by Jack Colrain
Daniel, of course, knew he had nowhere to run to. But he and Wilson were calm, relaxed and accepting. “Best say a goodbye, Dan,” Wilson said. “I hope you don’t mind me calling you that. It’s been… I won’t say a pleasure, but more of an honor than you probably think I feel. So, say a goodbye to Captain Ying, and make it a good one.”
“It’s been more of an honor than I thought, either,” Daniel admitted. He closed his eyes. ‘Live your life and be happy. I hope you’ll get to have that family you wanted…. All I can do is hope you can forgive me for doing the right thing.’
Epilogue
UES Ganges, orbit of Jupiter
Captain Ying Xi Huang matched her fighter’s velocity with that of the Ganges and allowed the automatic systems to take over the recovery and docking procedure. The rest of her flight did likewise, having seen no sign of the Gresian fighters that had supposedly been reported near Io.
In truth, she wouldn’t have been surprised if it had all simply been a drill; it had been at least two months since a Gresian ship had actually ventured as far in-system as the orbit of Jupiter. They only had a few ships, and while humanity could produce vessels relatively quickly by means of the Mozari factory ships and nanotechnology, the Gresians had no such means.
Ironically, as Hope saw it, the Gresians had established a fairly well defended base on Titan, having conquered the UES base where she and Daniel had been training for their originally intended mission to a Gresian planet. The base was still as well defended now that the Gresians held it as it had been back then, so everyone in the military knew it would take some time to push them out of the Solar system entirely.
Humanity now had that time, though, she reflected, thanks to Daniel West.
The thought of him still stabbed pain into her heart. For several weeks after returning to Earth, she’d resented Marty Beswick and Kate Kinsella for bringing her home. She had even resented them for the fact that she was still alive. Back then, she would rather have been with Daniel.
She hated to think of it, but she had resented him, too, for denying her that. But resenting him didn’t mean she could ever not love him, especially when she was so proud of the decision he had made. There were those who said he and Wilson had made the wrong choice, leaving humanity stuck with enemies on their doorstep. Those people decried Daniel as a snowflake or a traitor, or as just less of a man.
None of them, of course, had been in the war. None of them had fought on the planet Firebird. No-one who had been there, on the ground or in orbit, thought that Daniel had done anything wrong.
‘Hope?’
She sat bolt upright, suddenly wide awake. Surely, she was dreaming? The word still echoed in her mind as her breathing finally calmed, a cold sweat chilling her back. Of course, it had been a dream, she told herself; she would undoubtedly have dreams like that all her life. How could she not, when she had shared such a connection, her and Daniel literally sharing each other’s minds and thoughts as well as emotions?
She felt a pang in her gut, a tension driven by the memory of her lost love, but gritted her teeth and forced herself to lie back on her bunk, to try to get some more sleep—
‘Hope, I think I can hear you. Or feel you—’
‘Daniel?’ she thought instinctively. If it was a dream, she was stuck with it, so why not? If she was awake and hallucinating with grief…. She would have to tell the flight surgeon in the morning, and that would be her tour over, at the very least. Now the pang in her gut was fear, the terror of losing not just her career but who she was. She was a pilot, that was the touchstone she was able to hold onto, and if she was threatened with losing that…. She didn’t even want to finish the thought.
‘Hold onto your touchstone,’ Daniel’s thought came to her.
Or her mind was taking his voice to mess with her.
And that was when the alarms howled into life, screaming and buzzing throughout the ship.
Like other fighter pilots aboard, Hope had become used to rapid awakenings and being ready for trouble in a matter of seconds. She ran into the Ganges’s C-In-C in less than a minute and found the XO, Commander Matsu. “What’s happening?” Hope asked, a little more stressed-sounding than she would have liked.
“Fighter Wing Bravo, green for launch,” the CAG was saying. “Intercept vector; we need eyes on that ship as soon as possible.”
Matsu looked up to answer Hope’s question. “Something big just showed up on sensors, coming from outside the Solar system.”
“Gresian?”
“Unknown. Unknown and goddamned huge. Its approach vector shows it coming in from deep space, not from within the system, so it’s not from one of the new Martian colonies, and it’s not a commercial asteroid miner, or a Mozari ship. But it doesn’t match any Gresian designs, either.”
“We have a visual,” the CAG announced.
“Put it on the table,” Captain Gramercy ordered.
It was hard to judge the scale of the image that appeared, but the numbers projected beside it proved it was indeed large. It was also, frankly, scary looking, though not in the way that the Gresian capital ships were. Rather than a coral and obsidian Gothic cathedral, this resembled a death’s head moth.
