Deadshepherd (Tales of the Final Fall of Man Anthology Book 1)

by Andrew Hindle

  A good dogfight was over before it got too intricate. Ideally, of course, it was over and the enemy ship was crippled or destroyed, because a good dogfight was one you won. But generally speaking, the longer a fight in space lasted, the more likely – exponentially more likely – it became that neither vessel would survive.

  And by far the greatest danger was hesitation. Knowing that you had crewmembers on board the enemy ship made you reluctant to hit areas that might cause their deaths. And that reluctance gave the advantage permanently to the enemy.

  “Bring us forward,” she said. “Carve us a hole through the main hold access lock and into the subluminal drive core.”

  XV (Meanwhile)

  They cruised down the scarred flank of the enemy starship, peppering the sensors, weapons placements and airlocks with torpedo fire. The crew of the Black Honey Wings was obviously scrambling to react to the unexpectedly ferocious – not to mention self-preservation deficient – attack, but the starship was well-equipped and a few more lucky shots seared the hull of the A-Mod 400.

  “Fire at will, take us into the shadow of that burned-out gun emplacement and around that containment leak,” W’Tan instructed, sending revised heading vectors. “Get us closer to the main hull. Keep eyes on that modular dock and spar section,” she added. “Battle crew on the secondary bridge, respond.”

  “Copy, Acting Captain,” Ruel said. “We’re seeing some debris and signs of occupation, but they don’t have any weapons locks from the modular’s weapons placements. They have enough on their plate without coming after us, but we’re keeping tabs on it.”

  “What about her mobility?”

  “No sign of engine activity. We don’t even know if she’s capable of independent flight, the way she’s embedded there, but we’re not discounting the possibility. We’re sweeping the mines from the – what is that?” Ruel added sharply. “Forward.”

  W’Tan called up an enhanced view.

  A pair of smaller vessels – they looked like converted landers – had swooped out of a secondary hold down by the stumpy remains of the relative suppressor array. They would be much faster and more manoeuvrable than the injured starship and more heavily-armoured than a lander, with a smaller crew complement and – naturally – more weapons. Maybe even big ones. It all depended on how well-connected this Noro and his crew were.

  This fight had just gotten more complex.

  They should have taken out all the hangar bays they could find. They should have taken out the one under the suppressor when they rammed it. If she’d known what those insane humans were doing, she would have seen to it that things were better planned.

  “Where is Mister Ghee?” she asked. “It was his designated sleep period, yes?”

  “Would have been,” San Genevieve said from the helm, without looking up, “but I’m guessing he woke up when the, y’know, space battle started.”

  “Mister Ghee,” W’Tan said, tapping her comm. “Get to the lander bay.”

  XVI (Meanwhile)

  Tippy was at the lander bay. He’d been there ahead of time, waiting for the order he’d known was coming.

  They were in a fight with a larger starship, and sooner or later they’d have to play the outnumber-and-outmanoeuvre card. Of course, he should also have been expecting the bad guys to launch their own sub-vessels, so ‘outnumber’ was off the table, but he was ready. He’d wanted to take initiative and just jump in a lander and take off, in anticipation of the order, but he knew W’Tan didn’t like that sort of thing. ‘Initiative’, to the XO, meant ‘making it up as I go along and forcing Commander Choya Alapitarius W’Tan to guess instead of strategise’.

  And besides, the lander bays were on battle-stations lockdown, the docking blister sealed and shielded in case of enemy fire. It was still a weak spot, yes, but opening those doors and flying out into the middle of a space battle without warning was a good way to leave your ship’s interior completely exposed to enemy fire. There was no way to launch a lander during battle lockdown without command authorisation from both the primary and secondary bridges.

  Well … no way that he wanted to let on he knew about. This wasn’t one of those situations.

