Avon’s finger stabbed down onto the controls. ‘Fire!’
Chapter 2
First Contact
The Liberator‘s hull groaned with the strain of another brutal change of trajectory. A deep, guttural moan, like a wounded animal protesting as it was forced into a painful turn to avoid a predator. It seemed to Jenna as though the flight deck warped and twisted in front of her eyes while she wrestled with the controls. But it was probably just the sweat that drenched her forehead and stung her eyes.
How long had they been fighting? It must have been hours since the first engagement, and yet it felt like a lifetime. Jenna ruefully thought of how all her smuggling career had been about avoiding the enemy. Hiding from them, or making a swift retreat if detected. It went against every instinct she had to steer her vessel into a confrontation. And yet here she was, principal pilot of the Liberator, and facing down hundreds of alien vessels as they forced their way through the single hole in the Star One defence grid.
She risked a look up from her controls. Cally was monitoring the battle formations, and remained calm despite the buffeting of the ship’s abrupt movement. Jenna had long abandoned warning them before she made any sharp manoeuvres – the crew had got used to the idea hours ago that they should expect the unexpected. Vila managed to maintain a firing procedure against the approaching ships, despite his plain terror at the onslaught. It was clear that his every instinct was to flee from the room and cower in a distant corner, but he gripped the weapons controls with grim desperation.
Avon was preternaturally calm, a still point amid the chaos. Jenna suspected it was a cold anger that let him remain in quiet control of the Liberator. How different Blake would have been in this situation. But was that necessarily better?
A hail of shrapnel rattled across the hull, and Jenna wrenched the controls aside to avoid the remaining debris. The flaming wreck of an alien ship, gutted by the neutron blasters, tumbled past Liberator and into the cold depths of space. Like so many of its predecessors, its bulbous shape seemed utterly inimical to conventional space travel.
Avon was already snapping out fresh orders. ‘I want a full sensor sweep, Zen. Have we enough energy in the primary power banks to sustain this strafing pattern ahead of us?’
‘PRIMARY POWER AT THIRTY-SEVEN PERCENT. SECONDARY POWER IS STILL RECHARGING.’
Avon moved over for a closer look at the main view screen. He clutched at the bulkhead to help himself stay upright when the ship lurched again. ‘Initiate pattern sigma positioning. Random manoeuvres at your discretion.’
‘CONFIRMED.’
The next bizarrely-shaped alien ship was squeezing into their sector from beyond the Star One defence grid. ‘Look!’ called Jenna. ‘That’s another of them through.’
This one, however, had an extraordinary turn of speed. Even at that distance, Jenna saw its knobbly hull fluoresce in a rainbow display of colours before it sped at incredible velocity towards Liberator. Vila was caught by surprise. He gave a little squeal of alarm as the vessel loomed impossibly large, impossibly quickly in front of them. Before Jenna had time to wonder if the shield would deflect it, or Vila had time to retarget, the ship had whooshed past and vanished from the screen.
Jenna let out a huge breath. ‘I thought it was going to ram us.’
Cally was already tracking it with the detectors. ‘Vila, can you pick it off with the rear neutron blasters?’
‘I can’t see it,’ he admitted, becoming flustered. ‘Wait… er… No.’ He flapped a bit more. ‘Yes! Oh… it’s out of range.’
‘Should we pursue?’ asked Cally.
‘Leave it,’ said Avon. ‘Stay focused on the gap in the grid. A handful of fugitives can’t do much harm.’
‘That’s what you used to say about us,’ muttered Vila.
‘And now look at us,’ agreed Jenna. She thought about the fluorescing vessel that had just escaped through the defence grid. The display screen showed that another strange ship was easing its way through the breach, growing larger before her eyes. ‘How many alien ships have slipped through now?’
Cally pondered the question. ‘Eight? Maybe nine?’
‘And we’ve destroyed twenty in the past hour alone,’ Avon reminded them. His finger stabbed at the controls for the neutron blasters. A fierce shaft of brilliant green light speared into the oncoming attacker and tore it apart. ‘Twenty-one now,’ said Avon. ‘Zen, how many more?’