“Definitely not Gresian...” She thought back to Daniel and asked, ‘If I’m not crazy and I’m not dreaming, now’s the time to prove it. Tell me something—anything—that only you would know.’
‘Do you want to watch some episodes of The Bachelor on our honeymoon?’ Hope let out a yelp that drew every eye in the C-In-C. ‘There’s something I need you to do.’
‘Name it.’
‘There are fighters heading towards my shop. I can tell you’re not flying one of them, so I need you to get someone to make sure the fighters are told not to shoot me!’
“It’s not hostile!” Hope said quickly.
Matsu and Gramercy looked at her skeptically. “And you think this why?” Gramercy asked.
“Daniel West is on that ship.” She didn’t expect them to believe it, and their expressions didn’t prove her wrong, but she persisted. “You know about the telepathic connection he and I shared?”
“It’s a matter of court record,” Matsu admitted.
“I’m in contact with him now. He’s aboard that ship.”
Gramercy looked at her for a long moment, then turned to the CAG. “Pass that along to the fighters. Order them to escort the ship, and to try to make contact, but hit it with everything if it makes the slightest suspicious move.”
The strange ship was too large to land in the Ganges’ flight deck, but it proved to have a docking port that would fit those on the Ganges. The cargo bay adjacent to that lock was filled with armed troops when she got there, as well as the ship’s Captain and XO. The soldiers had their weapons—a mix of railguns and high caliber weapons—trained on the hatch in case anything hostile came through, and they looked as if they had itchy trigger fingers.Captain Gramercy gave a nod, and a technician began to cycle the airlock. Hope could barely breathe, her heart pounding. The hatch eventually rolled open to reveal a number of unarmed soldiers in uniform. Human soldiers. They began to pour out of the hatch with expressions of disbelieving relief. There, in the middle of the first group, were two familiar faces: Lieutenant Daniel West and Professor Doug Wilson.
After a 48-hour debrief, Daniel was finally allowed to meet Hope, and he brought Wilson with him. The issues between them seemed, to Hope, to have been solved over the past six months. “Who are those men?” Hope asked, “And where did this ship come from?”
Daniel gave her a weary smile. “The troops are survivors of the invasion force who got trapped on Firebird when the fleet pulled back to Earth.”
Doug Wilson nodded sadly. “As the gate system started overloading, I was still connected to the Shaldine computer, and that computer generated a warning to me to evacuate the facility. Which, of course, I would have been more than happy to plan for, had I known there was a means to do so.”
“But the
re was?”
“The computer suggested we use a vessel from the hangar inside the facility,” Daniel explained. “Doug didn’t even know this hangar existed, but when it was offered to us, we weren’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. We took the ship and hightailed it out of there.”
“At that point,” Wilson added, “we were able to receive distress signals from the nearest beachhead zone, so we picked up everybody we could find and fit aboard. The ship had a wormhole generation drive, but it wasn’t nearly as fast as the gates. That’s, after all, part of the reason the Shaldine built the gate system.”
“So, how did you make it all the way home?” Hope wondered.
“That,” Daniel said firmly, “is a long story. But if you’ve got six months for me to tell it...”
Hope laughed. “Six months?!” As Wilson discreetly left the briefing room with a smile, she draped her arms over Daniel’s shoulders. “We have the rest of our lives,” she said, and, finally, kissed him so deeply that time seemed to have stopped.
End of Gateway War
Hammond’s Hardcases Book Three
About Jack Colrain
Sign up to Jack’s mailing list at
http://eepurl.com/gpXzhb
ABOUT JACK
Jack Colrain never intended to be a writer. But retiring after 30 years living, fighting and surviving in some of the grimmest regions in the world, he found himself with some stories to tell and lessons to impart.
What he’s picked up over the years can’t be found in any survivalist classes or the latest prepper books—they’re hard earned from surviving in the harshest conditions and can be found only in his books. He doesn’t live in a cabin in the woods (yet) but in the wilds of another kind: downtown LA, with his wife and two kids. They don’t always understand his prepping, but when SHTF Jack knows he’ll be able to keep them safe. They’ll thank him later.
Jack now spends his free time writing books about characters who get into certifiably FUBAR situations, whether they're survivalist scenarios or more military science fiction related, and then he tries to get them out of it using the skills he’s learned. He hopes that by reading his books readers will absorb some survival skills and a few more people will make it out okay when it’s TEOTWAWKI.
New to the industry, Jack would love to hear from readers: