by Scott Warren
The clouds betrayed its coming, beginning to rise at a pace that out-climbed his interceptor. They fled before the fury of the Maeyar weaponry. Then the blast hit him from behind, catching his ship and tearing it away from any effort to right its course. Sothcide tumbled nose over tail, helmet banging off the tight confines of his cockpit as a terrible rumble built underneath him. He had shut off his audio repeaters in anticipation, but the budding rumble that bloomed through his hull threatened to burst the fluid in his audial receptors. Behind the cacophony of the explosion was the blare of temperature alarms as the outside air baked the hull of the fighter, a fighter capable of nose-diving through reentry. He could see similar heat rising on his thermal sensors from the rest of his wing as they were warmed by the infrared energy.
It might have been the tumbling, or maybe the bombs had scrambled his sensors. But Sothcide had counted an extra thermal signature on the scopes, one not associated with his interceptors. It was gone now, but Sothcide couldn’t distract himself from the contact, despite the more pressing issue of the battle below as the reverberation from the shockwave faded and Sothcide wrestled control of his ship back, barely able to keep from blacking out. Something was up there. Something was shadowing his fighter wing.
"Riz, Did you see a thermal contact along axle six-two? Riz?"
No answer. Sothcide flipped one of his smaller screens to the after cockpit compartment recorder and saw his gunner slumped over in her straps, head lolling at an unnatural angle. He quickly cut the feed, sickened. None of the rest of his wing had reported it, it would have been all they could do just to avoid getting their own necks wrenched. And whatever brief glimpse he’d seen in Juna’s ionosphere was gone.
Was that where Victoria would track them?
The humans were slippery, space walking killers. They didn’t think like the Maeyar. Their tactics were almost Dirregaunt in nature. Could he think like one of them? That quandary would have to wait. With the area clear he had an attack to lead on the weakened Gavisari formation.
"See to yourself first, I don’t need you bleeding out before you can help her. Singh, make sure they can’t bypass that engine room door, then monitor the aft compartment. There’s still a few sealed up in comms, too."
Singh’s faceplate snapped in his direction, but she didn’t comment. Her opinion on leaving any of the Gavisari alive was something she wouldn’t discuss, but the scene that likely awaited him in the control center wasn’t apt to be pretty. Aesop towed Maggie’s limp form, pulling her along behind Vega as he navigated to the Gavisari medical bay. Medical closet would be a better description, as the three of them barely fit among the narrow stacks of supply compartments. There was nothing resembling a table or gurney, the Gavisari apparently performing operations while free-floating.
Aesop pulled off his helmet, inhaling the thick air, along with the scent of ozone and burnt gunpowder. His helmet he left in the air as he spun Maggie around and began pulling off her helmet as well.
"What do you need from me, Vega?"
Vega had already shrugged most of the way out of the bottom half of his suit, a gash on his thigh oozing blood that clung to his leg hair. Oozing was a good sign, oozing meant he hadn’t nicked an artery. "Pressure bandage," he said. "One of ’em nicked me around a corner, but I got him good. Let me handle Mags."
Pressure bandages were standard in every marine kit, stowed over the back left pocket. Aesop pulled it out and unrolled it. He had to get close to Vega to see what he was doing, and some part of him hoped Singh didn’t choose that moment to see how the surgery was coming.
Vega was currently too busy to care, if he noticed at all. Using his knife he cut away a patch of Maggie’s suit, pulling as he went to keep the material from self-sealing. As Vega tore off the section of suit, a sickly sweet scent hit Aesop’s nostrils, and he saw Vega curl his lip up with a sharp intake of breath and pull the last morphine syrette out of his chest pouch. Aesop finished adhering the self-tightening bandage and pulled himself up for a look. He winced as Vega prodded the jagged piece of metal wedged into her abdomen. It had gone in at a shallow angle, but the suit rubbing against it this whole time must have been excruciating, and white pus ran from the puncture.
Vega, a veteran of combat in several systems, grew pale. "I uh, I need a scalpel, they’ll have something like a scalpel. And forceps. And a spreader. Quick, the suit was keeping pressure on the wound. She’s really bleeding now.
