Defiance: (The Spiral Wars Book 4)

by Joel Shepherd

  “Yes Major!” shouted Kono, so all could hear, and all about the room came the rustling of weapons being prepared, though still pointed at the floor, for now. If it happened, everyone died… but now the stakes were raised, and the tension built. And now, perhaps, Aristan began to see his mistake in fighting a ceremonial fight against someone who cared nothing for ceremony. But he’d had no choice.

  Aristan attacked, a strike flashing for the unarmored side of her calf, then reversing back to whip at her face as she danced back. She ducked and stabbed at him, but he danced away, flowing like water, circling as he looked for another opening.

  “You have no time!” she hissed at him. “Already you are out of time! This system is lost, thanks to you! Your people will die by the million, and you will be blamed!”

  Desperation flared in those wide, indigo eyes, and he slashed again. Trace took the blow on her right arm, ducked, then barely swayed aside the stab for her neck… and lowered her shoulder into him and charged. Female she was, and smaller, but augmented legs gave ferocious acceleration and the armour gave her force as she hit his midriff in a tackle. They crashed down, and he was lithe enough to roll her and spin aside with a retreating swipe that Trace allowed to slash her armoured middle. Aristan circled again, adjusting the cowl and veil where they’d come loose of their hidden velcro… and again Trace saw the alarm there, noting what she’d nearly done — pinned him in a wrestling grapple, where she, armoured with a close-range weapon, held all the advantages.

  “Where is your calm, great soul?” Trace asked him. “To be Domesh is to be always at peace! I see no calm in you. Look at you worry. You worry for your future, for your legacy. For your life. You are no leader of Domesh. The great rulers of Harmony laugh at you.”

  Aristan circled, no longer entirely trusting himself, Trace thought. She would not allow herself to feel satisfaction, or blood lust, or the craving for revenge. She had her strategy, and the future lives of millions, perhaps billions, hung upon it. Aristan now stared into that karmic abyss, and trembled. Trace looked as well, and felt only stillness.

  She gazed at him, raising slightly from her low, crab-crouch, and looked him straight in the eyes. “Aristan. We have been on adventures together. It’s over, my friend. You’ve failed. Admit defeat, and I will spare you.”

  He swung hard, then again, Trace dancing back, him never getting close enough for disadvantage, aiming at her hands, her blade, then her face. She blocked with an arm, and he cut for her unarmored waist, the point where the upper-armour ended and the lower-section began… but that brought him close, and she dropped, catching the blow on chestplate, then trapping the blade with her arm. She grabbed his wrist, and drove the kukri through his middle, full force.

  He collapsed in her arms like a deflating balloon, sword dropping with a clatter, and sank to his knees. For a moment he just gazed at her, blue eyes filling with tears. It was a kind of haunted despair, touched with an almost-smile, like the fatalist who has just realised that the universe was never about to grant him its great prize after all. That it had all been a wonderful, terrible illusion. There was some humour in that, certainly… as one might find humour in discovering oneself the subject of an elaborate practical joke. That, and the tears of a child, denied his heart’s greatest wish, and knowing it would never come again.

  Trace put a hand to his cheek, within the folds of his cowl, and smiled back, faintly. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “You had a good run. But this isn’t your time.”

  Aristan spoke, his voice weak and fading. “If I’d only known,” said the translator. “I would have followed you.” For a moment, his eyes implored her. Then Aristan, leader of the greatest rising faction of House Harmony, slid to the floor, black robes rapidly drenching red, and lay still.

  24

  Gesul was furious, and spent most of the rush up to orbit growling into coms, with a most un-Domesh lack of calm. Lisbeth sat two seats from him, pressed into her seat by the Gs but pleased to have a scan-display before her in this unfamiliar parren shuttle. She knew enough Porgesh now to jump between functions and read the words without needing her glasses’ visual translator, and now had access to the official security feed of the unfolding situation. It told them they were completely screwed.

  “It’s impossible,” she said to Semaya’s question. “The defence grids won’t even work, there’s too many enemy incoming. Our ships were too close to Elsium to be in proper defensive positions. The enemy can kill the planet if they choose — Phoenix has to leave. If they follow Phoenix, that’s the best way to save the planet.”

