by Jake Bible
Even knowing that the odds were against a fighter pilot living through a mission, Garcia hadn’t wavered in her desire to hop in one of the skiffs and take to the vacuum. She hounded her CO, relentlessly putting in request after request to attend pilot training.
Garcia laughed to herself as she thought how being a pilot used to be a privilege, now it was open to whoever fit the physical requirements. All that time arguing for her chance at glory, starting with the skiff squadrons and working her way up to the quads, and it meant nothing since a farmer from the middle of some nowhere system could score high on a test and end up with wings on her uniform in mere months.
The lift doors opened and Garcia stepped out into the corridor, her mood less than pleasant.
“Makers, this place,” she said, trailing her fingers along the wall as she walked towards the bridge hatch. “I can never shake this place. I know it’s not the real thing, that the DGs set it up to look like the Norland, but damn… This place sucks.”
She placed her wrist to the panel next to the bridge hatch and it popped open instantly. Pushing the hatch aside, she stepped onto the bridge of the Norland, her eyes going wide at what she saw and her hand going to her nose at what she smelled.
There were people sitting at each station, even one sitting in the command chair, but it was obvious they were no longer living. The smell alone alerted her to that.
Before her, past the rows of consoles, was the main view window, a five foot thick piece of plastic and glass interlaced with billions of reactive diodes that could change the window from real and into a vid screen at the push of a button.
Garcia stared at the scene before the Norland. All the wreckage and debris that swirled about in the vacuum. Slowly, she walked past the corpses, past the command chair and the dead captain that occupied it; past the ensigns assigned to handle the weapons systems, navigation system, communications. She approached the view window and looked out at the death and destruction before her.
She’d been in battles before, she had even been out in the very wreckage she was looking at, but it all seemed different from up on the bridge of the Norland. It seemed more intense, more drastic, more pointless.
Her eye caught sight of the hundreds of bodies that floated along, bumping off of and being torn apart by the battle debris. She watched as two bodies collided then went spinning off in different directions, quite possibly the last human interaction they would ever have.
Human interaction…
Garcia spun around and stared at the corpses. They were Estelian corpses. Doublegangers having taken the form of true humans. No one knew what a real Estelian looked like; one had never been captured in its natural state. She walked amongst the corpses, marveling at how real they looked. Even through the decay, Garcia could see the blemishes and scars that had marked the creatures’ skin, just like the blemishes and scars that marked her own.
“So real,” Garcia said. “So close to human. But not quite, you DG fuckers.”
Yet…
Garcia had begun to move the corpses from the communications console, hoping to see if she could get a message out to the CSC that she was alive, but something stopped her. She held the corpse by its shoulders and narrowed her eyes as she looked into its mouth.
Braces.
The Estelian woman, if they had sexes, had braces on its teeth. Garcia had almost missed it since the braces were nearly invisible, but the light from the view window had caught them just right, giving off just the barest of reflection.
“Why the hell would a DG need braces?” Garcia asked. “Why go to that kind of trouble to replicate humans that much?”
It didn’t make sense to her. Why put braces on someone that would be seated at a communications console on a cruiser? Detail was one thing, but no one would have given a second thought if the woman didn’t have braces.
“Not a woman,” Garcia said. “An Estelian.”
That wasn’t the only thing that bothered Garcia.
“How did you die?” she asked. “This ship was hit, but not enough to kill everyone on the bridge.”
A gas? Some sort of toxin that also made the bodies decompose rapidly? Maybe Estelians committed suicide at the first sign of defeat?
All questions she asked herself as she looked around the bridge, her need to contact the CSC overpowered by her need to figure out the mystery that gnawed at her. She left the woman with the braces and went from corpse to corpse, studying the bodies closely. She took shallow breaths as she opened uniforms, pulled up sleeves, removed boots.
A man with a cybernetic eye. A woman with a prosthetic leg. A man with a port in his chest for easy access to his artificial heart. A woman missing most of her torso, nothing but wires and tubes enclosed in a plastic frame for a midsection.
Garcia hurried back to the woman with braces and examined her more closely. She found ports in the back of the woman’s head; ports she knew were used to stimulate brain activity in wounded soldiers that had suffered severe head traumas.
“What the holy hell…”
She moved the woman out of the way and activated the communications console. The ship’s transmitter was completely offline, but the receiver was in good working order. She started to scroll through any messages received and was puzzled by the lack of language. All she saw were command codes; codes given to systems for remote operations. She knew them well since she’d had to learn how to operate and fly a skiff or quad remotely. All pilots did in case they needed an immediate evacuation off a hostile planet they’d landed on and weren’t close to their fighter.
Garcia backed away from the communications console, confused and alarmed. She bumped into the command chair and spun about, coming face to face with the man that was supposed to be the captain of the Norland. Except the man didn’t have any eyes and was missing a large portion of his lower jaw.
