Vengeful Dawn

by Richard Patton

  “Wireless range?” Ethan said incredulously. “We’d have to get within spitting distance for a normal connection, and with all the interference from the battle, we’ll practically need to crash into them!”

  “Hence the complication.” Rebecca looked up at him. “You can do it.”

  Ethan let out a deep breath. “I can do it,” he affirmed. “I’m just not sure we’ll be coming back.”

  The Race

  The Phantom leapt out of compression and into hell.

  Bright flashes of destructive energy lanced across the battlefield, slamming into hulls and shearing them in half. The human ships returned fire with billowing clouds of smoke and fire, hammering the shining silver armor of the Naldím vessels with meter-wide shells. Fighters on both sides circled their opponents like buzzards, alternating fire between the opposing dogfighters and capital ships. The wreckages of a hundred small craft drifted and spun through the void.

  Whatever strategy had been employed by each faction had long been abandoned to a desperate free-for-all. Ships from both sides maneuvered to cut each other off and overwhelm their defenses with firepower, but for every two ships that encircled another, four more would come to the cornered one’s rescue. It was a vicious cycle of destruction.

  A flaming hull passed in front of the Phantom spitting out debris and escape pods in equal measure. The Phantom nimbly ducked through the carnage, its turrets flashing like blood-red strobe lights as they targeted the Naldím Tridents inbound to pick off the survivors.

  Ethan yanked the joystick back and forth, doing everything in his power to keep the ship level amidst the chaos. Information flooded his field of view – proximity warnings, EM flashes, overheating alerts. He swore, leaning to the side as if to see past the display.

  “Hawking!” he snapped. “Cam, shut off the HUD!”

  “Inadvisable, given the number of unknowns.”

  “Honestly, I’d rather fly blind. Turn it the hell off.”

  Cam silently obliged, reducing Ethan’s view screen to a pure, unadulterated view of the bloodbath.

  “Ethan, hard port.” Rebecca called from her station. “Cruiser on our six.”

  Ethan checked his flanks. A Naldím ship was encroaching on their left flank, and could be outmaneuvered by a hard turn, but there was also an Imperial megacarrier barreling towards them on the right – too close to turn without crashing into it. Ethan decided to do it anyway.

  “Cam, give me mavs.” He jerked the joystick left and back, leading the Phantom into a banked turn. The grav thrusters wouldn’t be enough to arrest its movement before it hit the carrier, but adding the maneuvering thrusters’ power gave the ship a chance.

  It was barely enough.

  The Phantom scraped against its dish, its wing drawing a jagged line through the ship’s white lettering, IMS Singapore. The Naldím ship opened fire as the Phantom broke off, punching a clean hole through the dish. The Singapore lobbed a cluster of shells back at it to little effect.

  As much as Ethan wanted to, he forced himself not to worry about the carrier. It could look after itself. He had to concentrate on the Phantom.

  The Naldím ship seemed to be of a similar mind. It neatly dodged the Singapore, which was hammering it with every gun in range, and resumed its pursuit of the Phantom. Though objectively larger and slower, it had no difficulty keeping pace with the smaller ship, as it blindly pummeled through any obstacle the Phantom was forced to navigate. Before long it was in firing range.

  The control stick went lax in Ethan’s hand, suddenly no longer reacting to force feedback. He elbowed the intercom.

  “Kahlo, I’ve lost control.”

  “Aye, we’re working on it. Lost grav thrusters starboard side. I’m getting you on mavs, but that’s only thirty percent force.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind.” In a moment, the joystick began to respond again, though clearly handicapped. Each turn to port became a wide drift. “Rebecca, get that ship off me,” Ethan ordered, trying to constrain himself to right-hand maneuvers.

  “Turrets aren’t strong enough,” Rebecca shot back. “Give me a forward firing arc.”

  Ethan checked his course and deactivated the dampeners, allowing him to rotate the ship without stopping his forward momentum. Rebecca wasted no time with the momentary opportunity he gave her. The front of the ship erupted in a flash of laser light ten times the size of the turrets’. Almost instantly, the battered bow of the Naldím cruiser lit up, crumpling and melting under the intense heat of the burn.

