by Geoff North
“Chief?” Atlas had climbed out of the turret onto the left wing of their ship. “What’s happened? What does it all mean?”
Foma didn’t have any answers for him. She looked out past the disorder of the landing troops running about their powerless vessels. The building General Emin and his troops had stormed was gone, swallowed up completely beneath the waving grass and wild flowers.
“The Pegans,” she finally replied. “The Pegans did this… they must have.”
White light suddenly consumed the green grass. It blasted the blue from the sky. Foma tried shielding her eyes from the brightness with one arm, but it got through anyway. She bent over and buried her face into her lap.
“Sol preserve us,” Atlas said moments later. “They’ve done it, Chief… They’ve actually gone ahead and done it.”
Foma looked up and stared out over the horizon towards the distant hills and forests. Day had turned into grisly orange night. A towering inferno of flame was rising into the sky, pushing waves of smoke up above it into the planet’s stratosphere.
The milun was still talking. “There’s a whole damn city over those hills.”
“There was,” Foma said grimly. She could hear a rumble approaching from the conflagration. A numbing sense of horror rushed through her when she realized what it was. “Everyone back inside their fighters! Drop your canopies manually and take cover!”
She had barely managed to secure the hatch of her own canopy when the shockwave hit.
Chapter 51
“We have confirmation, Admiral,” Major Weston announced from the bridge weapons section. “The high-altitude EMP probes triggered… nuclear detonation occurred twelve and a half kilometers above the planet’s surface, approximately four-hundred kilometers west of the target city’s center.”
“That city, is there anything left?”
“The bomb was carrying a yield of seven hundred and fifty megatons. It was by no means our largest, but I’m sure it did the job. The majority of buildings might still be standing, but there are now ten million or so less Pegans we’ll have to worry about.”
“Did the EMP disable our fighters already on the planet’s surface?”
“It would’ve knocked out anything within a six hundred K radius of the city.” Weston turned and faced the Admiral. “You know that. The fighter back-up computers will activate automatically in thirty minutes—if they survived the blast.”
It was a calculated risk Tor Emin hadn’t been let in on—a gamble no one in the rescue force was aware of. The decision to jump Ambition into orbit around Pega minutes after the last grouping of fighters had departed couldn’t be shared with anyone Lennix didn’t completely trust. The Pegans had engaged their fighters—they hadn’t prepared for a single mass assault from Ambition with so many of its own people headed for the planet’s surface in an apparent rescue attempt. The aliens didn’t see the main attack coming until it was too late.
“I want to be informed the instant our people down there are able to communicate with us again—do I make myself clear?” He spun his command chair around. “Did you hear me, Cor?”
Argus Cor sat at the communication station—her chair turned towards the main viewer as everyone else’s was—staring at the immense orange blister erupting up from the planet’s surface on screen. There were only two other bridge officers there with her now that had served under Captain Sulafat. The rest of them were men and women from Ambition’s past—her original command crew. “I… I don’t think this is right, sir,” she finally answered. “I’ll continue monitoring all frequencies, but I really must protest…”
The Admiral looked at Olivia Bertrand standing nearby. The woman wrapped an arm around Argus’s shoulders and helped her to stand. “It’s alright, I have some experience with communications. Perhaps it would be best if you went to your quarters.”
Lennix pointed to Kalin Aurig at helm-nav and section head Homa Sis at the security console. Two more of the Admiral’s original officers replaced the men at their stations. He could no longer rely on any of Sulafat’s people to complete this initial round of planetary strikes. The Admiral rubbed his chin thoughtfully as Kalin and Homa were led off the bridge with Argus. “Patch me through to the fighter garage, Olivia.”
“A line’s open, Admiral.”
“Unit Three, report.” He waited a few seconds. “Three—has Captain Sulafat’s execution been carried out?”
“Nothing wrong with the line,” Olivia said. “If anyone’s down there, they aren’t answer—”
“The garage bay door is opening,” Major Weston interrupted. “A fighter is attempting to launch.”
Lennix pounded a fist into the chair console. “Security! Lock this ship down—every deck, lift, tube, and goddamned door.” He glowered at Weston. “Bad enough our executive shuttle was stolen beneath our noses, I sure as hell won’t allow a traitorous Captain to escape with a fighter as well. As soon as that ship’s within range of the exterior cannons, blast him out of the stars.”
Chapter 52
“Incoming!” Vin yelled.
Sulafat banked Nail hard to starboard. The laser blast fired from the cannon streaked over his canopy cover in a flash of angry red. “Don’t sound so surprised.” He straightened the fighter out less than ten meters above Ambition’s hull. “We knew they’d try and cut us down. Now the trick will be to pick up as much speed as we can while remaining as close to the ship as possible, and set a course for Pega. By the time they get the cannons trained on us again, we should be a pretty small target.”
“Should be?”
Sulafat engaged the fold drive as Nail skimmed over the last kilometer of Ambition. “I tried this a few times in simulation when I was a lot younger. Enemy ships always blew me to bits about a hundred K out.”