Swallowing hard, Garcia reached past the captain’s corpse and activated the log controls on the arm of his chair. An image popped up of a man talking, giving a basic, boring general report on the status of the cruiser and its crew. The image was not of the man that was seated in the chair. And the time stamp that scrolled by at the bottom of the image was nowhere near the current time.
In fact, as Garcia did some quick calculations, the time stamp matched closely to the time when the CSC Norland had been reported destroyed by Estelian forces during the Battle of Lost Skies. That battle had been over six years earlier. Even if the Estelians had captured the Norland and were using it as their own, which they had been known to do with other ships, why wasn’t there a new log by the new Estelian captain?
Or if they didn’t use logs like humans did then why wasn’t the last log of the battle itself? Why was it a simple status report? All CSC warships went into automatic record mode so that each and every moment of a battle was saved for study and posterity.
And hadn’t Garcia seen the last broadcast from the Norland, the last captain’s log, just like the millions of other humans had when the defeat of the CSC at the Battle of Lost Skies was announced?
Too many questions. Garcia’s mind swam with them, reeled from them, tried to reject them. She wanted to think there was some easy explanation. There had to be. She was on an Estelian ship, she was dealing with Estelian corpses, she didn’t know the first thing about the alien technology the DGs employed. It was all a trick, all an illusion designed to mess with her head, to break down her confidence.
It was all designed…
“…to look like an attack,” Garcia whispered.
She gasped as the words left her lips. She turned quickly, throwing up the couple bites of the stale contents of the dinner the refreshment station had provided her, throwing up food that had probably been in stasis since the Norland had been lost.
Because Garcia, at that moment, had zero doubt in her brain that she was on the actual CSC Norland.
She hurried back to the communications console and scrolled through the log, checking the details of the code received.
She hunted for the information that would tell her what she needed to know to confirm her worst fears. After several minutes of checking and double checking, Garcia had her answer.
It was not an answer she liked, but it was an answer.
Fifty-Two
“Everyone hold,” Valencio said. “You wait until I give the order. Do not fire until I say so. I want evasive maneuvers first. Fly around the attack. Weave between the ships when they get here. They will open fire on us as soon as they punch through. Do not return fire. We have limited ammunition. They do not. I want chaos, not a slaughter. Just keep from getting killed.”
“You sure about this, boss?” London asked. “I mean, we went to all that trouble of arming these skiffs, seems like a waste not to use those arms.”
“We will, London,” Valencio said. “But only when we need to.”
Valencio bristled at London’s words. He knew what she had planned and he was trying to talk her out of it. In any other situation she would have let him. More importantly, in any other situation, she would never have created the plan she did.
But there was no going back. Even if she wanted the skiffs to return to the Perpetuity, she had no idea what waited for them there. While the skiffs waited for the Estelian armada to appear, Valencio had ordered London to try one last time and contact the Perpetuity. She had to try to find someone reasonable to speak with.
London had found plenty of people to speak with, none of them reasonable. He quickly reported back the same type of interaction they had had with the colonel on the Mars platform. Everyone had accused London of being an Estelian spy and traitor. Many threats were made, most involving the removal of his genitals and their storage in various orifices of his body.
As far as Valencio was considered, they were on their own and possibly the last defense that Earth had. That was the justification she held onto as she thought about what she was about to do to her squadron of cadet pilots.
Before she could dwell much further, the Estelian warships punched out of interspace just off of Mars, their cannons firing immediately just as Valencio had expected.
“You know the plan!” Valencio shouted as she flew her fighter skiff towards the battleship that led the armada. “Get in there and make those warships fight themselves! Dive! Dodge! Twist and turn! You keep those flight sticks moving at all costs! Never slow! Never sit still! Never give them an easy target! CSC OR DIE!”
“CSC OR DIE!” Zenobia yelled.
“CSC OR DIE!” Richtoff shouted.
“CSC or die,” London said, not quite as enthusiastically as the others.
A few of the cadet pilots echoed Valencio’s call to action, but most were so green that they didn’t even know the battle slogan despite the CSC’s continual attempts at indoctrinating the human populations of all the systems.
“You have this, cadets!” Valencio yelled. “I believe in you!”
She banked her skiff and ducked below a barrage of plasma bolts. Valencio rolled and then pulled up, changing the trajectory of her skiff so that she was facing one of the destroyers that had punched through. The plasma cannons from the cruiser behind her followed then stopped firing as the destroyer in front of her came into the line of fire.
Valencio had hoped that she could instigate some friendly fire between the warships and have a few take each other out. It would have made things so much easier if at least one of the ships would have gone down that way, but Valencio knew it was a long shot. Too many safety protocols built into the systems.
A muted scream over the comm then an explosion to her right caught Valencio’s attention. She banked again, taking her skiff into a steep dive and watched as one of the cruisers began to list to the side, a good sized hole in its aft section.
“It’s working,” London said. “First casualty down and damage is done. You know the others are going to figure this out soon. Zenobia is gonna be pissed off and Richtoff could easily start firing on you.”
“They already know,” Valencio said. “I’m not proud of what I’m doing, but I’d be downright suicidal if I had hidden it from those two.”