  Rebecca kept the weapon trained on the ship as the Phantom swept over it. “Down and out,” she reported, precisely releasing the trigger once the ship was no longer in her arc.

  “Copy.” Ethan turned the Phantom back towards its course, and not a moment too soon. A fireball erupted directly ahead, scattering a dense cloud of debris across the void. The Phantom’s retro thrusters kicked in, lessening the speed of the impact and sending the brunt of the damage to the shields.

  “Port dorsal turret offline,” Rebecca muttered, absorbed in her console.

  “Could be worse,” Ethan grunted back, trying to wrestle the ship back under his control.

  It was.

  A group of Naldím corvettes appeared through the flame directly over them, approaching like a pack of ravenous wolves. Within seconds they had the Phantom surrounded, dashing into its path each time it made a move to escape. A few glancing shots from the forward battery did little to dissuade them.

  They began firing. The Phantom’s shields dropped in larger and larger portions with each successive hit. The ship was quickly collapsing.

  “Rebecca…” Ethan shouted over the deafening noise of the impacts reverberating through the hull.

  Rebecca glanced between the door and Ethan. Then she stood, yanking him out of his seat, taking it for herself. “Get to your fighter. They’re not fast enough to cut it off. I’ll keep them distracted.”

  “This ship isn’t going to last much longer!” Ethan objected. He grabbed Rebecca’s shoulder, but she brushed it off.

  “The fleet won’t last much longer if you don’t get the message out. Get moving.”

  There was no use in objecting. Telling himself that Rebecca could take care of herself, Ethan sprinted off the bridge.

  The halls of the Phantom had morphed into a jagged array of loose piping and torn sheet metal. Every hit from the Naldím wolf pack opened a fresh fissure in the walkways. Ethan ran, tripping over writhing cables and dancing carefully around the ragged edges of broken panels. He didn’t dare try the elevator, instead opting for the emergency ladder that exposed itself the moment the ship had come under fire. It brought him down to the foyer, separated from the cargo bay only by an airlock.

  The airlock wouldn’t open. Ethan tried a dozen different commands, but it refused to move. Finally, he opened the porthole and saw why.

  “Uh, Rebecca?” he said into his comm, clearing his throat to steady his voice. “My ship’s gone.”

  There was silence on the other end of the comm. “How?”

  “The whole cargo bay is gone.” Ethan glanced around, as if there might have been a solution waiting for him in the small passage. With nothing in sight, he started back up the ladder. “I’m coming back to the bridge. We’ll figure a way out of this.”

  “Ship’s not going to take much more.”

  “I’ll be fast.” Scrambling to the upper deck, Ethan backtracked through the continuously deteriorating halls until the bridge was in sight. An explosion cascaded through the hull, rupturing a gas main. The wall beside Ethan blew open, pummeling him with bits of shrapnel. He froze, pressed against the opposite wall, and stayed frozen until he realized he had somehow survived with only a few flesh wounds. He tried to move away but was yanked back at the neck. His dozen dog tags were caught on the debris, causing the chains to dig deep enough into his skin to draw blood.

  Another explosion split the hall open a few meters away. This time, it breached. Atmosphere screame
d past Ethan as he struggled to untangle himself. The force of the rapidly escaping air pressed him against the twisted metal.

  “Ethan, I’m evacuating the crew,” Rebecca said through the comm. “Get to the bridge now.”

  “Stuck in the debris,” Ethan grunted, trying again to disconnect his tags from the wall. “Tag’s caught…”

  “So cut it loose!”

  “I… can’t.”

  “Ethan,” Rebecca snapped. Quickly, she relaxed her tone. “I need you up here.”

  He could not explain it, but the sound of her voice made something click in Ethan’s mind. He wrested a loose piece of metal from the split wall and sliced the tags off. They clattered through the debris and were vacuumed into space. He ran for the bridge.

  *

  “Kahlo, tell your men you’re going offline. I’m ejecting the pods.” Rebecca raced toward the rear of the ship, bound for the cryochamber.

  “Copy that, sir. Not much left we can do for the Phantom.”

