by Rick Partlow
***
“What happened to the other cruiser?” I asked Joon-Pah, leaning against the railing around the perimeter of the bridge. “Did you manage to get a shot at her with the impulse gun?”
I was the only human on the bridge—the others had been taken to the Helta medical bay for treatment, and I envied them the excuse to lie down and get some rest. I tugged at the collar of my Class As and wrinkled my nose. I really needed a shower. The bridge crew was sneaking looks at me and I wondered if it was because of what we’d done on the Two Angels or because of how bad I smelled.
“The Tevynian ship withdrew,” Joon-Pah told me. “It was inexplicable, unless, perhaps, they had seen what the impulse gun could do and knew we would destroy them eventually. They took aboard an escape pod from the cruiser you boarded, then jumped to hyperspace.”
Shit. That was Captain Cartimandua. She’d been rescued. And she knew there were humans fighting with the Helta, thanks to me. I didn’t say anything to Joon-Pah, not yet. I needed to talk to General Olivera first.
“What’s the situation, then?” I had been trying to read the tactical sensors since I’d arrived on the bridge, but my eyes were starting to blur from exhaustion. “How many cruisers do they have left?”
The initial count had been six, which have left them with one, the one who had run from the fight with the Truthseeker, but initial intelligence reports were always wrong.
“Our remote sensors show three out near the orbit of Leviathan.” Joon-Pah touched a control at his command station and the main screen switched to a sensor display with the massive circle of the gas giant in the background. Three enemy cruisers perched like vultures in a tight formation, waiting for an opportunity to dart in and steal a meal. “As for the rest, all their carriers have either been destroyed or withdrawn after the destruction of their entire fighter complement. There are still dozens of troop ships in the outer system, but they have yet to chance our defenses.”
“That’s coming next,” I guessed. “They know you’re all that’s left. They’re going to come in with all three cruisers and keep you busy while they throw their troop ships at Hoarfrost, or maybe even Helta Prime.”
“But our orbital defenses will slaughter them,” he protested. “They’ll lose at least two-thirds of their troops!”
I stared at him the way a teacher might regard a slow child.
“Don’t you get it yet? They don’t care. Their lives don’t mean anything to them, at least not compared to their cause.”
“And this is a thing you humans have seen before?” He phrased it as a question, but I knew it was rhetorical. He’d read our history. He knew.
When he spoke again, it was cautious, as if he were having to think how to phrase the words in my language.
“We will not win this, then.”
I wanted to lie, wanted to tell him it would be okay, that we’d figure something out. But I remembered something Strawbridge had said to me and damn if the woman hadn’t been right.
“Quantity has a quality all its own.”
“Then what should we do?” he asked. “Should we retreat to Helta Prime? Throw our defenses in with theirs?”
“No,” I said, based on nothing but the feeling in my gut.
What the hell am I doing? Who the fuck put me in charge of the defense of a whole star system? I had changed my mind. There was, I decided, a God, and while He didn’t hate me, I was pretty sure He found me amusing, which might have been worse.
“The closer you take the fight to your homes, the more devastating the damage you’ll take is. We need to jump out to where the troop ships are holding, into the outer system, and start blowing the shit out of them. They’re lightly-armed and armored, right?” At his nod, I went on. “So, we whittle down what we can, make them scatter. When the cruisers come after us, we micro-jump, wait for them to cluster together again, keep hitting them.”
“Our power conduits are already strained from the micro-jumps we have made in this battle. They will fail, as surely as the ones on your Two Angels did, and we will be helpless.”
“I know,” I admitted. “But every troop ship we take out is a few hundred less occupiers your people will have to deal with. And if we can’t win this fight, maybe we can make it possible for someone else to win it.”
Joon-Pah stared at me as if I’d told him to go dig up his mother and desecrate her corpse.
“This,” he said, “is a human way of thinking, isn’t it? Because everything within me, every thought you would call an instinct, is telling me to run, to retreat from this system and preserve this ship and this crew to fight another day.”