"Scalpel, forceps. Right," said Aesop.
"And a spreader!"
Antimicrobials too, if he could find them. Aesop didn’t know if what Vega had would be sufficient. He pushed away from Maggie and Vega to the stacks of drawers and clasped cabinets. Blessed God, the Doc aboard the frigate had painstakingly labeled everything in a tight Kosso script. How those hooks held a pen he couldn’t wager, but he had probably saved Maggie’s life.
And they probably killed him. It was a gruesome thought, but he shook it off. He was getting too soft on the xenos. That could get him killed. He pulled out a rack of surgical instruments, only a vague idea of what forceps and a spreader were. Everything was neatly strapped down, but Aesop ruined the careful arrangement by ripping out what he needed. He stopped for a moment as he saw a bright nova deep in the storms on the planet’s surface through a translucent metal porthole. Someone had just blown up something down there. Something big.
"Aesop!"
"Moving," he said, clutching the tools to his chest and making his way back to Vega.
Vega had what few medical supplies fit in his pouch hanging in the air near him, and Aesop was careful not to disturb the air enough to send any of them drifting away. Thread, antimicrobial swabs, spray bandage, pressure bandage, and a suture kit hung around the marine like holy icons, completely counter to his chosen profession.
"Scalpel and spreaders, quick."
Aesop handed them over, instruments never designed for human hands or to be used on human physiology. Vega sprayed them with the disinfectant as he determined the best way to go about holding the treacherous hook-bladed scalpel. Despite the differences between the two races, medical professionals across the Orion Spur had seemingly universal commonalities. Doctors needed to be able to cut, they needed to remove foreign objects, and they needed solutions low-tech enough that the batteries would never die. Vega was clearly out of his element with the battlefield surgery. His hands trembled on the swabs as he cleared away the blood and pus, flinching as his patient twitched under his touch. Still, he knew more than Aesop. For all his ability to repair xenotechnology, he lacked anything more than the basic ability to repair the human body beyond applying a pressure bandage.
Vega’s hands were almost a blur until they were suddenly still. He looked up at Aesop.
"Hold these here."
Aesop hesitated.
"Hold them, goddamnit, I need both hands."
"Alright alright, like this?" said Aesop, taking the perforated grips of the Gavisari forceps in his hands.
"Close enough," murmured Vega as he bent down closer and slid the forceps around the shard. Maggie moaned as he shifted it, and Vega flinched again as if he were feeling everything she was. "There’s a second piece in there,"
"How can you tell?" asked Aesop.
"I can feel this one scraping it. Unless that’s her rib, in which case pulling this out might leak marrow into her bloodstream."
"That could cause an embolism, right?"
"I don’t fucking know, Cohen! But it’s got to come out. Keep holding those."
Vega mopped up the blood which had oozed out to fill the wound and took a deep breath. With one hand flat against Maggie’s pelvic arch he held his breath and applied a steady pulling pressure with his fingers white-knuckle tight on the forceps. Slowly, millimeter by millimeter, the shard of alien hull slid free, and blood welled up in its absence as the unconscious Maggie Chambers whined.
"I’m sorry Mags, I’m so sorry," said Vega as he probed the forceps deeper, for the piece of meta
l alloy that was still inside. The apologies weren’t for the pain. Well, not directly.
‘Vega," said Aesop. The marine didn’t look up, but he was listening. "This wasn’t your fault. The squad is my responsibility."
"Easy for you to say, mermão. You’re not the one that landed that harpoon."
"And I’m not the one making up for it now. A thousand things could have put any of us out of commission, but you’re the one that can give her a chance."
Vega grimaced again. "Holy . . . I think I got it." His fingers were quick and precise for such a big guy, and moving as much by feel as by sight, he adjusted the forceps an almost imperceptible amount, and then slid them out, with what looked like a radio receiver rivet between the tines of the tweezers. But the work wasn’t done, and Vega didn’t stop to gloat. Six sutures went into Maggie Chambers, then disinfectant, then layers of spray bandage to seal the wound. She would still need Doc Whipple, but Mags was through the worst of it. Aesop felt himself relaxing, running a hand through his sweat-soaked hair, and noticing for the first time, over the coppery tang of blood, the smell three days in a vacuum suit had imparted upon him.
