by Geoff North
“The Pegan lead ship has launched sixty fighters,” Ada announced.
“Throw a few more rippers at them, Gertsen,” Edmund called out. “Keep them busy.”
Two dozen of the lightning-fast missiles streaked away from Retribution. They locked onto the closest targets and destroyed them before the Pegan pilots could even begin to react. A few more were knocked out by the debris of the explosions, but twenty made it through. They launched smaller missiles and plasma bursts upon Retribution. It’s shielding absorbed most of the energy, and deflected the rest back into space. The one-manned Pegan fighters were no match for the Terran warship. Six automated cannon turrets rose from Retribution’s hull, each one more than triple the size of a single enemy contact. They locked on to the fast-moving targets and opened fire, wiping the remaining fighters out of existence in a matter of seconds.
“That’s all of them,” Lieutenant Gertsen announced.
“Two hundred forty more fighters have launched from the three Pegan warships trailing the lead vessel.”
Ada had a talent for deflating the human spirit, Edmund thought. “How are those calculations coming along, Weldheim?”
“I already have them. The warheads will achieve a speed of fifty-five kilometers per second approximately half a second after launch. The tricky part is re-programming them to eject their casings at precisely the right moment.”
“This will only work if that lead ship holds its present course,” Barret said. “They’re bearing straight down on us now, but if they alter even one astral degree…”
“I know,” Edmund finished for him. “The warheads will be flying blind. They can’t be controlled once the rockets have been discarded.”
“The lead Pegan vessel hasn’t adjusted its heading since initial contact,” Ada offered. “It has begun to decelerate, and it’s powering up its secondary weapons systems. I believe you will get your shot, gentlemen.”
Edmund grinned at Barret. “I curse her most times, but sometimes she says just the right thing.”
The Pegan warship fired upon Retribution before the SIC could respond to his commander. A blinding pair of plasma globes streaked through the remaining twelve hundred kilometers of space separating the two vessels. They struck into Retribution’s rear shielding, attempting to slice through into the hull.
Edmund clutched at the shaking tactics table. “Return fire, Gertsen! Weldheim, can you at least launch one of those nightfalls at the ship trying to open us up?”
“I can do better than that,” the science major called back. “All four are ready to go.”
“Warning. A nightfall detonation within a thousand-kilometer radius could result in the destruction of Retribution as well.”
“How far away are they?” Edmund asked.
“Eight hundred twelve kilometers and closing.
Retribution’s shields pulsed erratically in flashes of orange and intense red as the Pegan weapons continued cutting into them. More than a hundred heavy cannons were firing continuously from the Sol ship, sending a rain of destruction towards the alien target growing larger in space with each passing second.
“Seven hundred ninety kilometers. Retribution will be destroyed at this range if a nightfall-class missile is deployed against enemy target.”
SIC Barret fell into the tactics table next to Edmund. He grabbed onto the commander’s shoulder for support as he sank into one of the stools. “Don’t listen to Ada, son. She’s a goddamn computer. Retribution’s a tough ship, the shields will hold.”
Edmund took a hold of the old man’s hand and squeezed. “Lieutenant Gertsen, assign weapons control to the sciences section… Fire the nightfalls, Weldheim.”
Major Weldheim waited another second for his board to turn green. He pressed down on a row of four buttons. “Nightfalls away. Impact and detonation of the first will occur in nine seconds.”
“Route all auxiliary power to gravity control and shields. Everyone hold on!” Edmund gripped the tactics table with one hand and wrapped an arm around Barret’s waist. “No offence, but I would’ve preferred your daughter in my arms at the end.”
Bennoit Gertsen counted down the remaining seconds. “Four… three… two… one…”
The bridge turned white. The commander clamped his eyes shut and waited for the battle screen to automatically decrease the brightness. The first shockwave hit before it could. Edmund and his second in command were torn away from the tactics tables and thrown into the sections ring railing. He thought he could hear the ship tearing apart beneath his feet, but realized after a few frantic moments it was someone screaming. It was Gertsen.