  “I know. Sign out.” Rebecca switched channels. “Cam, shut down the projection system and prep for evac.”

  “System deactivation commencing. I recommend you and Lieutenant Walker occupy the two vacant pods in the cryo chamber.”

  “Mission’s not done,” Rebecca answered. “We still need crew on the bridge.”

  “Negative on that,” Ethan said, cutting into the comm. He sounded winded, but unhurt. “Turrets are offline. I can handle this. Get in a pod.”

  “You need help,” Rebecca retorted, stopping short of the pods.

  “I’m Ethan Walker. I can handle a little fancy flying.” He paused. “Besides, the Navy needs you more than it needs me. Especially now that my ship is gone.”

  Rebecca closed her comm, surrounding herself in the oddly serene silence of the cryochamber. She looked at the sleeping faces in each pod. Kahlo. Prasad. The crew members she had never made a point of knowing. She never would.

  Bypassing Cam’s safeties, Rebecca ejected the chamber from the control room beyond. The slumbering crew were launched into space, encapsulated in a protective shell that would see them safely to an allied ship or the planet’s surface. She ran for the bridge.

  *

  The Phantom was nearly unrecognizable. Ethan had managed to slip past some of his pursuers, but the damage had relieved the ship of its wings and had shunted control to the mavs. It slid through space like it was on ice.

  Ethan didn’t notice Rebecca sliding into the engineering position beside him until she spoke.

  “I’m not leaving you.”

  He did a double take. “Rebecca, you need to get off this ship!” he shouted, his momentary lapse in concentration costing the Phantom a thruster. He wrenched the ship back on course.

  “Ethan, you’re the only person who’s ever given a shit about me. Let me return the favor.” Rebecca locked onto Ethan’s eyes. Her gaze was warmer than it had ever been, but utterly resolute.

  Ethan almost laughed. “There’s no arguing with you, is there?”

  “Not this time.”

  Ethan took a deep breath and took in his surroundings. “Okay, I need you on power shunting. Cam was doing it, but-”

  “He downloaded into the escape pods. He’s gone.”

  “That explains that. Now keep power on the thrusters, but don’t let them overheat. Route it back to the radiators if-”

  “I know how it works, Ethan.”

  “Right.” Ethan gripped the yoke. “Alright. Let’s do this.”

  The Phantom ducked and weaved through the carnage, riding the wakes of destroyers and corvettes that offered it covering fire until it passed. Ethan guided it towards a remnant of the defensive line – three men-of-war in a triangular formation, holding off twice their number in smaller Naldím vessels. The plan was scrapped moments later as a massive Naldím mothership bulled through the trio, bound for the Phantom. Ethan maintained his course.

  The Phantom, miniscule against the hulking mass of the Naldím dreadnought, skimmed along its hull, dodging maneuvering fins as they swung in and out of the bulkhead. It wasn’t long before the Naldím noticed their company. Green bolts lanced out at random intervals, inaccurate at such close range but still searing the paint off the Phantom. Ethan was about to break off, not confident they could survive much more, when the dreadnought lit up with the fire of a dozen high explosive rounds.

  Racing to catch up with the Phantom was Vengeance, weapons blazing and ripping apart the mothership with unrelenting ferocity. The enemy returned fire too late – within moments it was so crippled it could only limp away.

  The Vengeance matched pace with the smaller ship. There was no way to communicate, even at this range, but the message was clear: the Phantom could count on the Vengeance’s protection. Ethan jammed the throttle forward and shot into the heart of the battle.

  With the flagship’s guns covering them from every angle, the Phantom closed the distance to the Imperium and its quickly shrinking battle group with ease. But their increasing speed posed its own problem.

  “We’re never going to stop in time,” Rebecca realized.

  Ethan nodded passively. “Nope. And we don’t have to.” He tilted his head toward the gunnery station. “Get on the forward laser.” She obliged with a quizzical look. “You can trust me,” Ethan assured her. “Do you have the message ready for transmit?”

  “It’ll transmit at one hundred meters from the array.”

  “We’re getting closer than that.”

