Starship Ragnarok

by Alex Oliver

  Explosions rang through the ship. the howl of escaping air was accompanied by the temperature plummeting. The doctor lurched into the corridor, closing a blast door behind him, and a moment later a sensor on Yas's board told him the breach had been sealed.

  The gravity generators cut out, leaving him clutching at the edge of his bowl to stay seated, and his sensors sparked with stinging lights.

  "We're down to one engine, guys," Keva observed. "If we're going to survive at all we need to run now."

  "Where?" Yas asked.

  A sudden darkness alerted him to the fact that, on the moon, the two digging ships had flashed their running lights and cut off their drills, leaving a hole in the satellite the size of a barn door. According to the Hawkbat’s sensors, it went right down into the moon’s core, where it breached a darkness the sensors couldn’t penetrate.

  “Where do we run?” he said again, puzzling over it. There was something there he wasn’t quite remembering.

  And then he saw them. They came up one after another out of the hole as though the moon was spitting swords. Gate ships. The diggers had made a channel up from the chamber where the gate ships were racked and they were pouring up to the surface.

  “Raggy,” came a new voice on the comms. “This is NXA commander Arjuna. We’ve been following your adventures closely, gathering military pilots at this location. We hear you need an assist.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  In the shadow of death

  "Commander Arjuna," Harcrow's small smile was belied by the light in his eyes. The others were less restrained, Zardari and Yueh high-fiving and even Desultory flaring cerise with joy. "It's great to hear your voice. We're in the lead arrow-ship, running on one engine. Anything you can do to help would be appreciated."

  Yas grinned until his cheeks ached, watching the slim slivers of ships streak toward the Hawkbat. Vasto pulled off one final dodge, and they were behind the shelter of the NXA ships.

  Out of radio transmission as they had been, Yas hadn't had time to wonder how the Alliance was handling all this new information. He'd adapted to the crew's sense that they were out of contact and on their own, but now the arrival of rescuers reminded him of what the Dean had tried to tell him early on. He didn't have to do everything by himself. He had allies.

  "I think I can—," Keva began, hurling herself out of her seat and stomping off towards the back of the ship. "Can you keep me in the link if I go down to the engines?" she asked Sasara.

  The ambassador opened one eye. Blood had begun to pool in the corner of her cornea, and her focus on the outside world was obviously shot. But she nodded anyway, and they all heard, in their heads, how impossible it was for her to speak right now, and how stubbornly she was clinging on.

  "Okay then."

  Keva disappeared through the door. Yas switched the sensors to pick up a view of the needle-craft swarming the elven mothership. They were so much smaller than Kelkalyn's vessel that it was having difficulty aiming at them. Even as he watched, one of the needles rammed itself into the opening out of which the city-killing beam had lanced. The mothership's hull tried to melt out of the way, but the needle was going too fast. It flew part way in and jammed, shuddering. The hatch blew off and a space-suited person ejected. A moment later, the needle-ship itself exploded with an ultraviolet flare Yas would not have been able to see without Harcrow's eyes.

  When he blinked the after-image away it was to find the mothership breached--a stream of air hissing out and glittering with small items sucked out with it.

  But the stream lessened as the ship's hull grew rapidly back together, the structure laminating itself like ice growing across a river.

  The city-killing beam did not lash out again, but from five small mouths around it, green fire erupted instead, incinerating two more needle-ships which had been trying to do the same thing.

  "Okay, guys," Keva's voice echoed along the corridor and in their heads. "I've given you two engines and maneuvering thrusters. Use them wisely!"

  Lt. Vasto splayed his hands once more over the flight controls and the Hawkbat crawled deeper into the cloud of needle-ships, putting the NXA forces between itself and Freya's chariot.

  Freya's warriors also seemed to have been cheered by Arjuna's appearance. They had gathered on the dark-side of the mothership, pinning it between themselves and the NXA fleet. The beams of Valkyrie spears flashed out, targeting specific spots on the mothership's hull that must be weaknesses.