Vin tightened her grip on the gun controls as she felt her body being forced back. The blue and green globe of Pega expanded before her eyes like a swelling balloon. Nail lurched to the left, and a second red beam scorched through the blackness of space on her right. The fighter dipped down, and then up. The Captain was performing a series of evasive maneuvers. Another beam flashed by, no where near as close as the first two. Ambition fired one final time, missing its target by kilometers instead of meters.
“We’re clear!” Sulafat announced.
“Now you sound surprised, sir.”
“I may be old enough to be your grandfather, young lady, but I’ve spent my entire life flying through space, not fighting in it. This is new to all of us.”
“Then as one new warrior to another,” Nail had begun plunging into the planet’s upper atmosphere, “I respectfully request you disengage the fold drive before we become a permanent fixture on Pega’s surface.”
Nail dropped out of fold; the fighter’s engines whined as Sulafat attempted to further slow their rate of descent. Cold air blasted around Vin’s legs as cabin compensators adjusted for the increase in temperature caused from the atmospheric friction. The ship punched its way through a heavy bank of brown clouds and leveled off less than five hundred meters from the surface.
“There,” Sulafat said. “Not too bad for an old-timer, wouldn’t you say, Vin?”
She didn’t respond right away. A city—or what had recently been a city—was spread out before them in a blanket of fire, and Nail was headed straight into it. A towering inferno of steel girders a kilometer high and half as wide was directly in front of them. Parts of its glass exterior were still burning intensely, melting down the red-hot steel skeleton frame.
“Pull up!” Vin screamed, knowing full well there wouldn’t be time. Nail was going to drive right into the center of it—they would die literally living up to the fighter ship’s name.
The building’s outer support girders suddenly buckled about a quarter way up. It began collapsing down, level after level, unable to withstand the million or so tons of melted glass oozing down its exterior. Nail was enveloped in a thick funnel of black smoke, and then they were clear.
> Sulafat continued taking them up to a safer altitude, and began a slow sweep of the destroyed city’s perimeter. He checked the canopy display and confirmed the rescue fleet’s landing coordinates.
“Captain,” Vin spoke quietly. “Did we do this?”
“Not us… Lennix and those others are responsible.” He didn’t say another word as Nail drifted through the smoke and ash, picking up speed towards the blackened hills and still burning forests beyond.
Chapter 53
The building had stopped moving ten minutes earlier, but Tor and his men remained together, unmoving, hunkered down in darkness. He had led them into a trap, but he wouldn’t jeopardize one more life by foolishly setting out blind into complete blackness. They still couldn’t raise the other three groups that had entered the building with them over their headsets, and the powered night vision goggles each of their helmets were equipped with had gone dead.
Tor’s soldiers were getting more than a little restless. They wanted to get moving. One of the more impatient ones—a milun named Etenar Danus—worked his way through the squatting bodies and tapped the butt end of his rifle against the floor to get the General’s attention. “Are we just going to sit here forever?” He whispered when their shoulders were touching. “I say we keep firing our weapons—light a path all the way out.”
“Out to where?” Tor snapped. “The entire building has descended into the ground. We’re not moving another inch until we have some idea where it is we’re going.” He glanced to his side and saw the dark outline of Etenar’s helmet. The milun was shaking his head. “Do you have a problem with—”
“Sir?” Etenar asked when the General didn’t finish. “Are you alright?”
“I can see you, Danus.” Tor looked to his right. Wez Canis’s bulky form was squatting down next to him. “I can see you too, Boss.”
Wez nodded. “Yeah, the light’s coming back slowly, but something’s wrong.”
Tor stood and aimed his rifle down the corridor to his left. It was the direction they’d last been heading when the lights went out. But there was no corridor. There were no more walls at all, anywhere around them. The light grew stronger, but none of them could see its source. Everything around and above them was shrouded in grey. The floor beneath their feet was the only thing of substance any of them could see besides each other; it stretched off in all directions like an endless, tranquil sea.
“Over there!” Etenar shouted. He raised his rifle and started firing into a blob of moving black figures.
Wez began shooting in the opposite direction. “No! They’re coming from the right!”
Tor felt a hot sting rip through the top of his shoulder. It had come from directly ahead. A milun screamed behind him. Tor spun around and watched as one of his soldiers collapsed to the floor. The top half of his head was missing.
Etenar slammed into Tor a second later and both men fell. The General took hold of his shoulders and shook him. “They’re our people! We’re firing on our own!” The soldier didn’t respond. Tor looked down and saw the majority of the young milun’s intestines spilled out across his legs. He pushed the corpse away and called to the boss. “Cease fire, Wez! Everyone stand down!”
Someone from one of the other groupings shouted back at them. “General Emin—is that you?”
“Yes, goddamn it, it’s me!” He yelled at the top of his lungs. “All of you quit shooting!” A few more shots fired, but they quickly petered out as the four groups came together somewhere in the center of the vast grey area. They looked around and counted the dead. “Nine of us,” Tor muttered. “We killed nine of our own people.”
“The Pegans made us do it,” a woman said. She threw her gun to the floor in disgust. “They separated us, got us all twisted around.”
“Why worry about the Pegans?” Another soldier added, throwing his rifle down as well. “We’re a bigger threat to ourselves.”
