by Alex Oliver
Yas sniffed his nose clear and wiped his eyes on the back of his hand, activating his sensors once more. The internal monitors showed Keva opening what looked like a foot-locker and loading the orb shaped bombs into a missile tube. It took a hundred at a time and then locked. When it was locked, Sasara pressed her trembling hand to it and whispered something. There were tears of blood trickling down the side of the ambassador's nose now, and she lay in the doctor's arms as pliant as a baby.
The board in front of Zardari lit up with a symbol that looked a little like the symbol for Scorpio, and they stabbed at it, obviously not knowing what else to do.
With a hollow thunk that vibrated the very deck under Yas's feet, the missiles spat out of the Hawkbat's side at near-lightspeed velocity. Yas threw the results up to the main viewscreen, and watched as the glimmering spheres traveled a curving line towards the knot of chariot and Svartalfr vessels. On the edges of the knot, the remaining needle ships were still ramming into the elvish battleships, and Freya's champions had begun to press the knot closer from the other side.
Yas wondered what Desultory had said to them, to persuade them to act against their own interests like this. Maybe they did genuinely believe they were acting to protect the human city below. Or maybe they honestly were, and it wasn't a question of belief at all.
Whatever the reason, the ships and the chariot had moved within ramming distance of each other. The Svartalfr were trying to break through the chariot's defenses with their beam weapons, and the reflected light was dazzling.
Yas watched as the Hawkbat's bombs curved into the battle.
Some, passing through the beams, were demolecularized with nothing more than a shift of color. Some passed through the criss-cross of destructive energy unscathed.
He bit his lip, watching them, his chest starting to burn as he forgot to breathe. The aim was true. They were passing between the Alfr mothership and the chariot now and they were going to—
Anticlimactically, they bounced straight off the forcefield without detonating, scattering into the disputed area between the six craft, and floating there inert and embarrassing.
Kelkalyn seemed to have decided that the chariot was a greater threat to him than one errant Hawkbat. His mothership was turning to present its repaired city-killer cannon to Freya's chariot, and the other elven craft were following its lead, arranging themselves into firing formation around the goddess's vessel.
"Dezba," Yas whispered to himself. "Dezba, come on," as though she could do something against all of this.
He imagined her. Perhaps she was living now in one of the large halls he had seen on the wheel, bunking with her shipmates and being waited on hand and foot by Lios servants. Had she taken to the life as easily as his own crew had? Was she happy in there? He hoped so.
Turning back to his screens showed Keva loading up a second volley of bombs.
Yas hissed through his teeth with frustration and anger. Sasara could not stand this much longer, and when she fell unconscious, the crew's control over the Hawkbat would go with her. But how were the bombs to get through this time when they had so utterly failed the last? What could he do?
A harsh crackle of static came from the voice the ship had synthesized for Desultory. Then he said, "I have an incoming transmission. Sub-lieutenant Sundeen? It is for you."
Yas thought first of his mother. She was right below them on the planet. Probably watching through Harcrow's feed. She would be able to see his face, his despair. At least she would know that he was doing everything he possibly could do to keep her safe. It wasn't enough, but it was an encouraging thought. They were close enough to speak to one another at the last, and he was grateful for that.
The radio crackled again as if clearing its voice, and then it said "Hey, bro. I heard you using my name in vain."
Yas gulped as his heart tried to make a break for it out of his mouth. He caught it just in time and swallowed it back. That was Dezba's voice. For all of his instinctive calling her name, he hadn't expected her to reply. He hadn't actually expected her to still be alive.
"Dezba," he choked out again. "How?"
"You know I was taken on board just before your graduation," she said. He could hear the smile in her voice. She didn't sound quite like herself—too laid back, too happy, too drugged—but even through that fog of drug-induced brainwashing, he would have recognized her anywhere. "I'm sorry I missed that, by the way, but I found a higher calling here."
