Sons of the Starfarers: Omnibus I-III

by Joe Vasicek

  “Yeah,” said Aaron. “I guess.” He rubbed his eyes.

  “Well, on with training. Let’s go—put ‘em up!”

  He did as she said and wordlessly went on with the exercise. The pain certainly weighed on him, but his thoughts weighed even more. He knew he should be excited, but something bothered him, and he wasn’t even sure what it was. Maybe the lack of training? He still hadn’t flown through a simulated combat run without dying. And the language issues—was he really ready for this?

  No one is, Mara’s words came to his mind. Somehow, they gave him little comfort.

  First Strike

  This is not a simulation, Aaron told himself as he fastened himself into the cockpit of the Paladin-4. All around him were tiny details that emphasized that fact: the canned, coppery taste of the air; the worn, faded fabric of the pilot’s seat; a distinctive scratch that ran down the auxiliary control panel overhead. Even the way the forward window was clouded around the edges. This was an old industrial sublighter, repurposed at the end of its life for war. How much longer that life would be was now in Aaron’s sweaty hands—not just the ship’s life, but everyone’s in it.

  The soldiers assembled wordlessly in the cabin, the clicking and tightening of their seat restraints cutting through the tension-filled air. The floor beneath their feet shifted—the Aegis making combat maneuvers, no doubt. Barely five minutes had passed since they’d made their final jump, and all that any of them had seen of the battle so far was the red flashing lights in the corridor on the way to the drop-ships. While in port, no one ever ran in any part of the ship, but everyone they’d passed on the way had been running.

  Aaron took a deep breath and started powering up the Paladin-4’s systems. He flicked a series of switches on the main control panel, and the indicators flashed to life. A faint, high-pitched whine came from the nav-computer, followed by a much lower hum through the floors and bulkheads as the sublight engine systems came online. The main display flashed white, briefly filling the dimly lit cabin with glowing light before switching to customary yellow-on-black. Out the forward window, a distant soundless explosion caught Aaron’s eye. The floor shifted again, and the stars began to spin.

  His heart pounding, he reached up to the radio intercom and switched it on. The tinny voices of the other starship pilots filled the tiny cockpit, making him feel as if the battle was just on the other side of the hull. He switched channels to the one designated for the drop-ships, and the din became more manageable. Through the static, he made out Commander Noah’s heavily accented voice.

  “Paladin wing, this is Commander Noah. All ships report.”

  The other drop-ship pilots went right down the line reporting their status and readiness. When it came to Aaron, he switched on the transmitter so quickly it nearly cut Paladin-3 off.

  “Paladin-4, ready for fly,” he said. The last of the system diagnostic checks flashed green on the main screen, and while the letters were a little fuzzy, he didn’t need to read them to make them out.

  “Copy, Paladin wing,” said Commander Noah as the last drop-ship reported in. “We are standing by for launch orders. Prepare to undock on my mark.”

  The radio went silent, and the men in the cabin were still. Aaron’s thumping heart seemed ready to leap out of his chest and into his bone-dry throat. The edges of his vision blurred, and the labels of the various switches and indicator lights began to swim. For a few brief moments, it was impossible for him to read any of them, but he closed his eyes and took a deep breath, willing the anxiety to pass.

  This is your moment, he told himself. Your whole life has been leading up to this. This is your chance to make a name for yourself.

  An image of the henna girl came to his mind, her black hair flowing like water over her intricately tattooed shoulders and back. Come for me, she seemed to call. A wave of peace swept over him, calming his heart and clearing his mind.

  “All ships, launch! Repeat, all ships launch!”

  He opened his eyes and threw the switch toggling the docking clamps. They opened with a muffled clang that reverberated through the bulkheads. His stomach fell a little as the Paladin-4 dropped out from beneath its mothership, and without hesitating, he engaged the engines. The targeting matrix blinked onto the main display, while outside the forward window, the stars began to pitch and sway.