  As soon as the communication came through he was flicking open the access panel of the foremost lander, hitting the response codes and hauling himself around into her entry hatch. He should have been sitting inside already, he berated himself. How much time had he wasted by just hanging around in the lander bay? He scooted into the pilot’s seat and tapped the old acknowledge / ready commands. Ten seconds after the Commander had told him redundantly to wake up and get to the lander bay, he was warming up the electrochem burner and checking the solar battery levels.

  Tippy loved flying landers, but that wasn’t saying much. Tippy loved flying everything. He could strap a chem jet to the back of a janitorial and fly that around, and he’d love it until he suffocated and froze. But there was something about landers. Something pure. And Lander 1, which he privately called ‘Kelley’, was his favourite.

  Kelley had a small but dirty nuclear cascade gun that they’d picked up from goodness-knows-where. It was mostly used for cutting and salvage work, at least that’s what it said on the manifest, but it could really take the shine off the day of any ship smaller than a modular. Admittedly there weren’t many ships smaller than a modular, but the gun was definitely worth having, because not many people expected a lander to have any sort of guns beyond the standard light gear. Kelley’s landing jets also had a directed flare feature that – again – the manifest said was for shear, storm and crosswind landings, but what it really meant was that the burners could be turned into a blowtorch. This wasn’t super-effective against bigger targets either, but it was all about what a creative pilot could do with it.

  Best of all, though, Kelley had extra plates of armour – some sort of crazy experimental military stuff that Brutan had probably stolen from somewhere but Tippy wasn’t one to point fingers – wrapped around her nose and across her belly. You could fly her face-first into a modular, or land her on top of a Fleet scout pod, and come out the other side with maybe a sensor or external fitting or two broken off.

  Kelley was not a lander. Kelley was a crasher.

  She was designed to be flown by Tippy Ghee.

  XVII (Meanwhile)

  San Genevieve angled the modular so her rec dome was facing the Black Honey Wings and the oncoming fighters, and Tippy’s lander shot out of the momentarily-opened docking blister under cover of the bulk of the starship’s body.

  “They look pretty well-equipped,” the helmsman said, as they swept back and resumed course. Some more random fire hammered their hull, and the A-Mod 400 fired back.

  W’Tan looked at the two fighters, and then used her lower right hand to dedicate a monitor to the developing fight as they moved on. She didn’t imagine she would need the monitor for long, but if things went badly and those two fighters came back into the A-Mod 400’s volume, she’d need to know about it.

  They were indeed well-made, she saw, a pair of standard landers fitted out with an assortment of weapons she couldn’t readily identify and clearly-enhanced subluminal drives that allowed them to leap into the attack. Considerable effort had been put into their conversion, and if W’Tan hadn’t already seen the relative suppressor rig first-hand, this would have convinced her of the shadiness of the Black Honey Wings situation. Evidently, they had a lot of authority behind them, even if it was an authority unwilling to identify or incriminate itself.

  The fighters were not, however, terribly well-armoured. With small ships, it was all about striking a balance between attack and defence, and if it came to all or nothing you generally got all and nothing. Tippy’s lander, for example – Lander 1, or Kelley as he called it, although landers did not technically have names – had some reasonable ordnance but it was mostly based on the existing drive and functionality. It could carry that ridiculous armoured lower section and nose, and nothing much else. The two fighter
s out of the Black Honey Wings, on the other hand, had massive clusters of guns and accelerators and recoil bands, but no real armour to speak of.

  The person who had contracted their design clearly had no understanding of prehistoric warfare.

  “Don’t worry about Mister Ghee,” W’Tan said, “he will be back on board to take the next shift at the helm. You will neither lose sleep nor gain much-needed flying hours.”

  “Flying hours this,” San Genevieve muttered, in a voice that would have been too quiet for a human to hear – but stringing together a sequence of words, perhaps, that a human would have understood as some sort of insult or statement of defiance.