He was still trapped on a xeno warship in a hostile system, but one had to learn to take the small victories where they could be found. Pushing off from the wall, Aesop left Vega to his work to revisit the porthole. The clouds had been pushed away from a substantial area on the blast wave of the nukes, but the speed of Juna’s winds was already dragging fresh coverage across the gaps. The ECW frigate had communications that might be able to penetrate the storms, with the aid of some human modulators to refine the frequency discrimination. Aesop pulled his helmet close enough for the radio to pick up his words.
"Singh, grab the comms array and start patching it in. Let’s have a word with the holdouts about our friends on the communication deck."
Emerging from the clouds into the canopy cleared by the brief atomic exchange revealed the two fleets careening headlong into each other. Arda’s smaller and more nimble remnant fleet against the comparatively slow but hard-hitting Gavisari cruisers. Without the mask of thick clouds, lasers lanced back and forth between the two. Only the Maeyar lasers fell within his visible range, but the searing metal and twisted gouts of venting gas betrayed the Gavisar arrays hitting home.
Sothcide pressed another burst of acceleration into his engines, switching to the fighter squadron frequency.
"Left wing, move in to support the Vitacuus. Right and forward, with me. We’re going to make a pass at the lead ship’s primary array."
With no gunner, Sothcide was limited by what dexterity steering the interceptor spared for weapons targeting, which was not much. Thus far the invasion fleet hadn’t responded to his wing of fighters dropping down from the canopy, or they had their hands full. But that wouldn’t last long. His squadron wings were practically skeletons, but he would make them work. Radio chatter between the Maeyar vessels failed to illustrate a favorable portrait of the tactical situation.
Barreling down at break-neck speeds, Sothcide opened up with tightly focused lasers. In atmosphere like this, they were visible to the naked eye and almost blinding even through the optical sensors. Violent cracks in millisecond bursts left glowing pinpricks on the hull of the lead cruiser. By the time he flashed past along with a dozen other ships, their presence had been noted and the anti-fighter stations began to deploy their own lasers and chaff to defract the cutting beams. But Sothcide was already headed back into the clouds, watching on his damaged rear sensors as the lines of the two fleets crossed each other, Arda with full engines burning trails in the atmosphere that snaked for miles, and the Gavisar fleet attempting to bring their cumbersome ships to bear. Two more Maeyar ships had left craters in the untamable mountains below, and they burned freely.
"Right wing, break off and provide fighter interdiction to the fleet. Forward wing, with me. Target is the Ridgebone-type missile destroyer aft of the main cruisers. Target the stress points amidships."
A kilometer-long ship was still built of parts, and swinging that much metal around in a tight arc was putting an unimaginable strain on an already damaged vessel. The Gavisari were getting greedy in their effort to stop Arda’s escape once again, overexposing their flanks. With a half-dozen interceptors in tow, Sothcide navigated the web of defenses and dove down at the destroyer, funneling as much of his micro reactor’s energy into his laser arrays as he could without blowing the linkages. Other lasers clicked on around him as his wingmates burned at the material joining points and the frame reinforcements of the destroyer. One of the sets of lasers winked out, and in a sideward monitor Sothcide saw a starburst explosion claim the unfortunate interceptor as a Gavisar fighter wing passed close to his formation.
His lasers weren’t designed to take down capital ships. They were made to cut through the armor of a fighter, or into sensitive exposed parts required by any deep-space vessel to maintain combat readiness. But the concerted effort against already weakened material paid off as he watched a plume of venting gas billow from the breach, and the amidship compartments crumple like a ration can. The aft third of the ship swung out at an angle, still pushed into the turn by the powerful engine while the rest of the Gavisar destroyer nosed down and began to plummet from the skies above Juna. The Ridgebone class destroyers were one of Gavisar’s prized artillery ships, and with its payload neutralized it would make it difficult for the Invasion Fleet to engage them without closing to almost point blank range.