  Yas fed those spots into Zardari's targeting computer, and as the Hawkbat retreated, she shot out her own beam weapon, trying to pierce the spot closest to the bridge.

  If they could only destroy the bridge and Kelkalyn on it, Yas thought. Without their leader, the alfr would be at a disadvantage - have to fall back and regroup, find a successor. And even if that was not the case, the bastard deserved it.

  "Get him!" he urged Zardari and got an irritated scowl in return.

  "What d'you think I'm trying to do?"

  Their first two shots landed squarely on target, and splashed off, just as the mothership's beams had splashed from the Hawkbat. The great, triangular ship sailed on toward Nahasdzáán silently, untroubled.

  And now its superiority in armaments was beginning to swing the battle back into its favor. A shot wiped through a cloud of warriors on horseback, leaving twisted metal and spinning, dismembered limbs.

  Yas's gulped as a second elvish mothership sailed up to hover just above Kelkalyn's ship, guarding the weakened bridge with its own forcefields and hull plates. Its own starboard city-killer trained on Freya's chariot.

  No one could deny that the goddess's warriors were brave, but they were hopelessly out matched. A third and a fourth ship drifted up to box them in and - responding to some distant commander's order, presumably - they fell back toward the chariot, taking the fifth ship with them.

  The box of elven battleships could provide a much deeper field of fire than any one of them alone.

  Yas watched with horror as their weapons tore swathes through the fleet of needle-ships. The needles had been armed only with hastily welded-on slug throwers, and the shot traced perforated lines of red fire across the surface of Nahasdzáán's moon as the entire battlefield drifted closer to the planet itself.

  The NXA needles had also teamed up into squads of four ships moving together as one. This meant their armaments, focused together on the same spot, had enough power to pockmark the gleaming black ships. But it also meant they were close enough to target.

  The fifth battleship let off a barrage of beam weapons and bombs toward Freya's chariot, and Yas had just enough time to think about all the children on there, dancing in the streets of the wheel, and about Dezba.

  She was either on the chariot or she was in the squadrons of warriors flying desperately for shelter.

  Yas bit his lip and clenched his hands until the nails bit into his palms, watching the warriors flee for cover. They were into the forcefield—They were inside the atmosphere in the body of the chariot, but the dark alf battleship was firing.

  Its beam reflected from the forcefield around the chariot, straight back at the ship that had sent it. The chariot itself blazed like a second sun, and the beam hit the elven ship on the under-side of its pointed nose and all but sheared the whole thing off.

  Yas might have cheered, but the battle was going poorly for the NXA. Already the moon's orbit was cluttered with destroyed needles, randomly drifting and forming a hazard to the ships that were still under way. Personnel in space suits were using their oxygen tanks as thrusters, trying to reach the moon's surface, even though it was rapidly growing further away.

  The alfr' death-beams never seemed to run out. Another cluster of needles was blown entirely to molecules as they watched, and Yas realized with a certainty that was also a sickness, that they were losing this battle as they had lost the last. That heroism and teamwork and just generally being the good guys was not saving the day.

  They were not going to
be able to win this fairly.

  So what could he do instead? Was there some advantage he had not taken advantage of? Some unthinkable solution to all of this that he had been overlooking because it didn't fit his ideas of how war ought to be?

  That was the problem, though. How was he supposed to imagine a solution that hinged on being the sort of solution he would never imagine?

  "Agh!" he said, clutching at his hair in frustration. His vision seemed to dim at the same time, and the bridge swam back into darkness as it had been when they got on board.

  His first thought was that there was something wrong with his eyes, but then he heard Sasara chanting beneath her breath, and her voice was destroyed, as if she had been gargling with ground glass. Now he saw her and knew her, he noticed that her head was back as though she couldn't gasp in enough air and she had begun to sway in her spot as if she was about to faint and fall over.

  "Doctor!" Yas called urgently. "Dr. Wakes, please. Have you got anything—she needs to be kept awake. Caffeine or something? Adrenaline? I don't--"

  "You do not know," Dr Wakes agreed. He had not been subject to the mind share, and his power-source was a small fusion generator, supplemented with light and temperature generating cells on his backpack, so exhaustion was a foreign concept to him. "But I know. Yes, I can give her a stim."