"Yeah, I..." again he had to struggle with his voice as unexpected tears tried to choke him. "I— I never blamed you for that. It's so great to hear you're okay."
"Time, Mr. Sundeen," Harcrow put in, just as a stray beam from one of the Alfr ships raked the Hawkbat from stem to stern and Yas was almost tossed from his seat by the tremors. "We've got maybe ten minutes tops."
"Are you okay?" Yas asked, uncertain and ignoring the implicit directive to stop using the comms for his personal calls.
"I've never been happier," Dezba enthused. "I'm doing wonderful work and I'm doing it for someone who is..." Her voice went misty, and the other members of the Hawkbat's crew stirred uneasily on their seats, presumably remembering what it was like to feel such adoration themselves. "She's everything you'd hope for from a goddess. When I told her I had brought my comm from the ship, she gave me permission to talk to you."
Dezba laughed. "I've been following the feeds, watching you. You and your crew are very odd, and there are things that you've said that made me uncomfortable. Things that I didn't tell her, because I didn't want to upset her. But you must know that you're wrong. We're not brainwashed. We're allowed to make our own decisions. You were. I am too."
Yas thought about Harcrow, even more easy-going and laid back than he was in his right mind, allowing his non-human crewmembers to sneak about behind Freya's back because it simply hadn't occurred to him that anyone might want to do her harm. And it had seemed completely obvious to him that of course they were doing Freya's will. Of course Freya would want the best for them. Of course everything would be fine.
Perhaps, for the favored and the normal, there was more freedom in that than Yas himself had experienced.
"Okay," he said uncertainly, not sure what she was trying to say. But Captain Harcrow's olive skin had blanched white.
"She's saying she’s guessed our plan," he said.
"It's not a very successful plan, is it?" Vasto was hunched over his desk, working with minute shifts of the fingers to align the Hawkbat's sputtering engines to bring them close enough for maximum accuracy but to keep far enough away to stay out of the blast radius. "It doesn't matter who knows if it's not going to work."
"If she knows," Avril Yueh said, puzzled, "why are some of the horsemen still helping? Why has the chariot not pulled away?"
"Dezba," Yas said, pushing his hair behind his ears in a gesture that allowed him to stroke and soothe himself. "What are you saying?"
"I'm saying goodbye," she said, still with that blissed out serenity in her voice that he hated. "Freya is worthy and loves us. It is her avowed will to do whatever she can to protect humanity. So of course she won't mind if I help you. I'm sending you coordinates now for your next attack, and I will lower the shield over that area and allow the bombs in. I'm not afraid of a thousand year journey into the past. I am where I want to be. But I wanted to say goodbye before going. I wanted to say that I was glad it turned out this way and to ask you to tell mum and dad that I love them."
So he was losing her after all. Yas felt his chin crumple. He gulped in a wet breath and managed to scrape out a wavery, "I love you too," before the flurry of activity on the bridge overwhelmed him.
"Coordinates locked in," Zardari announced.
"Bombs loaded and primed," came Keva's voice.
Then Harcrow called "Fire!" and Yas closed his eyes.
He forced his eyes open the next moment. No. He wouldn't let this happen unobserved. He would watch, because that was all he could do for her.
&nbs
p; The curving line of bombs raced out of the ship just as they had done last time, but this time each one felt like a punch in the face. He watched them arc into the battle zone between the five Alfr vessels and the chariot. A hundred of them - a hundred little dots visible against the galaxy behind them only because the ship knew what they were.
The Alfr ships began to glow brightly, their running lights pulsing as though they were luminous sea-slugs. It would have been beautiful if it had not been the sign that they were readying to use their combined beam weapon on the chariot.
Yas held his breath again and was aware of everyone else around him doing the same.The line of bombs curved beneath the nose of Kelkalyn's ship and the first one impacted with the chariot's shield just where Yas remembered the entrance to the hangar to be.
But no it didn't impact. It passed through. Dezba had lowered the forcefield on the hangar bay!