  “Uploading target to computers,” the flight commander’s voice crackled over the intercom. “Imperial Battlecruiser Star Fury II, eleven-point-six klicks, bearing seventy-four degrees.” He then said something about splitting forces between the command sections and engineering. Aaron scanned the autotranslator readout from the transmission and gathered he was to go with Paladin-2 and 3 and attack the command sections in the mid-upper decks. Happy hunting, the transmission ended.

  The scanners showed all eight Paladin ships in blue, with the friendly forces of the Flotilla in green and the Imperial warships in red. The Aegis was running away from the Star Fury II, no doubt trying to make it to a safe distance while her soldiers boarded and captured the ship. The explosions and tracer fire outside the forward window confirmed as much.

  Aaron nosed the Paladin-4 into position and throttled the engines to full burn. A heady roar sounded through the hull, and the force of the acceleration pushed him against his chair so hard that he felt as if he were lying on his back, looking up. On the scanners, the Paladin-4 took off ahead of the rest of the wing, while out the forward window, the Star Fury II loomed like a long symmetrical asteroid, taking up a good portion of the view.

  The autolasers! Aaron thought, the adrenaline pulsing throughout his body. He reached up and switched them on. Tracers arced from the Star Fury II toward a host of unseen targets just outside of view, represented on the scanners as fast-moving green points. None of the shots targeted any of the drop-ships, though, which was gratifying to see.

  “Paladin-4, you’re coming in too hot,” said the flight commander. “Reduce speed.” There was more, but between the static, the rush of combat, and the effort needed to translate, Aaron didn’t catch it all.

  “Got this, Commander,” Aaron answered. He cut the engines and threw the ship into a nose-down spin. In the cabin, one of the soldiers started screaming—Talya, by the sound of it. He kept the spin as smooth as possible and eased into another engine burn just before the maneuver was complete. The net effect was a feeling that something had caught them from a headfirst fall, rather than the gut-wrenching jerkiness that usually came from such maneuvers.

  An alarm sounded on the auxiliary panel above him, and the whir-whir of the autolasers mingled with the rumbling of the engines. Projectile fire, coming from the Star Fury II—they’d finally noticed the drop-ships. Aaron gripped his flight stick and weaved back and forth as the drop-ship decelerated, avoiding the worst of the volleys. Their ETA was less than fifteen seconds now, so there wasn’t much the Imperials could do to stop them.

  He toggled the main screen to overlay a visual on top of the target. The exterior video feed pitched wildly before fixing on a room with a wide, semi-circular window that bulged outward like a fishbowl. That must be the bridge. They were going too fast to stop there, but Aaron banked hard to the right and increased the throttle to eighty percent capacity, bringing them in just a couple hundred meters forward of the bridge. He dropped a countermeasure flare for good measure—let the commanders eat that—and set the autolasers to take out point defenses on the hull of the enemy ship.

  Once they’d slowed down, he deployed the mining clamps and fired up the docking thrusters to bring them in. They connected to the hull with a loud, reverberating thud, and the grinding sound of the metal clamps confirmed that they were locked into position. In the cabin, one of the soldiers started retching.

  “Hey—wasn’t that bad!” Aaron shouted over his shoulder. Several of the others laughed good-naturedly, while outside, another drop-ship came in just a short distance ahead of them.

  The modified mining gear started up with a low rumbl
e that soon transformed to a high-pitched grinding sound as they bit into the hull. The sound of the soldiers loading their rifles and retracting their seats back into the ceiling mingled with the ear-splitting grind, while the smell of sweat and vomit, like a rarified cocktail, hit Aaron’s nose. On the scanners, the red and green points continued to weave in and out of each other, but the alarms had gone silent, and the whir of the autolasers was sporadic at best.

  “Uh, Paladin-1, this is Paladin-4,” Aaron transmitted over the intercom. “What do now?”

  “Stay put and let the soldiers do their work, Paladin-4. Good flying. Hold position until Star Fury II is captured.”

  It was over, then. Barely three minutes into the battle, and for Aaron, it was all but up. The only thing left now was to wait for the soldiers to either capture the Imperial battle cruiser or retreat to the drop-ship for evac. There was nothing left for him to do except wait.

