Lucifer's Star

by C. T. Phipps

  Reaching the front of the amazingly durable-looking doors, I asked, “So, we should expect trouble on the other side?”

  “Yes. I also suggest you hurry as I doubt whoever disposed of the crew intends to stick around.”

  “Well, we just need to figure out a way to get past—”

  That was when the huge metal doors opened up, parting in four different directions and revealing the sight of a square chamber with the wall on the other side of us open to the crashing waves of Shogun. Isla was standing at the controls for the door and had pried them open before hotwiring them again.

  Someone really needed to talk to Janice’s security people.

  On the other side of the doors was a fifty-foot-long Peregrine-class gunship, shaped like a long metal truncheon with guns on the sides and front plus a backdoor entrance. It was flanked by dead soldiers.

  Ida and Clarice were both in front of the gunship, Janice Rin-O’Harra on the ground with her hands tied in force cuffs. Janice was also gagged, which was a simple but elegant deterrent to her using any of the Water Palace’s voice-activated defense systems. All three women looked to the opening doors with Ida and Clarice both drawing pistols.

  “Holy crap,” Judith said. “You’re running with a resilient crew.”

  “Too resilient,” I muttered while lifting my rifle. Turning on the armor’s speakers, I said to the pair. “Give me one good reason not to shoot you to hell, Ida.”

  “Cassius?” Ida said, her mouth opening. “Son of a bitch.”

  “That’s not a good reason,” William said, moving his rifle between both. “Someone owes me an arm and I’m entirely willing to take one from both of you since, technically, I lost two in the course of this fucked up mission.”

  “So you made it out,” Ida said, shaking her head. “I’m glad.”

  “We were just arguing about whether to go back for y’all,” Ida said, dropping her gun and gesturing with her head for Clarice to do the same. “Clarice wanted to make sure you were rescued, but I argued the safest place for you was in Janice’s dungeon while all this blew over.”

  “I lost my arm!” William shouted. “Hiro is dead!”

  Ida closed her eyes. “That was Janice’s doing. I’m sorry, I didn’t expect her to go that far.”

  Janice said something foul through her gag, probably a denial. Of course, I knew she actually was innocent and Zoe was responsible.

  Isla shut the security doors behind us before blasting the controls, which I wasn’t sure was an effective strategy, but I was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. “Guys, if you could hurry this up, I’d be very grateful.”

  “Isla?” Clarice said, mouth agape.

  Isla removed her helmet and rushed over to embrace her; the two of them gave each other a passionate kiss.

  “Excuse me, she’s still the enemy!” William said, growling.

  “You don’t believe that, or you would have shot her,” I said, wanting to move this conversation along.

  “No,” William said, slumping his shoulders. “I don’t.”

  “Aww, they’re in love. I guess I don’t have to worry about Isla after all,” Judith said, chuckling.

  “I should probably mention I was also with Clarice.”

  “You what?”

  “Now’s not the time,” I said, taking advantage of the fact we were literally in danger of dying any minute. “Captain Claire, I must regretfully inform you I am terminating our partnership.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Ida said.

  “I’m also taking the Melampus,” I said, smiling.

  “Like hell!” Ida said, balling her fists. I suspected if not for William’s presence, she would have gone for her gun then and there.

  “Already done,” I said, looking at the corpses on the ground. “I take it the Commonwealth no longer recognizes your authority.”

  “A wee bit of a tiny misunderstanding,” Ida said, frowning. “Stupid bastards only had to let us on the ship. They started spouting off some nonsense which got them killed. This is going to take months of data-work to sort out.”

  “Yeah, I used the Cognition A.I. to destroy your position in the Watchers.”

  Ida’s eyes widened.

  “You what?” Clarice said. “Cassius, how—”

  Isla pulled away. “Are you seriously going to ask that?”