Edmund was flat on his back now, struggling to get back to his feet. There was a weight on top of him, squirming, pushing him harder into the deck plating. The screen had begun to adjust. He could see forms again. The weight holding him down was Corwin Barret. The SIC was attempting to stand as well. One of the old man’s elbows was dug into Edmund’s stomach, pushing. The commander reached for the railing, shifted on the floor, and pulled himself up. He grabbed onto Barret by the collar of his command uniform and hoisted him up along the way.
“The shields held! The shields held!” Gertsen was still yelling at the top of his lungs.
“Yes, lieutenant,” Edmund snapped. “We can see that. Ada—is there anything left of the Pegan ship?”
“Nothing of substantive form, Commander.”
The battle screen honed in on what was left of it. A few thousand chunks of spinning black debris in a cloud of grey were all that remained. Some of them thumped into Retribution’s shields, creating a series of dull knocking sounds throughout the bridge.
“My God,” Simmons whispered from her navigation section. “If that doesn’t cause those other ships to turn back, I don’t know what will.”
SIC Barret was already seated back at the tactics table. “Put them on screen, let’s see what they’re up to.”
The grey cloud and its expanding field of debris vanished. In its place three points of bright light appeared. “They’re still coming,” Edmund said, sinking down into the stool next to Barret. “It appears they haven’t adjusted course, either. They’ll walk straight into the remaining nightfalls.”
“I wouldn’t be too sure about that,” Weldheim said. “The shockwave of that blast undoubtedly knocked the warheads off course.”
“How long until we know for sure?”
Ada answered for the science major immediately. “One minute, forty seconds.”
The bridge crew of Retribution waited. After a full minute had passed, more than two hundred smaller lights appeared onscreen in front of the larger vessels. The Pegan fighter ships were charging at them like a swarm of angry hornets.
“Rippers, Bennoit,” Barret ordered.
A hundred missiles shot off for their targets. Lornay Simmons cursed. “Two of the three warships are changing course, they’re breaking away. They must have detected the incoming nightfalls.”
“Unlikely,” Weldheim said. “They’d be almost impossible to pick up with all those fighters and rippers moving at each other.”
SIC Barret had been in enough cosmic battles to realize what the Pegan warships were attempting. “They’re going to try and surround us—pound at us from three angles.”
Another flash of white light filled the section of screen before them. Gertsen shook a fist triumphantly in the air. “Make that two angles, sir! The warship in the middle is no more.”
Edmund spun the stool around to face the weapons section. “Didn’t I warn you about over confidence once before, Lieutenant?” Gertsen lowered his head. “We may have a superior arsenal, but we’re still outnumbered and can barely move.”
The bridge shuddered once again as the first of the flanking ships opened fire.
“We are taking heavy bombardment to our port side. Re-directing maximum shield coverage to the affected areas.”
SIC Barret felt the deck plates shaking under his boots. “The second ship’s coming up from und
er us. You’re going to have to spare some of that shield coverage for our belly, Ada.”
Commander Edmund struggled up the section ring steps, fighting to retain his balance towards Gertsen. He pushed the young lieutenant away and took control of the board, unleashing fifty rippers into the ship beneath them. The rumbling beneath their feet ceased almost instantly. “They’ll resume firing as soon as the smoke clears.” He pulled Gertsen back in front of the console. “Shoot off fifty more in ten seconds, and fifty more ten seconds after that.”
Edmund rushed towards Marie Mara two sections away. “We can’t outrun them, but we don’t have to sit still. Power up the lateral starboard orbiting thrusters. Keep them on full.”
“That’ll put us into a roll,” the confused helm-master said. “And it will be a fast roll if I keep the thrusters on full.”
“I’m counting on it. Ada—We’ll need more power for gravity control.”
Barret laughed from below. “You crazy bastard. You’re actually going to attempt a pinwheel maneuver, aren’t you?”