Yueh cheered as the rest of the bombs followed the first into that closed cup of a room. She caught Yas's expression and Harcrow's pinch of disapproving frown and fell guiltily silent, but the smile was in her eyes as the final device followed the rest and for a long, agonizing moment, nothing happened at all.
Then they all went off at once.
The explosion was no easier to comprehend from the outside. The chariot seemed to blur as if seen through a heat haze, and the blurring spread from the hangar to the body, to the wheels.
The strange blast burst out of the hangar, funneled by its shape, and slammed straight into Kelkalyn's ship just as it lowered its shields to fire its beam.
A greasy yellow-green bruise spread in seconds across the ship's shiny ebony surface and touched the ship hovering protectively above it.
Then the bombs from the first volley were caught in the wave and went off one by one, scattered throughout the battleground.
A third Alfr ship began to pulse with eldritch light as it was caught in the blast. And then the sphere of destruction seemed to reach critical mass. It expanded faster than Yas's eye could follow, racing toward the Hawkbat.
"Get us out of here, Mr. Vasto."
"Aye sir!" Vasto was already moving.
The Hawkbat's engines whined and sparked as she turned away, throwing her passengers into the walls as the inertial dampening system shuttered and failed. Behind them, the time explosion flickered with lights and colors that hurt Yas's head because they were on the very borders of what he was able to perceive or understand.
His brain interpreted the visual input as nonsense—eyes appearing and disappearing. The shape of a great thunderbird dissolved into a bucket and then a hypermatter array, and then it was a blob with eyes again, before it blew apart into billions of tiny twinkling stars and everything went dark.
~
The darkness continued. The Hawkbat bucked as an impossible wave of force seemed to lift it up and drop it. Worrying groans of stressed metal and almost human-like screams came from the bulkheads. Yas waited for the lights to come back on. But they didn't.
"Sensors report," came Harcrow's voice, breathless and invisible.
"Um," Yas bent over them. Faint lights did swim there. If he narrowed his eyes and concentrated hard, he could see them like the trails of luminous fungus beneath the forest floor. But they were too dim to read. He thought the toggle for the viewscreen had been at the upper right and hit that, but if there was a response, he couldn't see it. "I don't think it's working any more, sir."
"Did we get them?" the captain repeated. "Let me see."
"Sir, the lights have gone," Zardari said, hushed in the dark. "And none of the instruments seem to be working any more. Either we got caught in the tail of the blast, or—"
"The ambassador's down," came Keva's voice, not modulated as it would have been through the comms, but slightly out of breath as though she had jogged all the way here from the engine room. "I can't read any of the controls any more. The doctor's seeing to her—we think she's okay for now. But if anything comes for the ship like this? We're sitting ducks.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Return of the conquering heroes
Yas slumped bonelessly into the cup of the elvish seat. His eyes were still adjusting to no longer seeing the world with Harcrow's camera enhancements on board, and there was a long moment where it was utter darkness both within him and without. Dezba's message repeated in a loop in his head, and he didn't know how he felt or how he should feel.
"That was your sister, right?" Surprisingly, it was Avril Yueh who spoke. She and Yas had barely interacted and he knew her less well than anyone else in the crew, but he was grateful to her for giving him a way out of his own head.
"Yes," he said. "Dezba. She was always the homebody out of the two of us. She said she was happy to haul ice around the Nahasdzáán system and go home for her leave. And now she's so far away she's utterly out of reach, and I'm floating over my parents home in orbit. It wasn't meant to work out like this."
"She made a choice to sacrifice her home so that it could be saved for her family," Yueh said. He could barely see her smile in the gray-white glimmer of the moss that grew on the walls, but it seemed sad. "You should be proud of her."
"I am," he said, but he wasn't, not really. Not yet. There was too much grief and guilt to work through before he could get to the stage of being proud. "But I wish she'd had a freer choice."