  “Everything Ida has done has been for the good of this Sector,” Clarice said, staring at me. “The FSA represents a clear and present—”

  Judith spoke over the loudspeakers, “I should mention I’ve not only given Cassius the legal title to the Melampus but also entered him into the system as a VIP for the Commonwealth. He can activate the Peregrine and get past all of the blockades or password issues we need to in order to escape. They’ll catch it in a couple of months but he’s the only way off this rock.”

  “Who the hell is that?” Clarice said.

  Janice hissed and muttered something under her breath, clearly blaming Judith for her present predicament.

  “A smart A.I. my sister created,” I said, telling a half-truth. “Before I destroyed the Cognition A.I. I had her downloaded into my cybernetics. She had ones for a lot of Crius VIPs she was going to raise from the dead and use as weapons. A whole new humanity to endanger the Commonwealth.”

  The bigger the lie, the more people would believe it, especially if you started with something plausible to build on.

  “Your sister didn’t make a Cognition A.I.,” Ida said. “She was working for me the whole time to sabotage it.”

  “Yeah, well, you didn’t take into account Zoe is a psychopath,” Judith said, on the loudspeakers. “Or did you miss the massacre of people on the Rhea.”

  “And I suppose the prison staff just let you walk out,” Ida said. “I don’t trust machines, girl, nor do I think Cassius is telling the truth about what happened.”

  “You can stay here if you want,” I said, smiling. It wasn’t a pretty smile. “See how you like it with the locals looking for terrorists.”

  “I’ll sort things out soon enough,” Ida said, snorting. “We’re not so computer dependent as that. Besides, you still haven’t answered my questions about your sister.”

  That was when I heard the sound of a detonation charge going off on the other side of the wall, taking out two out of the four doors. They weren’t able to hack through what Isla had done but they were possessed of enough weaponry to blow through it, I guessed.

  “Tick-tock, Colonel,” Ida said.

  William frowned. “All the more reason to shoot you, tell the nice people outside we’re with Cassius, and let God sort it out.”

  Ida frowned.

  Isla surprised me by ending this stand-off before it turned to violence. “I examined the Cognition A.I. before it blew. It’s real or was. You owe Cassius for destroying it. I’ve also examined Zoe’s work with smart A.I. and know you have, too. Zoe took the body of Judith and put her A.I. in the system before Cassius retrieved her. He stopped a threat you weren’t even aware of while you were chasing Janice. You owe him.”

  How Isla knew any of that perplexed me until I remembered she could see Judith’s avatar and had probably been communicating with her the entire time. Which meant she knew I’d said I didn’t love her.

  Well, so be it. It was only the truth.

  I love her as a friend.

  An extremely beautiful sexy friend.

  But a friend.

  Clarice looked between Ida and my group before taking a deep breath. “You’re right, we do owe them. We owe them everything.”

  “Is no one going to mention my arm? The one I’ve lost twice tonight? Which brings it to four times total!” William shouted.

  Ida slumped her shoulders. “Fine, Cassius, I believe you if Doctor Hernandez vouches for you. Still, we don’t need to run, a Commonwealth fleet is coming here to secure the planet and break the back of the Rin-O’Harra cartel.”

  I took a deep breath, realizing just how badly I’d
thrown things for a loop. “Actually, the Revengeance is coming along with the rest of the Sector Fleet to deal with it. In about, oh, ten minutes, this place is going to be the sight of the biggest space battle since Hoshi’s Point.”

  “I really, really hate your sister,” William said, wrongly blaming her for all of this. It was only about ninety percent her fault.

  Ida processed that information. “Get me to my ship. You can have it after I make a few holocoms and try to salvage this disaster.”

  A second detonation charge went off and blew a hole in the door as William fired back through it.

  “Into the gunship!” I shouted, ready to leave this rock.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  “Keep an eye on Ida for me, would you?” I said to William, plopping myself in the pilot’s chair of the gunship, taking a moment to familiarize myself with the controls. It didn’t take long since, to my disgust, I realized this vessel incorporated Archduchy technology, including smart A.I. and cybernetic link-ups. What the hell was going on?