Tor grabbed at the edges of the soldier’s chest armor and pulled him in. “Pick up your weapon, Andro, and shut your mouth.”
“Or what? You’ll break my nose and knock out my teeth? This isn’t the Black Hole, Emin. You can’t punch your way out of this one.”
Tor pushed him away. “Pick up your weapon.” He glanced at the woman. “You too, Cyon. That’s an order.”
Milun Mosa Cyon sneered at him. “Yours or Admiral Lennix’s?” Cyon removed her bloody combat helmet next and tossed it at the general’s boots. “I’m not taking orders from either one of you anymore.”
Tor removed his side cannon from its holster and pointed it at her.
“Don’t do it,” Wez warned.
“Go ahead,” Cyon said defiantly. She stepped towards Tor until the barrel end of his side cannon clunked into her chest. “The only person I’ll take orders from now is Captain Sulafat, and he isn’t around to command any of us… You’ve seen to that, haven’t you, General?”
He was going to do it, Wez realized. The squadron boss aimed his rifle at the side of Tor’s face. “I can’t let you do this. Please, General… lower the gun.”
Tor went to squeeze the trigger but couldn’t get his finger to respond. His entire hand had grown numb and heavy. He was having difficulty concentrating. What’s wrong… with me? His head started to swim. The woman in front of him started swaying and forth. He staggered back into one of the other soldiers without realizing he’d done it.
Cyon sank to her knees, and collapsed to the floor on her side. Wez teetered forward and crashed down next to her.
Tor tried standing. When did I fall? Why is everybody lying down? The grey light turned bright white. The air… the air smells wrong. Big bobbing heads on spindly necks surrounded him. Long fingers took hold of his arms and pinned him down onto his stomach. There were dozens of them, hundreds.
Something sharp was pressed into his neck. The darkness returned.
Chapter 54
“Look for it again.”
“I’ve looked a thousand times,” Hail complained. “There is no stupid exit from this tunnel into your spaceport. According to the map we’ve already overshot it by at least three K.”
Kella cursed. “Then we’re on the wrong level. The damn thing’s probably above us or below us somewhere.”
“That’s the problem with alien maps, they usually aren’t labeled in English.”
She ignored his sarcasm. “Then we’ll have to turn back.”
“It’s a big tunnel, but I don’t think there’s enough room to turn the vehicle around.”
Kella steered to the left and decelerated as the tunnel took a sharp curve. She stopped altogether when they’d straightened back out. She pulled the main gearshift back and they sat there, idling in neutral.
Hail was still looking at the crumpled map, trying to figure out where they needed to be. “I said there wasn’t enough room to turn around. You’re not considering backing us up, are you?”
“We might not have a choice.” She pointed through the front window.
At least a dozen men were waiting a hundred meters ahead, spread across the tunnel, armed with heavy rifles. “It could just be a routine check point,” Hail offered hopefully. “Show them your red helmet and maybe they’ll let us through.”
“They’re pointing those weapons right at us—nothing routine about that. It looks like our luck might’ve finally run out.”
“Then back us up out of here, before they open fire.”
She put the excavation vehicle into gear. They started moving forward instead of reversing.
“Kella… you’re going the wrong way.”
She pulled down hard on the shifter and they lurched ahead, picking up more speed.
Hail saw the flash of multiple guns firing simultaneously as he ducked down. Definitely not a check point, he affirmed to himself. The blasts thumped into the front of the vehicle, and ricocheted off the front window. “This vehicle was built to withstand falling rock and traveling up on the moon’s surface,” Kella yelled. “They’ll need to hit us
with something a lot heavier to do any real damage.” She pulled herself forward until she was practically standing over the steering wheel, and jammed her boot down onto the pedal. “And I’m not going to give them time to switch to bigger weapons.”
The men in front of them fired sporadically for a few more seconds. When the vehicle was less than five meters away and still accelerating, they began tossing their guns down and jumping to both sides of the tunnel walls. Kella couldn’t be certain they’d all made it to safety as the giant truck rolled through their broken line, and she didn’t much care.
Hail straightened himself up to peek through the front window. “Door ahead, Kella.”
“I see it.” The massive door was octagon-shaped, like the two they’d entered through from the surface on foot. Kella kept her boot down on the acceleration pedal.
He grabbed her arm. “Plowing through a bunch of armed guards is one thing, Kella—trying to ram your way through a foot of solid steel is another. We won’t make it.”
“It’s going to open.” Eight green lights had begun to flash around the door’s outer edge as the excavation vehicle bore towards it. “Trust me.”
Hail looked about desperately for some kind of safety restraints—for all the good it would do him. There weren’t any. He leaned back and braced his feet up against the console beneath the window. “Trust you… yeah, sure. I trust you.”
The big door started swinging in. Kella eased up on the pedal and lowered gears. The vehicle rolled through, and she brought it to a stop. The door clunked shut behind them. Another one was ahead, fifty meters away. “There, we made it.”
“Made it?” Hail repeated incredulously. “We’re almost right back where we started, inside a pressurization bay with Oread’s outer surface on the other side!”