"She seemed happy," Vasto put in, as though he was trying to be comforting. In the darkness and the stillness of the bridge there was something very intimate about being closed in together with these people. They didn't know what to say, but they were trying, and that meant a lot.
"Well yeah," he said, not above being bitter anyway. "But that was mostly the brainwashing. Tell me you'd want to be back there acting like schoolchildren with a crush?"
"If a person thinks they're happy, surely they are happy?" Zardari put in. Their expression was only half intellectual interest. The other half was softer. Yas gathered that this too was meant to be comforting.
And maybe it was. After all, his sister was alive and safe and happy. Shouldn't that be enough?
Then why did he want to cry?
"D'you think we got them all?" Harcrow asked again. There hadn't been an impact against the ship for minutes.
"I can't say sir," Yas turned again to his unresponsive board.
"Then go find a window," Harcrow insisted. "And if we're flying blind, I need those engines at minimum. Keva, that's on you. Desultory? Can you open that comms frequency again? We should at least put a distress call out."
"Yes sir," Yas said, standing up, dull, but glad to have something to do. He had no idea where he would find a window if there wasn't one on the bridge, but exploring the ship had to be better than—
A shock against the ship's side threw him back into his seat cracking the backs of his knees against its lip. He stilled and listened intently. That hadn't sounded like a weapon's impact but could he really be sure?
Then a booming knock sounded out from directly overhead, where the outer hull was. It was a sharp rapping as though someone was trying to tunnel through using a pick-ax.
Harcrow tilted his head up to listen and an actual smile, small but warm, tilted his mouth up at the ends. "That's morse code. I think we're being rescued."
The crew broke out into smiles and even Yas had to fish out a little grin. Now that he knew what was going on outside, the further knocking was easy to identify as the sounds of magnetic grapples locking on. A tug on the line threw them all to the floor again as it warred against the Svartalfr ship's momentum and thrust, but then Keva cut the Hawkbat's engines entirely and the jostling gave way to a smooth pull.
One of the civilian ships from the moonbase had caught them. They were safe and going home.
~
About an hour later, another set of thuds and a sense of settling, of being captured, signaled that they had been docked. A heavier clunk out in the corridor, followed by a long building hiss suggested a universal airlock had been attached
. But there was no door and no means of making one.
"I'm guessing we're tied up at one of the moon-base's quays," Yas speculated. "But we got in using a command wand. How are we going to get out?"
"Leave that to me," said a weary voice. Yas turned to find Sasara, leaning heavily on Dr. Wake's arm, but walking up from the engine room under her own power.
"Should you?" Harcrow asked. His concern was understandable - she still looked dreadful, her hair tangled, her skin gray beneath its golden tattoos, and her eyes like pools of blood. "We can wait. Or we can try cutting tools first."
Sasara laughed. Despite her haggard appearance, Yas thought she seemed relieved, lightened, as though she had passed some test she had set herself. He could understand that. He'd always been impressed but a little skeptical about the tales of the Inquisitors—the idea that anyone was capable of the sort of feat they were known for had seemed unrealistic.
It must have been a lot to live up to, especially for a young woman on her first assignment. And now she had, she could relax a little into an enjoyment of her own abilities.
"After holding a gestalt with five humans, an Ocuilin and an alien spaceship, opening a door will not kill me," she said and pulled the wand out of her fraying sleeve.
She aimed it, whispered, and the door bubbled open. A human smell burst through - iron, sweat and deodorant. After having breathed svartalfr air for the past few hours there was something disturbingly organic about the smell, like a slaughterhouse or a public toilet, but after two more breaths it passed, and Yas rose to salute the Captain who came in, torch in hand.
"Captain Harcrow," the newcomer said, holding out his hand to the captain. "I am Captain Anderson. I salute a fellow survivor of the battle of Ko. I am here to take possession of your prize, this alien cutter, on behalf of the NXA government. It needs to go to research at once to be studied.