance; maybe Bobbi would still be alive.
“Transitioning now.”
A gut-wrenching shift of reality, and then yet another less than a second later as we jumped into and out of T-space in the smallest fraction of travel possible. There was a sharp stab of pain behind my eyes and a numbness that spread out from my stomach and I had the thought that this couldn’t be good for you. I had my eyes squeezed shut against the ache, my hands pressed against my temples, but my headcomp was showing me the tactical display in my contact lens whether I wanted to see it or not. We were in-between our flotilla and the CSF lighters, and I could feel the maneuvering thrusters kicking us around to point the nose of the ship at the Predecessor spaceships even as the rest of our squadron activated their fusion drives and started burning towards the lighters.
“What was the range on this thing again, Munroe?” Al Amari asked me. I blinked my eyes open and saw him looking at the tactical display.
“No fucking clue,” I admitted. “I know it works point blank.”
“Point blank it is, then,” Conner said cheerfully, and hit the drives.
My headcomp informed me that it was exactly nine gravities’ worth of acceleration pushing me back into my cushioned seat, but all I knew for sure was that a planet was sitting on my chest and I was about a pubic hair’s distance from passing out. The distance between us and the Predecessor ships shrank rapidly, and I could see the closest of them beginning a slow, almost indecisive turn to aim one nondescript end of the glowing green cigar toward us.
“I think they’ve figured out we’re here,” I heard the dry humor in Conner’s voice over my implant ‘link, but I was fairly certain he hadn’t said the words aloud, not with this kind of acceleration pushing his lungs flat.
“I don’t know if this thing will work if they shoot that gravity shit at us,” Al Amari said. “Gabbert, target that ship and prepare to fire on my command.”
He didn’t sound strained either, and I had the sense that Al Amari and all his people were jacked and implanted at least as much as I was, and maybe closer to the extent that Conner, Cowboy and the other Glory Boys had been. I should have guessed that alr
eady; there’s no way Murdock would have sent them on this part of the mission, otherwise.
“Is it my imagination?” Conner wondered a moment later, “or is the glow around that ship getting brighter?”
“We’re at a thousand kilometers,” Al Amari said. “I suppose that’s about as close as we’re likely to get. Fire, Gabbert.”
“Weapons has the stick,” Conner intoned, giving attitude control up to Gabbert.
There was a hammer-blow bang of maneuvering thrusters that jerked my head painfully to the side, and then barely a second later I heard the woman respond, “Firing.”
It might have been my imagination, but I thought the lights on the display dimmed and the holographic projection shimmered. Or maybe it was spacetime that shimmered. Either way, the pulse of whatever from that Skrela weapon struck the Predecessor ship only a microsecond after Gabbert pulled the trigger.
I’d expected a reaction like the one in the lab, but it looked so much more spectacular on this scale. The emerald halo expanded instantly, like a supernova, and I had a second’s mindless panic at the thought it would swallow us up, but just as quickly as it had swollen, it contracted. And then it was gone. No explosion, no wreckage, no sign that it had ever existed.
The relief I felt was multiplied by the fact that Conner had cut the ship’s acceleration back to one gravity and I was suddenly able to suck in a lungful of air and rise up against my seat. I could hear Gabbert laughing hoarsely, but Al Amari was all business.
“Next ship in the formation,” he snapped. “Before they can react!”
This time I felt it, and it wasn’t a trick of my acceleration-addled brain; something like a wave that seemed to come from all around us and pass through the ship, drawing force from somewhere and directing it like a water hose. We were farther away this time, and when the effect hit, the green glow around the next Predecessor ship flickered on and off but didn’t expand and wasn’t extinguished. The alien ship seemed to spin on its axis as its halo flickered, but then it steadied and started to aim itself straight at us once again.