The commander shrugged. “Why not? It was part of our basic training back in defensive flight school.”
Gertsen finished launching a third round of rippers into the Pegan vessel beneath them. He glanced away from the board quickly. “What’s a pinwheel maneuver? It wasn’t part of my basic training.”
“That’s because it was outlawed over twenty years ago,” Barret said, still grinning at his son-in-law. “Activated shielding will move in accordance with the ship it’s protecting—directional, spinning, rolling. Set any ship in a fast enough spin or roll, and it will literally begin to deflect any incoming weapons fire, sometimes even directing that fire back into the aggressor.”
Another heavy hit to Retribution’s port side almost threw Edmund on top of his helm officer. He grabbed at her shoulder, straightening them both up. “It’s called ‘pinwheel’ for the colorful spinning effect it creates.”
“It’s also a move that was only attempted with much smaller ships,” Barret said.
“You should know, SIC,” Edmund added. “Since you were the first pilot to try it.”
“Lateral starboard thrusters at maximum, Commander,” Mara announced. “We’re spinning up at an incredible rate.”
“Warning. I will be unable to sustain interior gravitational control much longer.”
“Keep our feet planted on the floor for a few more seconds, Ada,” Edmund urged.
“It’s working!” Simmons shouted. “Both Pegan warships have broke off the attack. They’re backing away.”
“Cut the thrusters, Marie, and level us back out. Mr. Gertsen… pick a ship to shoot at, I don’t care which one. Cut it to pieces.”
Retribution’s particle-guided lasers lashed out and began to dissect the vessel directly beneath them. The second Pegan warship swung back in, resuming its attack on the Sol ship’s port side. It pounded at her shields with three more massive plasma bombs. A fourth glowing globe erupted against the failing shield’s weakest point. Half of the bomb’s energy rippled outwards along the failing barrier in a brilliant wave of fiery orange. The other half pushed through, tearing into the ship’s thick outer hull.
Gertsen clung to his board as the rest of the bridge officers spilled to the floor. “The ship below us has been destroyed. Training all weapons on the remaining target.”
Retribution’s shields gave out moments later. A fifth Pegan plasma bomb smashed into her fully exposed hull. The ship lurched violently, throwing Gertsen hard back into the railing.
“New contact. Warship approaching at high speed.”
They were finished, Edmund thought. He had no more tricks, no more outlawed maneuvers to try. Retribution and her crew had performed admirably, but it wouldn’t be enough. He stared to his left where the fourth alien vessel filled the battle screen, hanging in space like a great mountain of steaming metal. It was less than thirty kilometers away, powering up a final plasma charge in one of its forward cannons.
Behind it the bright light of a fifth Pegan warship began to take shape. Edmund dragged himself up from the deck. The fifth ship continued to grow on the screen. “It isn’t Pegan,” he gasped. “Ada! That isn’t a Pegan ship!”
“I never said it was, Commander. I believe ‘new contact’ were the words I used.”
The new contact decelerated rapidly behind the Pegan warship, its massive form enveloping the vessel in front of it. Six immense beams blasted out from its pitted surface and tore into the back end of the Pegan vessel. The alien ship began to break up into pieces before Edmund’s eyes; strips of hull a hundred meters in length curled away and rolled off into space as the great red beams continued their relentless assault. A sudden flash of white ballooned out as one of the beams cut into the main drive systems.
Retribution shook as the shock wave hit. The Pegan ship—what was left of it—blasted apart in a thousand burning chunks.
“I can’t believe it,” Barret uttered. The debris and smoke filling the battle screen dissipated. “It just can’t be.”
The other bridge officers stared at the massive object that had saved their lives without saying a word. Commander Edmund asked his ship’s computer to confirm what they were seeing. “Ada… identify the ship on our port side.”
“A mining vessel constructed in the mid twenty-third century. Military refit completed in the year 2329. The largest space-faring ship ever constructed by humankind. The ship is named Ambition.”