  Behind them, Tippy flew straight at the two fighters, which stayed in close formation and fired at him for just a fraction of a second too long. He banked without decelerating – a catastrophically non-AstroCorps-approved move that almost tore his engine out by the roots – exposed his dented gunmetal-grey belly to the enemy, and careened full-speed into both ships in a spray of deflected weapons-fire and molten fragments. There was a pair of tiny white puffs as the oxygen in the fighters burned out, and then Tippy’s lander was rolling clumsily, scattering more debris, and swooping back towards the severed docking spar-end of the Black Honey Wings. He pinged the primary bridge a moment later.

  “Permission to yee-hah, Commander?”

  “Permission deferred until after your combat report is filed,” W’Tan replied, “and I remind you once again that it is ‘Acting Captain’ at this point.”

  “Copy that, Commander – uh, sorry, Acting Captain I mean.”

  “Now,” W’Tan went on calmly, “Mister Krader – the cargo bay, please?”

  “Acting Captain,” Ruel’s voice said over the comm. “We’re seeing signs of some sort of activity on the Nope, Leftovers.”

  X (Meanwhile, Again)

  After the shooting and the screaming died away, Çrom took up position at the door Drago had just run out of. It seemed quiet out there.

  “Form up,” he said. “Any more injuries? No last-minute acts of pointless but heartbreakingly noble bravado?”

  “No, Captain,” Melvix replied. He tugged at his shirt, settling it around the wound in his side. “This will hold together without binding.”

  “Fide, Gabdin,” Gunton snuffled, then hnrrrk’d a gob of blood from his swollen nostril and gave himself a final wipe with a torn piece of somebody else’s uniform. “I’ll mend.”

  “Constable, you alright?” Skell turned to the compact security officer.

  “I’ll live,” Ital turned side to side, slowly, at the waist. She winced. “Don’t expect me to do anything too gymnastic.”

  “Duly noted. Blue?”

  “Fine, Captain,” Blue Persephone stepped away from the body of one of the Black Honey Wings Bonshooni, which she’d been checking for any deep-down life-signs. Molranoids often held onto those for a truly unfair amount of time, Skell reflected. She obviously hadn’t found anything. She had, however, come up with another weapon from the back of the big corpse’s coat. She checked it – it was a deceptively slender scattergun, capable of some pretty nasty directed heat damage – and pushed it into her belt. Çrom wondered why the Bonshoon hadn’t gone for it first. Maybe he hadn’t had time. Maybe he’d been concerned about his crewmates. The scattergun beam did have a bit of a radius on it – hence the name. It also required a bit of warming up, and things had gotten pretty spontaneous over dinner. “What about Fallen?” she continued.

  “Your call,” Çrom said gently, looking sadly at the body of Traumatic / Hysterical / Fallen. “We’re going to have a ton of really annoyed beef lovers kicking down this door in a very short time. There’s no getting back to the A-Mod anytime soon and there’s no carrying him with us. So–”

  Blue Persephone drew the scattergun, dialled it up, let it hum, then played it over Fallen’s body until there was nothing left but a dark, bubbled stain on the floor and the gun was hissing on the verge of overload.

  “Shall we?” Blue asked, dialling down and dropping it back into her belt.

  “Right then,” Skell said. “Let’s move out.”

  They moved out.

  XI (Meanwhile, Again)

  As cautiously as they could given the knowledge that they were essentially required to attack and kill anyone they met, they ventured into the corridors. The Nope, Leftovers was a modular built to much the same design as their own, so with any luck an influx of troops would come from …

  “This way,” Çrom said, waving the two humans, the Blaran and the Molran up the corridor.

  “You are aware this isn’t the way we came,” Melvix said. “What is our objective?”

  “Hactico’kriig,” Çrom murmured. “Havoc and war.”

  “Captain?”

  Çrom shook his head. “W’Tan will be severing the docking spar connecting the main body of the ship, so there won’t be any more enemies coming from that direction, but there are probably a few people on board this modular. It’s up to us to take care of them.”

  “And if she doesn’t cut the spar?” Gunton asked.

  “Then we all die here,” Çrom grinned. “Unless the new Captain of the Black Honey Wings decides to stick to the old mission and drag us back to face the Halfmoon throne, under the mistaken impression that it’s us the throne wants. In which case, most of us die here, and some of us probably die later on, somewhere else, with bits missing. Important bits. But isn’t that just always the way?”