  To her astonishment, Semaya actually relayed her assessment to Gesul. It told her that Gesul was still unable to get a proper strategic feed from Tobenrah, and that Gesul’s own three captains were probably too busy to brief their leader. Score one for the human system, Lisbeth thought, where the leader was a starship captain who didn’t need these things explained. Of Gesul’s immediate advisors, Lisbeth was the only one with direct spacer military experience, a realisation that might have shocked her were she not so preoccupied. She was a qualified shuttle co-pilot, and had flown several combat missions in that capacity. Now, at Gesul’s side, she’d gone from being the least capable combatant to the most, as she could read Scan and had a good idea of what all the moving dots and the storm of interlocking, curving lines actually meant.

  It made Gesul even more furious, and Lisbeth half-listened to his commands while checking various parts of the scan-feed in more detail. “I do not care who has declared himself as Aristan’s successor!” he was fuming. “Our selfish squabbling has left the world of Elsium completely exposed! Our ships were in the wrong position, they were too close to the world, to participate in our politics, when they should have been out guarding these lanes, and now look! Look what our parren folly has brought upon us! We have no choice but to flee this world in order to save it! I commit myself to our leader, Tobenrah of House Harmony, and may the fates condemn all those who do not follow!”

  Exactly how far that rant was being broadcast, Lisbeth had no idea. If it was reaching the broader parren population, and not just the leaders and military commanders, the implications could be large indeed.

  She’d been watching the vision, heart-in-mouth, when Trace had killed Aristan, goading him into hasty action when his best chance to beat her was to remain calm and patient. Again, she’d half-expected parren to be angry with her for defying the spirit of the rules, but Gesul’s entourage had been nothing but impressed. Extraordinary scenes had followed, many of the watching parren on the wide, central floor clutching their heads and falling with cries of pain and distress. The shoveren psychologist-priests had converged on them with ceremonial chanting, but there were too many, and soon the floor had been a scene of turmoil, parren on both the Domesh side, and the many-housed civilians dropping to their knees, supported by concerned friends who called for an overworked priest.

  It was the phase, and Aristan’s fall, in that room at least, appeared to have brought about a great shift in the flux. Now Lisbeth heard small snippets of confusion on various ships, commanders not responding, or too busy with internal matters to communicate properly. She suspected it was spreading, and now there were ship crews with phasing and incapacitated members, just when they could least afford it. And suddenly it occurred to her why all the great battles in parren history that she’d been reading about seemed to end so quickly when a leader died… and why the targeting and killing of leaders was such a strategic imperative for parren commanders. Kill the leader and parren would lose the focal point of their psychological loyalties — for many of them, the very lynchpin that held their current psychological structure in place. The consequences in a battle would be bad enough in ground combat. In space combat it was an awful Achilles heel, where the sudden incapacity of ten percent of a spacer crew could leave a vessel partially crippled.

  An icon blinked on Lisbeth’s visor, and she blinked on it, knowing it was Erik. With Styx running so muc
h of Phoenix’s coms encryption in this alien system, she knew it was a waste of time to wonder how these com links established themselves with such precision. “Hello Lisbeth, we’re having a hell of a time getting coordinated replies from Tobenrah or any parren, what’s going on?”

  Even though it was only her brother talking, Lisbeth realised she was being asked by the Captain of one of humanity’s premier warships to give a strategic update. Well, Hausler always told her that proper coms discipline was to keep it short, precise and efficient — maximum content for minimum effort.

  “Hello Erik, Tobenrah has internal command issues related to the phase. He’s leaving, everyone’s leaving, he wants you to leave as well since these attackers are almost certainly after you. A few of his commanders wanted to throw Phoenix to the deepynines, but Major Thakur just killed the Domesh leader in a catharan, so she and Phoenix now have great status in House Harmony, and Tobenrah wouldn’t dare. My advice is forget the politics, just focus on the deepynines and get us out of here, Lisbeth out.” She added the end-transmission signal without thinking, forgetting the usual icon-blink to indicate end-of-message, and prevent repetitive coms clutter.