  The Aegis had withdrawn out of range of the Star Fury II’s plasma cannons and was engaging a cluster of smaller Imperial warships. With the Flotilla concentrated in the local sector and the Imperial forces spread out across the system, there was far more green and blue on the scanners than red. As Aaron watched, one more red point by the Aegis blinked out, followed by another.

  “Remember your training,” Lieutenant Castor yelled over the grind of the mining gear. “Assaults first, scouts and heavies behind. Once in, supports stay behind to keep a path open to ship, the rest push forward to bridge. Understand?”

  The resounding “yes” made Aaron more than a little jealous. For the rest of the platoon, the battle was just beginning, the thrill still fresh. He wished that he could join them.

  Well, why couldn’t he? Just because he was the pilot didn’t mean that he had to stay behind with the ship the whole time. Of course, if his brother were around, he’d probably say something about how it was his duty to hold the rear, to be ready in case of a retreat—but in all likelihood, five or ten minutes was all it would take to know if they’d need evac. The rest was pure action, and Aaron wasn’t about to miss that for anything.

  He unbuckled his seat restraints just as the mining gear burst through the hull and began to shut down. He stood up—the battlecruiser’s artificial gravity field extended just far enough to keep their feet on the floor—and turned around just in time to watch the soldiers fire a series of flash grenades into the tube leading down through the mining equipment. His ears popped slightly as the air pressure in the Paladin-4 equalized with the pressure on the Star Fire II, and with a shout, the first of the soldiers dove through.

  “Move, move, move!” the squad sergeants shouted. Gunfire sounded through the hole, and the acrid smell of smoke wafted up into the cabin. That wasn’t enough to stop the platoon, though. As if with one mind, everyone pressed for the tube, jumping through so fast they were practically riding on each other’s shoulders.

  Aaron’s eyes caught Mara’s, and for a split second, he saw something primal in them that made her look almost inhuman. Before he could react, though, she was in the tube, followed closely by Hektor. Whether she’d seen him or not, there was something in her face that had left him deeply disturbed.

  The last of the soldiers jumped through and the tube doors hissed shut, cutting off the shouting and gunfire. Aaron found himself alone in a strangely silent and empty cabin. The autolasers whirred as they fired at some passing projectile, but only once. It was as if the battle had passed him by.

  Not for long, he told himself. He pulled down the gun rack and started browsing through the spare rifles.

  * * * * *

  Aaron didn’t know what he expected to see on the Imperial battle cruiser. Certainly he didn’t expect it to be pretty. Some smoke, some scorch marks, a few fallen bodies. Maybe a little blood. Still, nothing could quite prepare him for what he found on the other side.

  After waiting by the open tube to make sure there wasn’t any fighting going on below, he climbed into the shaft and pulled himself down. He landed on something soft and lumpy, losing his balance and falling to the floor. The soft, lumpy thing was a body—three, actually. They were sprawled face down, their armor scorched with plasma fire and their skin burned nearly black.

  He leaped to his feet and stood with his back to the wall, rifle at the ready. The whole corridor was littered with bodies, some scorched, others lying in pools of blood. Ugly, black streaks seared the walls, with pock-marks in the ceramic tiling where bullet fire had strafed them. In one part, a partition had been blown out almost completely, rubble strewn in all directions with the metal structural strut broken and twisted by the battle. Aaron coughed—the smoke was so thick, he had to cover his mouth just to breathe. It stung his eyes and made him stagger. Even with all the smoke, though, the scent of charred flesh was unmistakable. He gagged and nearly threw up.

  A movement to his left caught his eye. It was Phoebe, tending to the wounded with a gas mask over her face. It was only after seeing her that Aaron realized not everyone was dead. A soldier sat with his back against the wall, hand clutching his bloodstained chest. His unfocused eyes stared out into the void. Aaron didn’t recognize him, but from his mismatched armor he was definitely a member of the platoon.

