by Webb, Nick
“Aye aye, sir.” Min opened the line to the rest of the fleet. “Cairo, Washington, Stockholm, Samson, Carolina, this is the Intrepid. Request you form a blockade behind us. We are going to meet the Telestine fleet. Juno, you will fly with us.”
“Launch fighters,” Delaney ordered crisply.
“Fighter bays, launch.” Min’s eyes were focused on his screens. He pressed the earpiece and looked up to meet Delaney’s eyes with a brief nod. “Fighters launching, sir. Should I start the countdown to acceleration?”
“Yes, please.”
“All hands brace. Gunnery load. We will be firing from acceleration.” Min brought a countdown up on the main screen and turned to secure a nod from the helmsman before looking back to Delaney. “Fifteen seconds, sir.”
“Excellent.” Excellent? What was he, a politician? “Thank you, Lieutenant Min.”
Acceleration sucked them down as the too-old Telestine gravity compensators struggled to adjust. Delaney watched the papers on the command desk lift slightly, and then slide sideways off the edge as the Intrepid accelerated toward the incoming ships.
They appeared out of the darkness, Telestine ships shaped like teardrops, sleek and deadly. Fighters billowed around them in a vicious cloud, still invisible to the naked eye, but an angry swirl on the holograph. How many dozens of them, he did not want to know, not when he could picture the sad fighter bays of the Intrepid, each old fighter lovingly maintained and only just space-worthy. Of course, the more enemy fighters there were, the more they could take down. Humanity had spent the last decades watching their sons and daughters die in the black. As far as Jack Delaney was concerned, the Telestines could step up now and learn what that was like.
“Sir?” Ensign Kapoor, one of the communications officers, held up a hand to get Delaney’s attention. “We’re receiving a transmission from the Telestine fleet.”
“Ignore it,” Delaney ordered. Like hell he was going to let his crew be thrown off by a call for surrender.
“It’s coded as a government transmission, sir.”
Delaney hesitated. The content of the message would likely be the same, but an official transmission … that should be seen.
What would Walker do?
“Send it to my headset,” he ordered. He would adjust as necessary, and his crew would not have to watch their age-old enemy tell them that they were doomed, or that they were dooming the rest of humanity.
“Yes, sir.” The man tapped at a few keys and nodded to Delaney.
“Exile Fleet, this is Tel’rabim.” The voice was smooth and cultured. Why, Delaney wondered, was it so easy for the Telestines to speak human languages and so difficult for humans to learn Telestine? “In times past, I have been your ally.”
Delaney snorted. Tel’rabim had planned all of this. He had never intended to leave humanity alive. He had intended to kill them all, as if they were nothing more than a very expensive inconvenience.
“I can no longer, in good conscience, support humanity,” Tel’rabim continued. “When we arrived at Earth to find a new home, we were moved to mercy, and offered humanity a new home among the stars. I believed, as many others did, that humanity could be trusted to act in its best interest, and work with us to create a fruitful society.”
Delaney had fallen silent now. His hands were clenched so hard around the edge of the desk that his fingers ached. How dare Tel’rabim blame them for being angry when they had been forced from their homes into the dark, watched their families die, relied upon Telestine charity for their bare survival?
“It has become clear in recent weeks, however, that the spirit of rebellion is too deeply embedded in humanity for my people to trust them as allies. When we were informed of a shipyard at that produced military vessels, we attempted to disable only that installation. However, not only has humanity not condemned the actions of the Exile Fleet, we have now found ever more secret programs, including a weapons program on Io. We can no longer trust that by extinguishing the individual seeds of rebellion, we will attain harmony with humanity. Humanity will continue to rebel, and claim both Telestine and human lives. In the interests of survival for my own people, I must lead our fleet against humanity. Understand that this is not born of malice, but of necessity. I bear you no ill will, but I must protect my people.”
“Sir?” Min was staring at Delaney worriedly.
He had to pull himself together. Delaney stood up straighter and nodded crisply to Min, and then to the helmsman. “Prepare for engagement.”
“The message—”
“Nothing we haven’t heard before.” Delaney gave the small smile he’d seen Walker give when she was trying to reassure people. “It would be easier for them if we just rolled over and played dead. And we’re not going to do that, are we?”
There was a scattered cheer across the bridge and the helmsman’s hands danced over the controls. There was new energy on the bridge, a sort of shared joke. They were the species that couldn’t just conveniently die. They were the ones who refused to fade away quietly.
That was their strength.
The Juno hovered to port as they accelerated. Newer than the rest, it should by rights be the command ship of this detachment, but nothing could have taken the Intrepid’s place. Every creak was familiar to her engineers, and every strange quirk in gunnery and maneuvering had been learned over time. Delaney had made a vow to go down with the Intrepid, and like hell was he going to shift over to some new contraption with windows.
They were finally coming into range, and Delaney reached out to denote the targets on the holographic display. Destroyers, being highly dangerous and highly vulnerable in their own right, would be the first targets, and only then would they go for the carriers.
“Sir, I have a comm request from the Juno, Captain Gattina. Something about a reading on the Telestine fleet.”