  “Hello Lisbeth, we’re doing that. I’m on PH-1, we are currently three minutes to Phoenix intercept, then we are full burn on departure. We will need full navcomp uplinks to all parren vessels — we’ve been trying to tell them about Styx’s fallback moon, but no response. Styx insists it’s defensible, and that’s where we’re headed.”

  “Erik, I’ve told them already about the moon, I understand that they’ve heard me and are considering their options. I am… just over one minute from shuttle intercept and full-burn with Gesul on the Stassis. Erik, I’m looking at the tactical feed now and it looks like the Elsium Administration vessels are going to manoeuvre and move to block the deepynine formation’s path, forcing them to take evasive action or suffer casualties.”

  “I understand, Lisbeth. By my calculation this will mean one hundred percent casualties for those Elsium ships, can you confirm that intention?”

  “Yes Erik, remember these are parren you’re dealing with. They think it’s the most effective way to slow them down, given what we’ve seen of their performance. Otherwise they’ll catch us and Tobenrah straight out of jump, or worse.”

  There was the faintest of pauses from the other end. “Yes, I think they’re probably correct. Tell them Phoenix salutes them, or whatever the appropriate translation, if you can.” Near scan now showed the Stassis looming up fast. The parren shuttle pilot cut thrust still twenty seconds short of intercept, and Lisbeth repressed some anxious frustration at that lost time. She’d gotten so used to flying with Hausler, Jersey, Tif and occasionally Lieutenant Dufresne, that she’d forgotten most pilots simply weren’t that good.

  “Erik, I’m about to make intercept, and I’m not great at talking under Gs, but I’ll try. Good luck to you and Phoenix.”

  “And to you Lisbeth. We’ll need to jump straight through, tell the parren that if they don’t get their navcomps synced immediately, we’ll never make it.”

  The shuttle hit Stassis’s grapples with a crash and lurch, then a long pause as pilot and bridge communicated to ensure the hold was firm. Again, it was a longer pause than Lisbeth was accustomed to… but the sledgehammer weight of Gs when the main engines kicked in was just the same.

  Lisbeth still hated heavy-G pushes. In truth, she’d discovered that no spacers liked it, but all military types made a virtue of enduring the greatest discomforts stoically, and for spacers it didn’t get more uncomfortable than this. Being a lot fitter now helped — a stronger diaphragm particularly helped to get air in the lungs that were suddenly squeezed beneath some enormous weight. Everything roared and shook, and she focused her blurred vision on the visor display, which calculated a solid nine minutes of this until Stassis was far enough up the Elsium gravity-slope to enable jump engines.

  From there, the ride would get faster, but no easier. The deepynine ships could not go much faster whatever their technological advantages, having the same difficulties cycling the jump engines to gain V while heading into deeper gravity. They’d jumped in at a far enough distance to give them a good look at the planet’s defences, and to line up their approach accordingly. Even now, several of the outer fire-stations that surrounded most Spiral worlds had disappeared, vaporised by high-V incoming ordnance, and there was nothing between the attackers and the world of Elsium, and its half-a-billion souls. Lisbeth forced herself to stare at that image, as the forces flattened her immovably into her chair, and thought that surely, surely, this deepynine/sard and possibly alo alliance wouldn’t kill a planet. But then, they hadn’t any good reason to kill Mylor Station either. Humanity knew little about the alo, despite their alliance in the Triumvirate War, but what they did know suggested cold, grim calculation, little concern for human considerations of morality, and a perverse, often insulting sense of humour. If they’d made such great friends with the deepynines, and now teamed up with the sard, who knew what they were capable of?

  Stassis was two minutes short of first jump pulse when Erik’s icon blinked again. “Phoenix bridge tells me full uplinks to Tobenrah’s ships have been established,” came the synthesised version of his voice in her ear — uplink formulated conversation, much easier than talking under high Gs. “Well done Lis.”

  “I didn’t do it,” she managed to wheeze against the pressure on her chest, being far less accomplished at internal formulation. “But thanks.”

  The deepynines were diverting away from Elsium itself now, following Phoenix and her parren escort. The major stations in orbit should have taken hits by now, if ordnance had been fired at them, but remained intact. Presumably that meant the planet was safe as well. But now, it occurred to Lisbeth properly for the first time as she looked at the scan, all eleven of them were now chasing her.