  He stepped forward to do so, peeling back Sasara's damp robe from the crook of her elbow and administering a dose of something. She shook her head almost instantly, and sat up, blinking and alert, although the whites of her eyes were almost all red now with blood.

  "It will last for thirty minutes," the doctor said, calmly. "After which she must stop this or suffer a stroke. Any victory we stand a chance of achieving, must be done before that unless you wish the ambassador’s blood to be on your hands.”

  Half an hour. Yas stared blankly out into the moving star-scape. He needed to come up with a solution to all of this in half an hour or less.

  A sense of futility ground his skull into his backbone to the point where it was difficult to stay seated. He wanted to slump over, head in his hands, and for someone else to take over. An authority figure. This would be a good time for a goddess to intervene. He might even welcome it.

  At that thought, he retrained the sensors on the chariot. Although its shields seemed to be impenetrable-reflecting every shot aimed at it, it didn't seem to have any armaments beyond the champions. That had probably been enough in the dark ages, but was woefully inadequate now.

  Kelkalyn's worries made sudden sense to him now. If the rest of the Oses were anything like Freya, they had not changed their technology since they left Earth. They would be no real threat to the Svartalfr unless they gained a sudden increase in the size of their army of champions.

  Perhaps that was why they had turned up again in human space, because they had found themselves outgunned out there in other galaxies, and they needed to recruit more armies to be brainwashed.

  They were not coming to protect humanity, but to use it as cannon fodder in their own battles, and Freya at least was an expert at making the humans complicit in that. Making them enjoy it.

  Yas shuddered. In the time it had taken him to think these thoughts, the NXA fleet had been reduced to a quarter of its size. Kelkalyn's battleship was a little scuffed along its shiny sides and three of its beam weapons were no longer working. But as he watched, the deactivated needle that had been stuck where the city-killer beam emerged was ejected like a cork from a bottle, and the hull around it began to tessellate back together into a familiar form.

  Meanwhile the entire battleground had moved across the moon's orbit and the Alfr ships were floating above the dark side of Nahasdzáán.

  There was only one city down there large enough to be seen from space. The Pueblo people preferred to illuminate their houses inside, but to let no light escape, and many of the towns and scattered hogans also preferred firelight and lamplight over streets lit with neon. Only the capital shone both day and night, visible as a bright eye on the dark ball.

  But the capital was where over seventy percent of Nahasdzáán's people lived.

  What can I do? What can I do? he thought, all but tearing his hair out in frustration. Why wouldn't a brilliant idea occur to him right when it was needed?

  "What can we do?" Harcrow said suddenly, as if reading Yas's thoughts—perhaps he was, they were all rather permeable in this artificial gestalt. "Give me some ideas."

  "Um, we could aim for the beam emitter again," Lt. Yueh suggested. "Stop it from reforming. With the four of them stacked like that, if we had a weapon big enough we could almost get them all in one shot, but we—"

  "What weapons have we got?" Harcrow asked, as if encouraging her to expand on that idea.

  Zardari shook their head, "Half the gunnery platform just isn't showing up for me, sir," they said. "I'm guessing the ambassador is not familiar enough with the minutia of elvish weapons to make a translation. I guessed this one was the beam weapon because it looks like a sun, but..."

  Something that he had said nudged Yas's mind. He picked his head out of his hands and stared fixedly at the wall. Damn. He had an idea He just couldn't put his finger on it. Something about all their enemies being close enough to take one shot at, and... something else.

  "Can we compact them even more?" he asked. "I mean, what if we lured Kelkalyn and his buddies over toward the chariot? Take out the Svartalfr and the goddess all in one blow."

  "How?" Zardari asked, looking at their board in frustration.

  "I can certainly lure them in," Vasto agreed, glancing at Harcrow for permission.

  The captain shrugged. "Do it," he said, "and maybe Mr. Sundeen will have finished his thought process by the time we get there."