“One moment.” Delaney finished denoting the targets. “Tell the fleet to make sure it stays out of the line of fire for the Telestine cannons.”
“Yes, sir. Sir, Captain Gattina—”
A bright beam cut across the view screen before the picture went a brilliant white. A mechanical whine burst across the comm lines, visible even without the headsets, and one of the officers gave a yell of pain. The Intrepid rocked and the artificial gravity failed and restarted with a groan and a bone-dragging moment of calibration, and Delaney had just a moment to see his death coming for him at last.
Just a moment, before he realized it was the Juno that had taken the brunt. The Juno, the new ship from Mercury under the command of that brilliant kid from Ganymede, Jennifer Gattina, the one Walker said reminded her of herself at that age.
The Juno, which was not crippled and scrambling to right itself, but entirely gone, only the tiniest shards of debris left to show it had been there at all.
Chapter Eleven
Near Mars
VSF Santa Maria
Bridge
The Venus Sovereign Fleet. She tried saying the phrase several times in her head, testing it, even mouthing the words over and over. Getting the feel of it.
She didn’t like it. Oh, the ship itself, she loved. Gleaming, fresh, new. The pinnacle of human ingenuity.
And it was Nhean’s. And Nhean insisted it be referred to as part of the Venus Sovereign Fleet, and not part of Walker’s home—the Exile Fleet.
“Ma’am—ma’am!” The pounding of feet caught her attention, and one of the newer officers bobbed his head nervously at Walker before snapping into a salute.
“Yes?” There were so many new recruits these days. She smiled automatically, and tried to remember his name. Cooper? Copper? Cummings? She did not let her eyes drift to his name tag.
“Message for you—on the bridge. An official Telestine transmission.” He lowered his voice on the last words.
She wavered. An official transmission was not to be ignored. The Telestines would view it as open rebellion. The consequences—
She could have laughed. What was she
worried would happen? She was part of the Exile Fleet. She’d already made her allegiance clear. “I will return shortly. Have the message held for me.”
“Yes, ma’am.” There was a tumble of the same fears in the officer’s eyes. Open rebellion against the Telestines still felt risky, even when compliance also killed them.
Walker returned his salute and made her way down the hallway, trying to drown out the pound of her anger with hard footsteps on the metal grating. It shouldn’t be this way.
And soon, however this ended, it wouldn’t be.
Her feet carried her to the fighter bays, to a sight she had seen too often in recent days: Commander Theo McAllister, alone at his fighter. There was a rag in one hand and oil in the other, even though these new Venus Sovereign Fleet birds were already gleaming. The craft was clean and spaceworthy, but McAllister kept polishing.
And McAllister was, as he always was these days, alone. In the constant activity of the hangar bay—frenetic now that they were racing for Mars—he was quiet enough to fade entirely into the background.
She made her footsteps loud enough to be heard, and waited for him to look around.
He saluted. “Ma’am.” Something in his eyes said he wasn’t entirely there anymore.
She didn’t pull her punches. “You don’t look good, McAllister.”
A dull anger flared in his eyes. “I can still do my job.”
“Can you?” She stared him down. “Can you tell me a damned thing about any of your pilots right now? D’you know who’s injured, whose family is on Mars, who’s been doing well in drills? Can you even tell me a damned thing about the fighter you’ve been polishing?” He looked almost betrayed, and that told her she was on the right track. “Yeah, I know, I’m not being nice. You know who is being nice? Your fellow pilots. And how well are they getting through to you?”
McAllister swallowed hard. “Did they tell you to come talk to me?”
“They didn’t have to.” He faded into the background well enough, but no deck chief was going to miss a pilot hanging around. Ahlstrom had come to talk to Walker recently, grease-stained face tired and worried in equal measure. The deckhands were starting to get nervous and rumors were flying that McAllister’s obsessive behavior—he polished no matter where he was—meant he knew something that they weren’t aware of. “And you know you haven’t been doing your job. You’ve been going through the motions, and that gets people killed.”
“So fire me,” he spat back.
“I will, if that’s what I need to do. But you’re a damned good pilot, and you used to be a damned good CAG, too. I’m not going to throw that away without giving you a chance to pull your act together.”
“Why?” he asked her.
She frowned.
“Why do you even care?” he clarified. “We’re not going to win this. You know that.”
“I don’t,” she told him simply.
“You do,” he pressed. “You stand up there on the bridge and you tell them we can win because you think dying quickly while trying to win is a better life than dying slowly on a station. I get that. But you have to know we aren’t actually going to win … right?”
She tilted her head to the side, caught off guard by this. She knew that despair might poison any member of the crew, but she had never considered that they might think she was knowingly lying about their odds.
“You didn’t know,” he said slowly.
“No. I don’t know.” She smiled at him. “How did we even survive, McAllister? How did we make it all the way to here? Every single step of this has been so damned unlikely, but here we are, and you have to wonder—was it ever really unlikely at all? This is who we are. We’re scrappers. We’re fighters. We refuse to die, and we’re smart. We’ve started winning battles, and we’re going to win more. We’ll probably lose a few too. It happens in war. So, no. I don’t think it’s inevitable that we’ll lose.”