  Aaron stumbled down the hallway, more to escape the smoke than anything. He followed the trail of bullet holes and scorch marks until the air was a bit clearer and the bodies quite a bit sparser. Not all of them were Outworlders, he was gratified to see. Several of them wore the light gray fatigues and body armor of Imperial shock troops, and the further he got from the ship, the more of them he saw. Their armor was a lot thicker, and the dark black visors on their helmets almost completely covered their faces. Still, from the scorch marks across their breastplates and the flechette shrapnel embedded in the weaker material of the joints, they’d taken a fair amount of damage from the platoon’s fire. Thank goodness the battle hadn’t been all one-sided.

  “Hey,” a female voice called out to him. It was Talya, patrolling the battle-strewn corridor. Her gas mask was dangling from one chin strap, and she opened her visor, revealing her dark-skinned face.

  Aaron opened his mouth, but all his words became garbled, so that he couldn’t say anything at all. The edges of his vision blurred, and a headache began to throb across his skull. Talya spoke to him, but she might as well have spoken in gibberish for all he could understand. He lifted a hand to his head and closed his eyes, trying desperately to clear his mind.

  “—you all right?” she asked, putting an arm on his shoulder. The headache suddenly dissipated, leaving him dizzy and disoriented.

  “I-I think,” he said. “Don’t know what happened. Want to know where is everyone.”

  “Up a little further, maybe a hundred meters. Last I heard, they’d met up with Second Platoon and were about to storm the bridge. They may have spread out to the lower decks by now, though. I don’t know.”

  “Right.” He turned back to the destruction and carnage behind him and shuddered. “Was it bad?”

  Talya’s face was grim. “Yeah. They knew we were coming and were waiting for us to break through. We had to storm them at point blank range, but we did it.”

  She tapped her earpiece and frowned. Further down in the corridor, Aaron heard the sound of gunfire. It seemed to be getting closer.

  “I have to go,” she said. “If you’re looking for the others, your best bet is the bridge. Lieutenant Castor says we’ve taken it.”

  “We have?”

  “Yeah. But what are you doing here? Why aren’t you back at the ship?”

  He ignored her and took off running. The corridors met at a juncture up ahead—he assumed that was where he’d find the bridge. The plasma streaks and bullet holes were sparser here, but there was still just enough of them to confirm that the other soldiers had been this way. He switched off his rifle’s safety and clutched it tight against his chest, adrenaline surging now that he was back on the move.

  The juncture was thick with smoke and rubble. Seve
ral partitions had been blown explosively apart, and bodies—most of them Imperial soldiers—littered the blackened floor. In places, the superheated plasma had pooled and was still evaporating. That meant that the fighting had been recent, perhaps only a minute or two ago. Aaron covered his mouth and ducked his head.

  He came to the bridge just as the ventilators kicked in and began to suck out the bad air with a roar. Two soldiers guarded the doorway, which had been blown almost completely apart—Aaron recognized them as Lino and Tzaf. Lino’s knife was tucked into his belt, the blade dark with blood.

  “Hey,” said Tzaf, stopping Aaron with his outstretched cybernetic hand. “Where are you going?”

  “Is battle over?” Aaron asked.

  “Almost,” said Lino. “We have control of the bridge and have killed the ship’s commander. Commander Noah is taking her out of the battle now.” He said something about setting up perimeters and meeting heavy resistance on the five lower decks, but Aaron didn’t catch it all.

  “Okay,” he said. “Where are others? Where is battle?”

  Tzaf waved his arm. “Here, there—everywhere is battle. Wait for long enough, and fighting will come to you.”

  “That not what I want. Where should I go?”

  “Why aren’t you at the ship?” Lino asked. “Shouldn’t you stay there until the fighting is over?”

  “How many are dead?” Aaron asked, ignoring his question. Both men’s faces turned grim.

  “Last I heard, twelve,” Tzaf answered. “Nestor was first. Took three bursts to the chest and went down. I took some, too, but plasma eats flesh better than metal.” He held up his prosthetic metal arm to show where the plasma fire had eaten almost completely through the casing. The sleeve was charred black and burned almost completely off.

  “It was tough,” Lino admitted. “Lost a lot of good men and women back there.”

  “Mara,” Aaron asked, his heart skipping a beat. “Is she alive?”