  “And before she can do anything, W’Tan will have to break dock,” Constable said into the uncomfortable silence that greeted Çrom’s philosophical moment. “So we’ll want to stay away from that area anyway. We can’t risk being too late.”

  “Right,” Çrom agreed. “It looks like Brute took a short cut through the exchange, and we’re not going to manage that. Not with injured parties. Our best bet is to stay on board this modular.”

  “Get to the bridge, then,” Ital said. They reached a corner, and Çrom led them to the left. “Take over, fly ourselves–”

  “No,” Melvix shook his head. “This ship isn’t spaceworthy. She’s an annexe. She might have some flight and weapons capacity but the relative drive is burned out, and it is our duty as AstroCorps combatants to take out her subluminal drive too. Maybe set her to ram the other half of the ship, at best.”

  “So,” Ital reiterated, “we want the bridge. We can get into life support there, save us having to fight the entire crew hand to hand.”

  “No,” Çrom said, though he didn’t like to double-team with Melvix in putting down the earnest and well-intentioned tactical suggestions of such a good security officer, “good thought, but not the bridge. They won’t be using the bridge on this thing. It’ll be decommissioned and dismantled, if we’re lucky. Booby-trapped if we’re not, to catch the initiative-taking but ill-informed boarder off-guard.”

  “Secondary bridge?” Gunton asked.

  “Nope,” Çrom said, and smiled. “Tertiary bridge.”

  “Modulars don’t have a tertiary bridge,” Constable frowned.

  Çrom glanced at Melvix. Melvix would know. This wasn’t the first modular annexe that old beast had fought a guerrilla battle on. And at least there weren’t civilians on this one. Unless bounty hunters counted as civilians. Çrom was going to go with ‘no they didn’t’.

  Gonon Melvix returned Çrom’s look with an unreadable one of his own. “We need to get to one of the farm levels,” the Molran confirmed Çrom’s assumption.

  “Which one?” Blue asked.

  They stopped at another intersection, and Çrom and Melvix exchanged another look. Melvix shrugged his upper right shoulder lightly.

  Çrom looked around at the others.

  “Anyone want to toss a coin?” he offered.

  XII (Meanwhile, Again)

  Çrom had lost count of the number of people they’d killed. It had been at least four. But then, after he’d killed four people in a short period of time, Çrom always stopped count
ing. He felt that counting the people you killed, after four, was a sign that you were enjoying it too much. If there were more than four people you needed to kill, there might as well be a thousand. Did you bomb a Mandelbrot and then float through it in a spacesuit, counting up the bodies? Counting the arms and dividing by … well, two if they had five fingers, four if they had four …

  He supposed there were people who did that. They were usually doctors, though. You knew where you stood with a doctor. They swore to take no lives, take no sides, do no harm. It was a bit kooky, but it seemed to work for them. People liked doctors.

  They didn’t like starship Captains so much. They respected them, he supposed … although he’d given up on trying to earn respect a long time ago. It had been about the same time he’d decided to stop counting dead bodies once he got to four in a row, actually.

  He wondered if those facts were connected somehow.

  Anyway, he’d stopped counting. He never counted. More than four, and it was a slaughter. It was a travesty. Four could be self-defence, could be an execution of AstroCorps directives, could be the act of a good man doing what he must. More than four was mass-murder.

  He knew that Barducci, and Melvix for that matter, looked at it a different way. Their lives were a war, and that made it easy. In a war, you killed and killed and killed until someone with more shiny shit on their uniforms told you to stop killing. If you stopped killing before they said so, you either got killed by the guys you were just killing or you got shot by your own guys because you’d messed it all up for everybody. Wars didn’t need people who just stopped killing willy-nilly. Those people made everyone look bad. They made everyone wonder why they’d started killing in the first place, and why they hadn’t stopped ages ago if it was so easy.