  The engines no longer sounded like a harpsichord. They were a jangling, janky cacophony now, like a metal box of keys being dropped down the stairs, but the Hawkbat turned and limped back toward the Alfr mothership, describing a cautious parabolic curve around the repaired beam emitter and toward the chariot.

  A green plasma shot dazzled out his forward sensor for a moment, and he saw behind him the ant-like procession of small vessels coming up from the surface of Nahasdzáán. They must be bringing evacuees up to the moonbase, from which they could take the gate system to refuges at the other side of the galaxy.

  His parents would not be among those, Yas was sure. They wouldn't leave their land, the four mountains that were the grandsons of the mountains on Earth, the places where their people had been born and danced and died. The places where the holy people became visible, when they were asked nicely...

  Fleetingly, Yas wondered if the holy people were actually Oses too, and the thought was nauseating in its combination of anger and misery. No, they were not. His Yeis were to be trusted. They had been with his people all along, and they didn't pull this kind of shit.

  All along, he thought again, as Kelkalyn's ship followed Vasto's taunting flight across its bow. Something was snagging at his brain there too. What was it about 'all along'? Something about time? The depths of time in which the Oses had been absent.

  Time was what they needed, certainly. Time for the NXA to build up its fleet from the sad remnants of the needle-pilots who were taking this chance to separate from the fight and retreat back into the moon.

  Time for the NXA diplomats to hammer out some kind of unified response to the threat of Svartalfr and Oses alike.

  Time.

  It finally clicked and he found himself on his feet, hands over his mouth. "Time!" he shouted. "That's it! Remember the time-bomb that alf threw at us? Can we send them back in time?"

  He was so afire with the idea that he leaned over Harcrow's seat and used the captain's intercom to hail Keva in the engine room. "Keva, have you seen any time-bombs in the ordnance? Is there a way of setting the dates on them? Let's send them all back where they came from. They can go and terrorize your ancestors like they did two thousand years ago."

  "We might have already
done that, in fact," Zardari mused, obviously turning the idea over and liking it. "Think about it. What if she got there from here? It wouldn't be a paradox, and it would explain a lot about how a bunch of aliens ended up as our images of the gods."

  "Philosophy later," Harcrow interrupted. "Keva, can it be done?"

  "Um," she said, a clanking noise sounding beside her. "Maybe? There's no obvious switches or targeting devices. It may take Sasara talking to it."

  Yas looked at the ambassador. It was as if he could see the threads of psionic influence coming off her, she seemed to be the still heart of a storm, her hair standing on end and her eyes rolled back in her head until only the bloodshot whites showed.

  "Doctor?" he asked.

  "Another stim will kill her. I will not. I will, however carry her to the engine room, so she can commune with the ship."

  The doctor scooped Sasara up into his metal and piston arms and carried her easily out of the room.

  Watching her go, Yas was struck suddenly with the realization that if this plan came off, he was exiling not only Freya to the Dark Ages, but his sister with her.

  "Doctor!" he shouted. "No, Dezba's on the chariot. No, come back!"

  Doctor Wakes hesitated, his back toward Yas, and Yas was blinded and paralyzed by the choice he was being forced to make. His sister, or humanity? His sister or— he couldn't!

  "Belay that, doctor," said Harcrow firmly. "Carry on with the plan."

  "Yes sir."

  The doctor and Sasara disappeared. Yas fought to make some movement, some thought. He swallowed the universe and broke his throat on it.

  "Back to your station, Mr. Sundeen," said Harcrow, calm and slow as ever. Not a sound of remorse in his voice.

  Yas found it strengthening. He clawed his way back into control of his body, took a deep breath, and returned to his station, struggling against tears all the way.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  If only we had time

  "I have sent out a comms message," came an artificial voice from the ceiling. Startled, Yas realized it must be Desultory's—the ship, or Sasara's lingering influence translating his colors into something the crew could understand. "This vessel has the capability of communicating with the chariot and its horsemen, as well as any NXA vessels remaining. I have communicated the necessity to herd the alfr ships closer, but not the reason. I have received no reply as yet."