Lights flashed across the main fascia of the ship’s computer. ‘SENSORS INDICATE NEARLY ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-NINE VESSELS BEYOND THE OPENING IN THE BARRIER. THERE ARE AN ESTIMATED FOUR HUNDRED AND FIFTY-EIGHT VESSELS PROBING THE SATELLITE NETWORK AT OTHER POINTS.’
Movement on the screen made Jenna realise they’d forgotten something. ‘Incoming debris!’
‘Hold tight!’ yelled Avon, his previous composure gone. He threw himself into the nearest flight seat and held on. A metallic clatter on the hull indicated that the momentum of pieces from the shattered ship had carried them through the Liberator‘s defences.
‘INFORMATION. DEFENCE SHIELD AT TWENTY PERCENT EFFICIENCY.’
Vila groaned. ‘Now they can see us as well as hit us! Oh, where are those Federation ships?’ He seemed to ponder this irony. ‘We spend years trying to avoid them, but when you really need them to turn up…’
‘You are babbling, Vila,’ said Cally.
‘Babbling is what he does best,’ said Avon. ‘Concentrate on the neutron blasters.’
Vila looked furious. Jenna smiled encouragingly at him, but he wasn’t amused. ‘I’m not a soldier in your army, Avon,’ he snapped. ‘Picking pockets is what I’m good at. And picking locks—that’s my area of expertise. I’m a genius at that. But this is just… madness.’ Even so, he continued to focus on the screen, and his hands flickered over the blaster controls in anticipation of his next target.
Avon wasn’t interested in Vila’s protests, and was already considering their next options. ‘Zen, can you intercept any alien communications? Tell us what they’re saying.’
‘SENSORS HAVE DETECTED ALIEN COMMUNICATION, BUT TRANSLATION IS NOT AVAILABLE.’
Jenna was intrigued. ‘What do they sound like, Zen?’
‘NOW PLAYING INTERCEPTED MESSAGE.’
At first Jenna thought that there was interference in the signal. It soon became plain that the noise they could hear was actually the alien communications. This was what they sounded like. A warbling, guttural gargle of noise, swooping across a full octave and utterly dissimilar to any voice she had encountered. Unlike any animal noise she’d ever heard, too. It was completely… well, alien to her.
‘Turn it off, Zen!’ said Avon. ‘Keep monitoring for anything that makes sense. But if we can’t understand them, I don’t want to hear them.’
Vila agreed. ‘It was just gibberish.’
‘Maybe I should have asked you to translate,’ Avon told him.
This was no time to undermine Vila, Jenna thought. But she didn’t have time to comment, because of a sudden new turn of events. ‘Two more ships are through!’ She pointed urgently at them as they loomed larger and larger on the main screen, spiralling towards the Liberator. She considered an emergency manoeuvre, but concluded that the corkscrew pattern of the aliens’ approach had locked Liberator in their sights. Could she reverse away from them? That would take Liberator off-station and allow other ships unfettered access through the hole in the defence grid.
Perhaps it was already too late.
‘They’re locked on,’ Jenna yelled. ‘Brace for impact!’
Chapter 3
The Unknown Universe
Vila’s hands froze over the neutron blasters. The two alien ships coiled through space towards Liberator. Their hulls blazed with light, and a glittering tail of luminescence curled in their wake. It was almost hypnotic.
Jenna was yelling something at him. Or someone else. Or everyone. Or maybe just yelling. He felt like screaming himself. Instead, he grabbed hold of the console b
efore him, just as the alien ships smashed into the flare shield.
A deep vibration struck up throughout the flight deck, juddering and shaking him to his core. It was disorienting, slightly nauseating. Vila slammed back in his seat, and gripped the console even more tightly in a desperate attempt to stay upright. Distant alarms blared. A rattle of debris on the outer hull echoed throughout the room.
There was fresh yelling in his ear. Too close for Jenna. It had to be Avon.
‘You have them, Vila. Fire!’
Vila risked letting go of the console with one hand, and prodded hopefully at the activation control for the neutron blasters. It loosed off a fusillade of shots. Two, three, more…
The lights on the view screen flared brilliantly, blindingly. The flight deck tilted sickeningly to one side, and then just as abruptly to the other. When his eyes recovered, Vila saw only sparkling debris where the two alien ships had been.
‘Got them!’ he shouted, almost delirious with delight. ‘I got them!’