“Well, I’ll cut you some slack then,” London said. “Not much, but some.”
More cannon fire caused Valencio to pull up and bring her skiff into a sharp, spiraling climb. She watched the plasma bolts fly past her cockpit and gritted her teeth until she thought one would crack. The bolts slowed then stopped as she got out of range.
There was another explosion and Valencio checked her console as she brought her skiff back around.
Three more cadet pilots were lost, two in vain it looked like. One got through and collided close to the battleship’s bridge. There were massive sparks arcing out from the damage, telling Valencio that the battleship’s crew was having a hard time sequestering systems. If that kept up then maybe her training squadron could disable the armada without all dying.
She didn’t get her hopes up.
“Boss!” London yelled. “Incoming!”
Valencio’s attention went back to her console as she flew through the next wave of plasma bolts. Her scanners lit up with dots indicating the quads had arrived. Not having the same power capacity as the bigger ships, the quads couldn’t punch as efficiently, meaning they had to hang in interspace longer before reaching their destination.
“How many am I looking at?” Valencio asked.
“Looks like the Asteroid Belt stations thinned them somewhat,” London said. “But not as much as they should have. It’s a full squadron.”
“Shit,” Valencio said as she changed directions once again so that she could face the incoming quads and engage them immediately. “Richtoff. Zenobia. On me. We need to deal with these quads or they’ll cut our cadets down in no time.”
“Already on the way,” Zenobia said.
“Same here,” Richtoff replied.
“London? Hang back,” Valencio ordered. “You stay out of it and be our eyes and ears. I want to know the second things go our way. Or the second you know the day is lost.”
“I think the day is already lost,” London said. “But that’s just my opinion.”
“Noted and ignored,” Valencio said. “Just keep your eyes open and mouth shut, alright?”
“How am I going to tell you if the day is ours or if it is lost?” London asked.
“London,” Valencio growled.
“Right, shutting my mouth,” London said.
“And don’t forget about the platforms,” Valencio said.
“Not likely going to forget that,” London said. “Yay.”
Fifty-Three
“I ain’t gonna kill you right away, North,” Metzger said from directly behind North. “I need to know how deep this all goes. I need to know how many more traitors are on this station.”
“Coop, you have to listen to me,” North said, still on his knees, his eyes going from Linklater then out at the ripple in the lake that was getting closer. “I’m not a traitor. It’s the pharma. The stuff is messing with your mind.”
“The pharma is all that’s keeping me clear,” Metzger said. “I don’t know why, but if I don’t keep taking it then I start to get fuzzy. Did you put something in the water, North? Did you? Or in the food? You drugged the whole station didn’t you and want to blame it on the pharma. I’m right, aren’t I? I know how much you like that pharma. Is that why you took it so much? To counteract the poison in the water? The poison in the food?”
“There is no poison, Coop,” North said. “I haven’t had any pharma in hours. It was messing with my head too so I stopped. You have to trust—”
“Not a fucking chance!” Metzger yelled as he slammed the butt of his scorcher down on the back of North’s head. “No way will I ever trust a DG!”
North collapsed onto the beach. His face hit hard and he felt the rocks slice open his cheek. He started to push himself up, but a boot firmly placed to his skull stopped that. He felt Metzger lean in and knew that all it would take was one hard push and his brains would
be leaking everywhere. But Metzger eased up and North only suffered through a ton of grit grinding into the wound on his cheek.
“Who are the other traitors, North?” Metzger asked as he tapped the barrel of his scorcher against North’s shoulder blades, bouncing back and forth from one to the other like he was ticking off eeny-meeny-miny-mo. “Just give me some names, North, and I can make this easy on you.”
“Let Link go,” North said. “He has nothing to do with this. I forced him to come along.”
“Is that right?” Metzger laughed. “The guy sure didn’t seem like he was forced to do anything. He killed my guards without even thinking about it.”
“They were trying to kill me!” Linklater said, glancing over his shoulder at the lake as he sat in the shallows.
“What the fuck are you looking at?” Metzger barked.
“Nothing,” Linklater said, turning his attention back to Metzger. “It’s just been a long time since I saw a lake is all. I haven’t had leave in close to—”
“Oh, shut the fuck up,” Metzger sighed. “I do not care when you last had leave, Linklater. No one cares when you last had leave. You may be an officer, but fucking A, man, you are one boring motherfucker. Have you ever even been laid? I can’t imagine any woman, or guy, wanting to fuck such a boring piece of shit like you.”
“That’s a little personal,” Linklater said. He struggled not to look back over his shoulder again.
“Jesus, dipshit, what the hell is bugging you so much?” Metzger said. “You afraid of water? You think a fish is going to jump out and kiss you? Ha! That’s the action you get! You fucking kiss fish! Did I interrupt your date? Is that why you came running in here? For a date with a fish?”
Linklater just blinked as his mouth tried to form some type of response.
“Now you look like a fish,” Metzger chuckled. “Motherfucking fish kissing— HOLY FUCK!”