“That’s a human way of thinking, too,” I countered. “’He who fights and runs away lives to fight another day’, the saying goes. My country won a war against a more powerful nation to gain our independence following that line of thinking, with the idea that keeping the army intact was more important than winning decisive victories. But we have other sayings, ones we give more weight to, more respect to. ‘I have not yet begun to fight.’ ‘Damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead.’ ‘I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.’ And those won that same war.”
“You are a strange people, Andy Clanton,” Joon-Pah told me with as much sincerity as his command of human idiom could give him. “And you have yet to give me advice I have found to be wanting.” He turned to the helm officer and said in Helta, “At my command, execute a micro-jump and take us to the center of the formation of troop ships. Tactical, prepare to fire all weapons at all available targets. Do not cease fire until the enemy is out of range or jumps to hyperspace.”
“Are you certain, Captain?” the helm officer asked, her hands hesitating over the controls. She watched me, not Joon-Pah, perhaps wondering if we humans had been a bad influence.
“I am. Some things must be done, no matter how wrong they feel.”
I wished Julie was on the bridge, because I felt very alone.
We jumped, not technically a micro-jump, but a short one, from the asteroid belt to the outer system. It took thirty seconds between hyperspace entry and exit, enough time to ameliorate the rubber-band snap-back feeling of a micro-jump, though I still squeezed the railing in anticipation. My knuckles only turned a little bit white when we dropped into a huge formation of Tevynian troop ships.
If the carriers had been derived from bare-bones freighters, the troop ships were just as obviously converted from some sort of passenger ships, maybe colony vessels, though I hadn’t asked Joon-Pah about it before and now didn’t seem like a good time to bother him. They were ovoids, slightly flattened at either end, the drive pods mated to the aft. Landers were crammed into their oversized launch bays like bees in a hive, not leaving much room for weapons or armor. The drive fields would supply some protection, but their reactors wouldn’t be anywhere near as large or powerful as a cruiser’s, and none of them had got warning to have their fields engaged before we popped in on them.
“Target and open fire,” Joon-Pah ordered, still as cool as a cucumber.
The Truthseeker wasn’t quite as heavily armed as the Jambo, but she put on an impressive show. The main gun, what they’d told us was an anti-particle beam, was devastating at close range, transforming the nearest troop ships into a mini star with one shot. Even with their help, we hadn’t been able to duplicate the weapon, which was why the Jambo’s primary energy weapon was a laser battery. The impulse gun fired next, overkill for one of the lightly-armored personnel carriers, but we weren’t being charged by the round, and it blew right through the enemy ship conveniently lined up with the spinal mount.
And that was as much as we were going to get this round. Both weapons took time to recharge, and the enemy wasn’t going to sit around and wait for it. The troop ships darted away like fish outracing the ripples from a rock thrown into the water, heading in every direction.
“Shall we pursue, sir?” the helm officer asked, sounding more confident than she had a few seconds ago.
“Straight along our forward firing arc,” Joon-Pah confirmed. “Tactical, fire the impulse gun as soon as it recharges.” To me he said, “How long do you think?”
“Less than a minute,” I guessed, not bothering to pretend I didn’t understand what he was asking. How long before the cruisers come after us?
We were a good three light-hours from Leviathan, where the cruisers had grouped, but the troop ships were equipped with hyperdrives, which meant they could communicate faster than light.
“Should we jump now?”
The impulse gun jolted the ship and a Tevynian troop transport was suddenly a cloud of radioactive debris.
“No. If we drop out of hyperspace anywhere in the system, they’ll see it and head straight there. We need to get them all here, to keep them away from the inner system.”
The particle beam cannon took out another troopship and the rest of the cluster racing ahead of us jumped, vanishing into portals of nothingness even blacker than the black of space.
“Station keeping,” Joon-Pah ordered and the Truthseeker came to as close to a complete stop as you could get, given the nature of our universe. “Wait for them to come to us.”