‘Well done,’ said Avon. There was a grudging note in his voice. ‘Stay alert. There’ll be plenty more.’
Vila stared at the back of Avon’s head, visualising a target. ‘It’s only your encouragement that keeps me going, you know.’
But Avon had already crossed the flight deck, and was sliding Orac out from a side cabinet. He swept his hand across a table, scattering onto the floor what few items had not already been thrown there during the violent manoeuvres of the previous few hours. When he had Orac on the table, Avon slotted the activation key into place. A querulous whine indicated that the computer was active.
Avon placed his hands either side of the transparent box. ‘Orac, what have you discovered about the alien fleet’s intentions?’
Orac responded immediately in his familiar irritable fashion. ‘As I have mentioned before, your frequent and impertinent interruptions do not change the situation.’
Avon slapped one palm against the side of the computer. ‘Your regular and predictable evasions aren’t helping, either.’ He tried again. ‘What have you found?’
This time, there was a pause before Avon got a reply. Vila thought that Orac’s tone was now more evasive than aggrieved. ‘The alien technology is too inferior for suitable analysis.’
Avon gave a great laugh of derision, an odd contrast to his coldly imperious command of Liberator so far. ‘Of course! Their systems do not use Tarial Cells. Therefore, you cannot interrogate them.’ Avon’s humour didn’t last as he pondered the implications of this. ‘That doesn’t make them stupid, Orac. It makes them impenetrable.’
‘I thought,’ said Vila, ‘that all computers in the known universe were based on Tarial Cells?’
‘Well, you’re looking at the unknown universe now.’ Avon gestured expansively towards the view screen. In the distance, hundreds of alien ships lurked beyond the satellite defence barrier. ‘Orac, try something else. Assimilate all Zen’s current long-range scan data, and cross-reference it against the known movements of the alien fleet over the past two hours. Extrapolate their next moves, and advise.’
‘If you insist,’ grumbled Orac.
‘Oh, I do.’ Avon snatched at the activation key, and the chattering whine disappeared as he left Orac to complete the assignment. Avon slid the computer back into the side cabinet.
Vila wanted to ask what Avon had actually asked Orac to do, but Jenna was already calling over to him.
‘Watch it. Some of the smaller ships have broken through.’ She studied the display in front of her. ‘Must be…’
‘Half a dozen,’ suggested Cally.
Jenna was already steering Liberator back into a defensive position. ‘Here they come.’
Vila looked wildly at the view screen. A scattered group of gleaming points of light twisted towards him. Two of them executed an eccentric route that followed no logical pattern. The others zoomed larger and larger, aimed unerringly at the Liberator. He stabbed repeatedly at the neutron blasters, unsure whether just to blast away at random in the hope of catching all of the attackers, or to concentrate on fewer, more targeted shots and risk missing some of the others.
‘They’re too fast!’ he wailed. ‘I can’t pick them off.’
Jenna wasn’t making it any easier, he decided. Perhaps as a result of the previous attack, she was shimmying the ship from side to side to make it less obvious which direction they might finally commit to. The engines swooped and boomed. The view screen wobbled in response, and Vila quivered along with it.
‘There are more coming!’ Jenna warned him.
‘Another four,’ Cally confirmed.
Jenna twisted Liberator aside, and the ship rolled abruptly. But it was to no avail. ‘They’ve got us in a pincer formation!’
A coruscating barrage of alien blasts pummelled the Liberator. The flight deck lit up, brilliant light searing from the main screen until the automatic filters cut in to compensate for the painful brightness. The ship’s engines dipped ominously, then re-established their familiar note. Vila wondered if the defences had been breached. Were they holed? Could they still defend themselves from this fresh onslaught?
He examined his readouts worriedly. He wasn’t optimistic at the best of times, but this really didn’t look good. ‘Our neutron blasters are almost exhausted.’ He looked over at Jenna for reassurance.
She had none. ‘The force wall is failing, too. Zen, what’s our status?’
‘DEFENCE FIELD NOW AT TWELVE PERCENT EFFICIENCY. BATTLE COMPUTERS PROJECT THAT CURRENT RATE OF DAMAGE WILL EXHAUST THE AUTO-REPAIR SYSTEMS IN TEN MINUTES.’
‘What was that?’ asked Cally.