Chapter 14
Their father was a hero. At least that’s what Loke had always believed. Colonel Alexander Edmund had served valiantly in the Republic of Sol Planets, defending all its citizens from rebels and criminals. Their grandfather was a hero as well. A lot of older people had even called Admiral Barret a living legend. Both men had fought in the Worlds War, and both men had been lost in that epic conflict near its end. Again, these were things Loke and his sister had always believed.
Until now.
The two children had learned new facts about their father and grandfather—facts, that according to their mother, cast both men in a decidedly lesser heroic light. The Republic of Sol Planets wasn’t some glorious organization protecting Earth and the colony cities of Mars. Maybe once, a long time ago, ROSP had served its people well, but not anymore. Now it was controlled from the very top by an alien government Loke hadn’t even known existed until a few short hours ago.
The Alderamins.
Loke picked up a piece of concrete and hurled it into the air. It dropped into the rubble twenty meters below, bounced off a bar of rusted metal with a dull twanging sound, and thudded into more concrete chunks ten meters below that. He was sitting atop the rubble pile he and his sister had used as a hiding place from the starvers two nights before. Loke wasn’t worried about starvers anymore. There was still plenty of pink light in the sky to keep them off the streets and back alleys. Loke felt at the hard lump resting heavily in his coat pocket. There was that to keep him safe as well.
Loke’s entire perception of who he was, and where he came from had shifted drastically. He didn’t care about rules and curfews, where he should go or who he could talk to. Loke just wanted to be alone with these new thoughts. He needed time to adjust to this new family history.
Unfortunately, his twin sister wasn’t going to give it to him.
“That almost hit me, you know!” Charm yelled in a muffled voice from below. She started climbing up through the rubble. The cat she’d adopted from the streets was with her. It climbed with Charm, picking its way silently and surely.
“Go home,” Loke called down when she was halfway up. “I want to be left alone.”
Charm ignored him and kept ascending. It was slow-going. Her face was covered with a mask—one of those emergency breathing fittings the school had supplied all the kids with at the beginning of the year. The little glass eye pieces didn’t allow her a good field of view. She stumbled, scraped a knee on something sharp.
Loke rolled his eyes, and went
to help her the rest of the way. She shoved a second emergency oxygen mask into his chest. “Put it on. Mom says we got to wear them for at least fifteen minutes every hour.”
“Since when?”
She pointed to the twelve giant terra-forming chimneys in the distance. “Since the order to start shuttin’ the factory down was announced.” Charm pushed past him and resumed her climb. The cat followed, stroking up against Loke’s shin along the way.
Loke looked to the north. Three of the chimneys were no longer belching smoke into the sky. It was true then, he thought; the plans they’d heard their mother and the other revolutionists discussing in the sewage tunnels—the things she’d told them back home later last night. People were leaving Mars because they had to. The planet was being abandoned.
He trudged back up through the debris and sat beside his sister. “We’re going to have to go live on Earth, aren’t we?”
The cat jumped up onto Charm’s lap. She scratched it behind the ears. “I guess so.”
“I don’t wanna go there. I don’t wanna live on a planet with a blue sky. That’s just weird.”
“It might not be so bad. Blue’s a pretty color. There’s lots of trees there too.”
Loke shook his head. “I don’t care about trees. Don’t care if I never see an ocean either.”
“You won’t see nothing for much longer if you don’t put that mask on.”
Loke swung the strap over his head and let the breather hang against his chest. “If we stayed… if we helped Mom fight against the government, we wouldn’t have to wear these stupid things. The factories would keep running and the air would stay clean.”
“That ain’t gonna happen. Mom already said we have to go to Earth. Maybe someday when the fighting’s done and the terror—the revolutionists take things back, maybe then we can come home.”
Loke tossed another chunk of concrete into the air. “I don’t want to go to Earth. I don’t want to live with Aunt Ella in York City. We’ve never even met her.”
“It’s Dad’s sister. Think of all the stuff she can tell us about him—what he was like when he was our age, what it was like growing up with Grampa.”