The Tevynian captains were on the ball—it barely took a minute, and when the three of them popped in on our position, they managed to come in directly behind us, out of the firing arc of our weapons.
“Turn us around!” Joon-Pah snapped. “Shields at maximum!”
It was too late. For them, not for us.
There was a fraction of a second when I thought the cruiser barreling out of a hyperspace rift directly ahead of us, filling the main viewscreen, was another Tevynian warship, that we were dead.
And then I noticed the emitter at her bow, the spinal mount cannon, just before it fired. The USS James Bowie put a tungsten slug the size of a minivan through one of the Tevynian cruisers, stem to stern, and she blossomed into a supernova of sun-bright plasma as her reactor vented into space right through the hull.
“Fire!” Joon-Pah bellowed, smacking his hand on the armrest. “Fire now!”
The particle cannon hurled a lance of coruscating blue balefire and one of the remaining two cruisers shimmered as her drive field wavered with sudden instability. That was enough for the enemy ships. Space ripped and both ships disappeared into hyperspace.
“Captain,” the tactical officer said, turning to face Joon-Pah, “I’m picking up hyperspace jumps all over the system. The Tevynians…they’re leaving. I think they’re pulling out.”
“Jesus H. Christ,” Michael Olivera said, his voice booming over the bridge speakers, his grin spreading across a third of the view screen. “I leave you alone for a couple days, Andy, and look what happens!”
I sagged against the railing.
“Sir,” I started, then had to swallow the lump in my throat to go on, “with all due respect…next time, I’ll be happy to stay on the boat and let you play diplomat. ’Cause I really suck at it.”
Chapter Thirty
“Why is it,” I asked, taking a deep breath of fresh, winter air, “that every time we come back here, I’m surprised?”
“What?” Julie asked, nudging me with a shoulder. “Surprised the President hasn’t already gotten tired of your shit and banned you from his ranch?”
“No, surprised I’m still alive.”
I leaned back, the old wooden bench creaking under my weight, and slipped an arm around Julie.
“Happy,” I amended, “but surprised.”
“Easy there, cowboy,” she said, pushing my hand off her arm. “This ain’t the drive-in. We got Secret Service, military, political hacks, not to mention our boss.” She nodded toward Olivera, who was pacing in front of the ranch house, cell phone pressed to his ear, his free hand gesticulating.
“And I’m here, too, thanks for noticing,” Dani Brooks put in from the bench on the other side of the front door. “Though God alone knows why, since neither I nor my Rangers did a damned thing on this mission.”
“Believe me,” I assured her, “I wish we’d had you and your Rangers, and General Olivera and every Goddamned one of you.” I tilted my head back, resting it against the hard grain of the wall, closing my eyes. “Maybe then, Delia Strawbridge would still be alive. And Gus, and Rodent, and Ginger, and Baker, and Grunewald and Ripken….” I had to stop, had to clench my jaw because I didn’t want to start bawling like a baby. I’d been there before and while it was cathartic, it would also leave me as drained as running a half-marathon, and I was supposed to be meeting with the President of the United States.
Speaking of which….
“Where is the President?” I asked, looking around again. “We’ve been waiting for an hour. Shouldn’t he have been here already?”
“He’s flying in from some emergency meeting,” Olivera said, tucking his phone away. He folded his arms and scowled. “Something’s wrong. Everyone knows it, but no one’s talking. I’m getting total radio silence from the office of the Space Force Chief of Staff and it’s starting to piss me off. I’m not some fucking staff puke.”
“You can ask him yourself,” Brooks said, nodding upward.
“Good eye, Colonel,” I said, squinting up into the morning sun. I could just make out the V22 Osprey coming in from the east. “You know, I remember when Marine One was a helicopter.”
“You know how old you sound when you start a sentence with ‘I remember when,’ Andy?” Julie told me.
“You’re technically older than I am, sweetheart,” I reminded her.