  “Focus, Cassius,” Judith said as the gunship’s shields popped on and absorbed the fire of the retreating Commonwealth soldiers who’d come here for evac.

  I could only imagine what they were feeling, having gone into a mission that had rapidly gone pear-shaped, managed to survive the Shogun’s fierce resistance, and now were ready to escape only for us to steal their ride. It was a spectacularly terrible thing to do to a fellow soldier.

  But I had my own people to look after.

  Linking myself to its controls and finding myself capable of overriding the military safeguards to prevent exactly this sort of thing from happening, I pulled it out of the hangar bay and headed for the stars. The gunship was an ungainly and heavy thing compared to the sleek starfighters I was used to flying, but it was orbit capable, which was all that mattered right now.

  The Peregrine gunship shuddered and shook as it moved through the atmosphere, the ship’s sensors picking up multiple contacts as I could palpably feel the arrival of the Revengeance in the system. It wasn’t alone as the ship detected a massive armada of Commonwealth ships already deploying. The thing was, the Revengeance hadn’t arrived alone.

  They’d brought the Chel with them.

  “Shit,” I muttered, watching hundreds of lights appear across my mind’s eye. What had been planned as the perfect ambush had turned into exactly the opposite.

  “What have I done?” I muttered, staring forward.

  “It’s the other Cassius,” Judith said as her avatar appeared as a six-inch-tall hologram on the dashboard of the ship. “He must have recognized this had all the makings of a trap and called in the others.”

  “How?” I asked, my mouth wet.

  “It’s literally what you would have done,” Judith whispered.

  “I hate that cliché,” I muttered, shaking my head. “Even if it is literally true today.”

  I tried to calculate what our chances of getting through this minefield to the Melampus and then getting out were.

  Not good.

  Worse, we didn’t exactly have any other options since Peregrines didn’t have jumpdrives and were designed solely to link up with larger ships like the Revengeance, Rhea, or Melampus. We had to get to the latter in one piece, and then get it out similarly, all the while surrounded by a massive armada.

  I had not thought this plan through.

  “You think?” Judith’s avatar said, looking up at me.

  “Hush you. You helped initiate it.”

  “I was blinded by love!”

  “Uh huh.”

  “And screwing over every side in this stupid, stupid war.”

  “I admit, that was part of the reason.”

  That was when Clarice surprised me by moving into the cockpit and taking the co-pilot’s seat.

  “You know how to fly a Peregrine?” I asked, trying to figure out the safest vector for traveling through a spaceway about to fill up with starfighters.

  “We had something similar in Mason’s Raiders,” Clarice said. “Albeit significantly older and shittier. The souped-up cybernetic interface should work with mine as long as your little A.I. buddy provides me with the necessary clearance.”

  “A.I. buddy?” Judith said. “That’s it, you’re off the Christmas list.”

  “The what?” Clarice asked.

  I flipped several switches as I powered up the weapons systems. “This day can’t get any worse.”

  “You just had to jinx it,” Judith grumbled.

  “What now?”

  “The good folk at the Commonwealth down below have just marked this ship as stolen,” Judith said, sighing. “The Commonwealth’s forces have now marked it as hostile. Oh, and Janice’s people have done the same for kidnapping her. They have orders to disable it if possible, though.”

  “If possible.”

  “Janice pissed off a lot of our family,” Clarice said, sighing. “I suspect it’d be better for everyone if she and I both went up with this ship.”

  “Great.”

  We broke the atmosphere a few minutes later, finding ourselves in the infinite void of space even as the sensors picked up the hundreds of battlefronts opening across the endless canopy. On Old Earth, tacticians had to deal with attacks from their sides and above, but space had even more angles as well as unfathomable to the human mind distances.