  The Phantom shot like a bullet into the heart of the battlefield. The Imperium was facing it, though its weapons were concentrated in a dozen different directions. With the other Imperial ships crowding the mothership, there was no room for the Phantom to maneuver. The only course was a collision course.

  “Okay, see the portside hydrogen scoop?” he asked, flicking the stick left and right with final adjustments.

  “Copy.”

  “We’re going through it. There’s a thin point in the armor in its rear plating. Fire at it on my mark.”

  It took Rebecca a moment to figure out Ethan’s plan. “We’re not going to fit.”

  “We don’t have wings anymore, remember? We’ll fit. But you have to fire… now.”

  Rebecca didn’t hesitate. The laser sputtered and fizzled, then found full power, bombarding the interior of the Imperium’s port-mounted scoop with high-energy photons. The inward-sloping armor on the far end began to glow and warp.

  The Phantom raced along the flagship’s port side, meters from exchanging paint.

  “In range. Transmitting,” Rebecca said, her finger still tightly gripping the laser’s trigger. They were nearly inside the scoop. “Message received,” she breathed.

  Ethan let out an unintelligible shout of relief. Now within the portside scoop, they only had to thread the needle at the back end.

  Every retro thruster fired, slowing the ship as much as possible as it rocketed towards the rear of the scoop. The laser died, but it had done its job well enough. Ethan prayed that the Phantom would fit through the hole it had burned.

  Continuously making adjustments, Ethan held his breath and didn’t blink, scrounging for every centimeter he could manage. The very second the Phantom’s nose reached the breached wall, he closed his eyes. The ship struck the edges of the hole on the right, then the left. The sound of grinding metal accompanied yet another section of the ship being ripped out of place.

  The Phantom hurtled toward the far side of the battle, completely out of control. Ethan let go of the stick. There was nothing he could do for the ship now. He turned to Rebecca.

  “Mission accomplished,” he reported wearily. She looked over at him.

  “Mission accomplished.”

  She joined him at the helm as the Phantom was caught in the gravitational pull of the planet, its few remaining thrusters slowly righting its angle but unable to do anything to stop its descent.

  Far from the battle, they watched the Naldím’s home world drift slowly t
hrough space. It was peaceful, even beautiful, as a red sun dawned on its horizon. At that moment, everything was at peace.

  Contact

  Briggs stood behind his chair, gripping its back – it seemed counterproductive to be sitting, though there was little Vengeance could do. It headed the last group of ships retreating to the rendezvous, while the Imperium covered their flank.

  The Naldím had seemingly lost interest in the fight as soon as the Imperial fleet showed signs of retreat. They had returned to a decidedly inoffensive formation. Briggs was certain it was a trap, simply daring the humans to attack again.

  By the time the Imperium’s battle group reached the safety of the fleet, the newly-christened Third Fleet was dropping out of compression. Their admiral immediately joined the open comm between captains.

  “This is Admiral Hawke. Third Fleet is ready to engage.”

  “Acknowledged, Admiral,” Admiral Singh answered from the Imperium. “Hold position until First and Second Fleets have re-formed. You will then engage the enemy in a frontal assault. The Imperium and a detachment of destroyers will remain in the rear to counter the inbound enemy fleet.”

  There was a pause on the line. “We were not aware of an inbound fleet, Grand Admiral.”

  “Neither were we until twenty minutes ago. New intel from SWORD.”

  Briggs closed the comm. Singh did not sound terribly appreciative of the risk the Phantom had taken to deliver the message. Then again, it had blown a hole in his ship. “Status on the Phantom,” he ordered.

  “In decaying orbit,” his navigator replied. “Projected to impact the surface in the fifth sector.”

  “Dammit,” Briggs swore under his breath. He composed himself and looked back at the navigator. “And these High Ones? Any sign of the buggers?”

  “Not yet, sir. Wait…” The navigator pressed a finger to his earpiece. “New contacts on Imperium’s scopes. Exiting hyperspace with Naldím signatures.”

  “Visual. Now.”

  The view screen opened on pitch black space. Small vortices were forming in the void. In an instant, Naldím ships sprung out of them, already in a spearhead formation. They moved forward slightly, then came to a halt, far from the battlefield.