  The twelve Elsium Administration ships were thrusting hard from the planet’s gravity onto a direct intercept course, just before Stassis’s first jump pulse hit. Everything was still thirty minutes behind them, but the deepynines, seeing it coming, and knowing there would be a lot of ordnance coming ahead of it, began using their last remaining bit of jump-engine-capable approach to dump V. Even for advanced deepynine ships, running into that much ordnance, at that high V, would make defensive targeting and evasion unlikely, and result in a lot of casualties. At lower V, deepynine advantages became overwhelming. But in forcing them to dump, the Elsium ships would slow the entire assault right down, then force the deepynines to transition through the deep gravity-well where they could not use jump engines at all, all at a lower V. That move should then allow Tobenrah’s forces to escape, actually putting distance on their pursuers. But the cost was going to be awful.

  Erik’s head swam in that peculiar way it did post-jump — not nausea like the green rookies got, but a strange sense of dislocation, both like and unlike awakening from a deep sleep. He fought to refocus his senses, aware of voices on the bridge feed, second-shift talking and sorting their problems. But he didn’t have his big chair displays and visor, nor the holographic 3D visualisation in between, and not being in the chair himself, he just couldn’t find the urgency.

  Worse, he was realising he didn’t have his drink bottles, and PH-1’s observer chair wasn’t equipped with electrolytes and sugars to replenish in one big hit what jump took out of the bloodstream. Worse again, fuzzy-headedly, he couldn’t think of the feeding procedure for going through jump in a shuttle — let alone a two-jump as this was supposed to be.

  “Yo, Captain,” said Hausler from up front, and tossed a bottle back at him. Erik caught it gratefully, and took a long gulp — it was sharp and awful, but the shock of alertness to the brain was enough to make it good. And Hausler added, “Hello Major Thakur, how you guys doing back there?”

  “We are good,” said Trace.

  “Major,” said Erik, “Lisbeth told me before jump that you’d just acquired some serious rank in House Harmony by ki
lling Aristan. You might want to think on what that means, before you see any more action with these guys.”

  “It probably means I’m supposed to depose you as leader and assume command myself,” said Trace, sounding as though her mouth was full of food, probably an energy bar. “I’ve never been more pleased to not be parren.”

  On coms, Lieutenant Lassa was waiting for some of their parren friends to arrive. Phoenix was fast, and predictably, they’d beaten everyone here. ‘Here’, Erik saw, was four-point-two AU out from a G-class star, a few sunbaked, close-in planets and some cold and uninteresting outer gas giants… and very little in the way of settlements or coms traffic. Lusakia System, Navigation informed him with certainty, despite no human ship ever having been here before.

  “Captain,” said Hausler. “You see what happened to the Elsium ships before jump?”

  “Three left that I saw,” said Erik. A lurch into hyperspace, as Draper cycled the jump engines to dump V… then a swing sideways to line up the course correction. But Draper paused before firing the engines, waiting for the parren to arrive. No doubt he’d dialled back their jump a little, Phoenix having the capability to do that so as not to leave less powerful ships behind by too great a margin. Sometimes it was better to be slower, and arrive in force, rather than coming in fast and alone. “But I think they hit at least one, hopefully more. We’re going to have to nail this course correction — even with that delay, the deepynines will be right on our ass.”

  With a flash of energy, a ship arrived… then another, right alongside. Phoenix linked coms with them immediately, displaying the required course-change ahead, then hit thrust with every bit as much power as they’d used escaping from Elsium’s gravity. Erik barely got the bottle into a seat stowage before it hit — there was absolutely no chance of him getting up to the bridge now, Phoenix would be manoeuvring hard enough to make free movement lethal for any crew stupid enough to try it. But Erik was not especially worried — Draper got better every time he flew the ship, and with that in mind, replacing him would have been counter-productive even were it possible. Word was that Draper and Lieutenant Dufresne were even kind of friendly now, which they hadn’t been a few months before. Being forced to work together in close proximity, in the sure knowledge that everyone died if you stuffed up, had a way of making the most unlikely friendships. Erik thought of Trace, and knew that she could say the same.