  On one side of the battle was the Revengeance, much as I remembered it, but it had been outfitted with powerful new engines and Chel hypercannons. Accompanying it were dozens of Chel dreadnoughts, destroyers, and carriers. An even larger array of Commonwealth ships were present, with frigates and corvettes to supplement it further. It was like the Battle of Hoshi’s Point reborn.

  And I’d brought it down upon Shogun.

  No.

  As much as my conscience wanted to take the blame for this, it would have happened in other places if not here. The Free Systems Alliance had already destroyed fleets and at least here the Commonwealth had the advantage of forewarning. Nothing could keep humans from fighting if they wanted to fight. It was a lie but one I could live with.

  I hoped.

  A hundred thousand energy blasts sailed across space in every direction accompanied by long beams of continuous light which were a weapon I did not recognize but crisscrossed the battlefield despite the enormous energy drain it must have been inflicting on their reactors.

  They looked derived from mining lasers but were being fired from the Revengeance and the Chel dreadnoughts, slamming into the shields of the Commonwealth vessels before overloading them. They were brute force weapons that wouldn’t provide anything more than a momentarily advantage in battle but that was sometimes all you needed.

  “Any sign of the Melampus?” I asked, trying to focus solely on our situation. Thankfully, the two sides appeared more focused on each other than taking revenge on us for whatever slights we’d committed on Shogun.

  I could look but it was taking everything I had to coordinate with Judith and run the six other systems that were supposed to have other crewmen running them. The fact Judith was helping only just barely made it possible given she was operating out of my implants.

  “Yes,” Clarice said, surprising me. “It’s already taken off. It’s marked as a neutral ship and space is big, so it’s avoiding being caught in the crossfire. It’s headed to the jump beacon.”

  I tried not to grit my teeth. “How long until it makes it?”

  “Uh—” Clarice looked down at the controls.

  “Five minutes and thirty-two at present speed,” Judith interrupted. “They hadn’t gotten the engines prepped properly before breaking away from the space station.”

  “Show off,” Clarice muttered.

  We could intercept them before they arrived at top speed and I immediately pushed our engines to that.

  “Shouldn’t we contact them? Tell them we’re coming?” Clarice asked as warning alarms started blaring across the gunship.

  We were now being targ
eted by a trio of older-model Crosshair fighters. I suspected they believed the gunship would be an easy kill and we were passing nearby their attack zone. The fighters launched a series of Nebula-14 concussion rockets, the least of which would blow this ship apart. We were, after all, little more than a glorified troop transport and infantry support vehicle.

  “No, that would make the Melampus a huge target,” I said, moving to one side before igniting the ship’s surface missiles.

  “Cassius, those aren’t going to stop those things,” Clarice said. “They’re way too slow.”

  “Not if an A.I. is good at directing where they go,” I said, looking at Judith’s avatar.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Judith muttered. “This isn’t exactly what I was designed for.”

  Behind us, the concussion rockets exploded as Judith’s countermeasures kept us all alive a bit longer. I fired the ship’s plasma cannons behind us, but their short range and weak power meant they were doing little more than pecking against the fighters’ shields even when they hit.

  “Cassius, focus on shooting down their missiles and slow down enough to get them close,” Judith said.

  “Excuse me?” I asked, not sure I’d heard that correctly.

  “Put everything, even shields in maneuverability,” Judith said. “I trust your piloting skill.”

  “I’m not sure I do in this garbage scow,” I said, nevertheless doing the same as another string of rockets was launched our way.

  Judith then detached all of our missiles at once without launching them.

  “Judith—”

  “Trust me.”

  Clarice took over the gunnery position and targeted the Nebula-14 rockets with the aft cannons, blowing apart one after the other while I dodged out of the way of two before blowing them to pieces. The Crosshair fighters proceeded to descend from the sky, firing at us with their cannons and managing to take out a side emplacement with a stray shot. Any closer and it would have gone through the engines.

  That was when the rockets Judith had released ignited just as they passed and went up the Crosshair fighters’ engines, causing all three of the ships to detonate in a spectacular display of light.