His mouth was hanging open. “You think—” His voice was high and he broke off, cleared his throat. “You actually think we could take back Earth?”
“I think we can win this,” she told him honestly, only slightly evading the question. “I believe that.”
There was so much more she wanted to say: that the late Arianna King wasn’t the only reason to keep hoping for more, that there were other people who still needed him, that if he wanted to curl up and die, the Telestines would welcome it, and he should just have stayed on the stations. But she didn’t need to say any of that, because he knew it all.
She had chosen her crew well.
She watched him pull himself up. “If we die—”
“Others will take our place.” She cut him off. “And they will start with the gains we have made. None of this is useless, McAllister. None of it. I promise.”
He nodded decisively. “Right. Right.” He looked around himself at the oil, the rag, the fighter. It was as if he wasn’t quite sure how he’d gotten here. “Right,” he said again. “I’ll go, ah….”
“Prepare for battle?”
“Are we going to get there in time?” He blinked at her.
“Our resident computer whizz thinks it’s possible, and I think you can agree it’d be an awful shame to get there in time and not have any of our fighters ready. So get your ass in gear and your pilots ready, soldier.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He snapped a salute.
She returned it, and then she turned and left for the bridge, to hear a transmission she could already anticipate. And to reject it utterly.
And to fight.
Chapter Twelve
Mars, High Orbit
EFS Intrepid
Bridge
The ship rocked, and Delaney nearly lost his footing.
“Commander!” His helmsman was pale with fear, eyes darting to the sensor arrays. “If we—”
“Hold course!” His voice was a bellow. This was a war—had his crew thought they’d be out of danger in the fleet? They should know better, especially after Mercury. Delaney straightened and swept his eyes over the room. “No matter where they move, no matter how they try to get to the surface, we will be a thorn in their side.” He jabbed his finger at the holographic display, stalking around the room. The red shapes of the Telestine fleet were swinging out to flank, and the Intrepid plunged down in the center, reforming with the remaining ships to form a new blockade. “They will pay for every single thing they try to take from us, am I being clear? Mars is the single largest colony we have. Millions of people are down there.”
The bridge crew said nothing. He could feel their fear, and for a moment, he almost pitied them. The ship shuddered and they flinched.
They could not win this. There were not enough ships, and the ones they did have were the oldest ships of the fleet now, half-broken and scarred from battle. There was no winning against the attackers.
But every ship they downed was one that could not come for the other colonies. Every Telestine fighter pilot and scientist and gunner they killed—if the Telestines even had those things—was another blow to the invaders that held Earth. Let them lose their sons and daughters out in the black. Let them see how they liked it.
They will pay for every single thing they try to take from us. Jack Delaney had never spoken words he believed in more than those.
“So what are we going to do?” he asked his bridge crew.
“Make them pay.” It was a scant whisper from one or two of them. The rest were frozen.
They were young to die, the ones surrounding him. He allowed himself a moment a pity. A moment, and no more. “Make them pay,” he agreed. “Make them pay.” A little louder this time.
“Make them pay,” came the response from his bridge crew, nearly lost in the groan of the ship as the Intrepid swung into position. It shuddered as it absorbed the impact of the debris from the Juno that hung throughout the battle in a cloud.
Was it too much to hope for that the Telestines might be getting desperate?
He didn’t have time
for hope right now, any more than he had time for fear.
“Cairo and Washington, flank.” They were going to play by the book. “Washington, hide your fighters behind the Intrepid. Stockholm, swing outside Cairo and harry them. God willing, we can hold them until—”
“Sir, we’re getting a reading!” shouted Yeng, one of his communications officers. She swallowed and had to try to speak twice before she got the sound out. “What look like … Telestine ships inbound from Jupiter. Oh God.”
The bridge went dead silent. Delaney clutched the edge of the desk until his fingers ached. “What?”
“We have another fleet inbound.”
“And you’re sure it’s Telestine?”
“None of our ships can handle that rate of deceleration, sir. Only Telestines can do that.”
“How did they get a fleet in between Mars and Jupiter without us knowing?” He was yelling at her and he could not stop himself.
“I don’t know, sir.” Her face was white.
“Well, figure it out!”
He looked at the display, as if he might somehow find more ships there, but there was nothing new, there was no way out. The smaller ships stood no chance. The Samson had been blown to pieces in the first few seconds after the Juno, and the Carolina was a smoking wreck on the surface of Mars; they had watched it tumble away, end over end, while the crew struggled to right it, and in the end went full burn to keep it from smashing into the main colony, itself.
And now another fleet. They were lost.
“Cairo and Washington, full burn for the new fleet. Start shooting before you have a lock, see what you can do.” Make them pay. He watched them begin to turn on the display. “Stockholm, close the flank.”
There was only a moment’s hesitation. “Yes, sir.” The answer from both captains was crisp.
They were going to die here. He saw in his mind’s eye, in a flash, Commander King’s ship streaking overhead and into the line of fire over Mercury. This was how it was going to end, not dying to liberate Earth, but to protect the very god-forsaken colonies that were choking the life from his people. His mouth tasted bitter. “Helmsman, full burn. Make for the carrier.”