“And a gentleman wouldn’t bring that up with a lady.” She dug her elbow into my ribs and I grunted.
“Hey, with the Helta treatment, age really is just a number.”
We shielded our eyes when the rotors went horizontal and the tiltrotor airplane came down only fifty yards away, kicking up clouds of dust and debris. The ramp started lowering before the engines had a chance to spin down and the President was scrambling down the steps ahead of his Secret Service escorts, with Tommy Caldwell, the National Security Advisor in tow. Neither of them looked happy and I didn’t think it was just because they were sad over Strawbridge’s death.
All four of us came to attention and Olivera saluted President Crenshaw. He returned it with a motion more perfunctory than usual.
“Inside,” he said, gesturing to the front door.
A Secret Service agent pulled it open and I followed Brooks and Olivera in, with Julie beside me. The door slammed and I turned, my eyebrow shooting up as the President stalked across the entry room and straight to the conference table. He leaned against it on both palms, head bowed for a moment before he straightened.
“Give me your sense of our relationship with the Helta Alliance,” he said.
I assumed he was talking to Olivera and said nothing, but then he looked me straight in the eye.
“You, Major Clanton. You were there, you witnessed what happened. What is our current status with the Helta?”
“Before we left the system,” I said, trying to organize my thoughts into something coherent, “we were invited to a ceremony at their capital on Helta Prime, their traditional choosing of a new Prime Facilitator. The one chosen was a female called Jolan-Fra, and she seemed really grateful to us for stopping the invasion. She formally named Joon-Pah as the head of their military and extended an invitation to bring Earth into the Alliance, pending a vote by the other members. It seems like our relationship to them is stronger than ever and if any of the Council of Facilitators has an issue with us killing Gafto-Lo-Mok or her followers, they didn’t mention it.”
“Their forces are a bit depleted at the moment, though, sir,” Olivera reminded him. “They’re down to two cruisers in-system, though they’ve recalled several from long-range patrol. Luckily, the Tevynians seem to have thrown everything they had into this invasion, so they won’t be in any position to capitalize on that.”
“Something’s wrong.” I said, earning a dirty look from Olivera but ignoring it. “Something h
appened, didn’t it?”
The President exchanged a glance with Caldwell.
“Tell them, Tommy. You tell them, because every time I say it, I want to kill someone.”
“The Tevynian prisoner you brought back, Vercingetorix,” Caldwell said, sounding like he was about to break the news of a loved one’s death to the next of kin, “he was being kept in a top-secret blacksite off world.”
“Off world?” I repeated. “We have off world prisons now?”
“Just the one,” Caldwell said, his scowl telling me what he thought of the interruption. “Holding the prisoner at any prison on Earth would have been risky, there might be intelligence leaks, so we set up a holding cell at the construction station in Lunar orbit, where we were putting together the new cruisers from the hyperdrives.”
“So you could chemically interrogate him again without having to worry about anyone blowing the whistle,” I presumed. Another dirty look, but he didn’t argue the point.
“It was a fucking mistake,” the President declared, his face turning red, as if this was a raw wound that we were picking at. “I should never have put a security risk in such a sensitive location.”
“It was my recommendation,” Caldwell insisted. “The blame should go to me.”
“Blame for what?” Olivera asked, his tone harsher than I would have expected when he was speaking to either the President or Caldwell. “Would someone tell us what happened?”
“Did the prisoner escape?” I asked. But where the hell would he escape to?
“Someone, we don’t know who, except that they were using IDs and security clearances from a Polish engineering crew approved to work on the ship’s hangar bay launch sled, smuggled weapons into the construction base, killed the security detail and took the prisoner. And this next part, let me caution you all right now, is compartmentalized, need-to-know, and if it leaks, we’ll know it was from one of you. Do you understand me?”
“Oh, no,” I moaned, understanding slamming into me like a ton of wet cement. I dropped into one of the chairs. “Oh, shit. Tell me they didn’t….”