Vila saw that she had her head tilted at an angle, as though straining to hear something. ‘That was our last chance of survival!’ he told her.
She didn’t seem to hear him. Or maybe she was concentrating on whatever had caught her attention. Though what she could possibly hear above the cacophony of the alien assault, Vila couldn’t imagine. He returned to his controls, firing the neutron blasters as the alien counter-strike continued. Liberator‘s hull groaned ominously.
‘Can’t you hear it?’ Cally asked. Her voice was insistent, but so quiet that she was barely audible beneath the noise of the attack. ‘It’s a babble of voices… a kind of continuous chattering…’
‘The aliens!’ groaned Vila.
‘Or,’ suggested Avon, ‘she’s been listening to you for too long.’
‘INFORMATION. DETECTORS INDICATE SEVERAL HUNDRED ADDITIONAL SHIPS APROACHING LIBERATOR, VECTOR SEVEN-NINE.’
‘At last!’ A surge of relief flooded through Vila, almost as good as a slug of soma. ‘The Federation fleet! I never thought I’d be glad to see them.’
‘Impossible,’ snapped Avon. ‘They are a long way off. Zen, identify those ships!’
‘THAT INFORMATION IS NOT AVAILABLE.’
Jenna already seemed to be considering other possibilities, but the instrumentation was not helping her. ‘Rear sensors have been knocked out.’
‘I only realigned those the other week,’ grumbled Vila. The emotional rush had well and truly dissipated. ‘I don’t fancy going out there again, Jenna. Those hull suits make me claustrophobic.’
‘Auto-repair should be able to handle it,’ she reassured him.
‘Not at this rate of damage,’ said Avon. Trust him to crush any remaining optimism.
Vila was exasperated. ‘We’re surrounded! Defenceless. Blind. Let me know if I’ve missed any other kind of catastrophe. I’d hate to die misinformed.’
Avon clearly still couldn’t believe the evidence of the readout in front of him. ‘How the hell did so many alien ships get behind us?’
Vila glared at him. ‘You know what they say about “fight or flight”? Well, I’ve always been quite keen on flight. How does that sound to you, Avon? Jenna?’
‘Neutron blasters are depleted,’ she replied. Her choice was clear, at least.
Avon was still searching for straws to clutch at. ‘We’re ru
nning out of options.’
‘Running out sounds like a pretty good option to me!’ Vila retorted. ‘So what’s keeping us here?’ He twisted around to appeal directly to the others. ‘You agree with me don’t you, Jenna? And you, Cally?’
Jenna was frowning. But it wasn’t Avon she was worried about. ‘Cally? Are you all right?’ There was no reply.
A fusillade of alien fire raked across Liberator, and a control panel next to Zen exploded in sparks. Everyone ducked instinctively.
Everyone, Vila noted, except Cally. She remained standing by her console, rocked from side to side by the lurching movement of the flight deck, yet otherwise unmoved by the bedlam around her.
Her expression had glazed over. Despite the commotion of the alien bombardment, her attention was somewhere else entirely.
Chapter 4
Ragtag Army
Cally could feel her body swaying to and fro. She sensed movement around her, the flicker of lights in her peripheral vision, and the sense that her friends were trying to talk to her.
But there was a more insistent conversation in her mind. She’d perceived it faintly at the start of the alien attack, but dismissed it as her mind playing odd tricks at a time of great stress. Odd sensations that had tickled at the edges of her consciousness since arriving in this sector had continued to build, like a voice calling ever more insistently from a distance. Was it trying to attract her attention?
It had grown into many more, all calling, all appealing… to her? Low whispers that were building into a shout. Becoming a chorus of voices.
She concentrated. Tried to make out what they were calling out to her. No, it wasn’t a chorus. They were not all chanting the same thing at once. The words were not the same. But surely, Cally sensed, their meaning was the same. Not the same words, exactly. Not the same vocabulary. Not even the same language. But the same theme.
Cally focused in on that theme. They were not even voices – they were minds.
She felt a thrill ripple through her whole body. A mixture of dread and exhilaration. For a brief moment she contemplated the prospect that she had reached out to the consciousnesses of the alien fleet. The excitement faded as she realised that the enemies’ thoughts were utterly closed to her. Unknown. Unattainable.
Blake’s 7: Warship Page 2