As soon as Sothcide received the report that Arda’s remaining ships were clear, he led his wing back into the clouds covering the battlefield. The Maeyar’s positioning had given them the worst of the exchange, and left them three ships poorer to the Gavisari’s two, including the destroyer Sothcide sent into the valleys below. Once again the violent lighting of Juna crept around his interceptor, welcoming it into the storm. Already communication was becoming spotty and distorted, but he knew where to find Arda.
His radio chirped, the local wing band light illuminating. "Wing officer, are we not returning to the battlegroup?"
"Negative, four. There’s another ship up there somewhere, running quiet. It's feeding our course maneuvers to Gavisar. We have to locate and neutralize it."
If they could. Victoria was slick as river stone, and the way she spoke of this other captain . . . . She didn’t respect him, but she did fear him. If he were there, and that was still an if, then he was not to be taken lightly. Even as primitive as the Earth vessels were, there was a reason he personally had sought their kind out for this expedition. Now his decision may have cost the war if Arda couldn’t return what was left of her fleet to Pedres in fighting condition.
"Passive sensors only once we reach the ionosphere," said Sothcide. "Assume all voiced radio calls are compromised. Use the light cipher when able"
This truly was a different kind of war. Sothcide cut his engines to just above idle, barely enough to stay aloft. The humans rely on passive sensors and the reflected returns of radar in the vicinity. Where would such a craft gain the most advantage? The lightning of Juna’s storms followed the path of least resistance, likewise radio waves traveled with less resistance in Juna’s overcharged ionosphere. The secondary band of the ionosphere was home to thick masses of increased ionization which would reflect the RF signals with stunning clarity. Sothcide tuned his passive receivers to identify likely parcels. It was likely Victoria’s ghost ship would be in or near one, and he passed the message along to his squadron. The light array on his console blinked encrypted acknowledgements, and Sothcide silently cursed the necessary emissions.
The clouds were thinner here, but still ever-present in grand, sweeping brushes that would prevent visual detection. As Sothcide progressed, radio signals increased in strength toward his left front quarter receivers, and he swung his fighter around while keying the cipher transmission. Two and Six, increase speed and array north of my mark, seven-hundred miles distant. Three and Four, left and climb another thousand meters.
Five, with me.
Four of his five wingmates keyed an affirmative. Number Four was silent. Sothcide sent an IFF interrogation toward his bearing. Nothing. Could be the storms, could be the radio interference. Could be the Privateer. Six to Four’s last known position. Three report.
Four is unresponsive, Wing Officer the light panel chirped at him, drawing his attention to the message.
Sothcide diverted his own interceptor, and as he approached he picked up a plummeting thermal signature. His fourth squadron mate. Cursing to himself, he climbed to a higher altitude and made an assessment.
Two and Five, deploy active sensors, he ordered. Enemy vessel is present.
The active radar nearly overwhelmed his receivers in the ionosphere, but radar returns weren’t what he was looking for. Instead, he diverted his attention to the infrared sensors along his downed wingmate’s last known bearing. A small contact appeared, barely above background levels. But it was there, and it was moving south away from the wreckage. Sothcide checked the prior thirty seconds of his radar returns. Nothing. His eye spun in its socket as he relayed the new information from his squadron and fell in line to pursue. The humans were still largely a mystery, but they had some way of preventing active targeting returns via radar. But it wasn’t an infallible system. It generated waste heat.
Keep the active sweeps, narrow-field on incoming targeting data. Intensify output voltage. Ready point defense.
If they were confused at his orders to sweep what must seem like an empty swath of sky, the rest of the squadron gave no indication. These were Vehl’s pilots, and they were used to the unorthodox. With the active emissions awash at his back, and there being less likely to betray him, Sothcide risked a bit more speed in pursuit of the fleeing thermal signature and continuing to give Two and Five updated bearings.