Violent Wonder

by Fredrick Niles

  They’d have to pray hard if they wanted to make it out of this.

  “Fire it up,” Ritz said as one of the corvettes started to advance on their position. One of the others began to move off to the right to come in from the side while the third hung back at the gate.

  “Okay,” Byzzie said as she typed away at her counsel. “We should be…good.”

  “All right, you get a lock and I’ll tell you when,” Ritz said. “Hector, you make sure we’re always moving in a zig-zag pattern. I don’t want anything hitting us even once. Our shields might be able to take it, but I don’t want to find out.”

  “Got it,” Hector said.

  “And Hector?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Make sure they can’t follow us through that gate.”

  “We should be okay as long as we can make it through,” Hector said. “This ship is a closed system, so no one should be able to see our coordinates.”

  “Good,” Ritz said. “Now hitting those Mirror Circuits is going to be pretty difficult, and who knows how long it’ll take. So our priority is taking out these three corvettes. They have numbers and firepower, but we’ve got a few of our own tricks up our sleeve. So hopefully we can outmaneuver them long enough to take them out. After that, we have all the time in the world to take out that shield. Got it?”

  “Got it,” Byzzie and Hector said in unison.

  Blue dots began to appear on the side of the nearest corvette as its weapons spun up. Most military vessels of that size used Tesla-powered firing coils that shot condensed beams of energy. The Leopold could only take one of those before its shields went down, maybe two with the new system in place.

  “Hit it,” Ritz said and Byzzie pulled the trigger on her console.

  A thin beam of light was emitted from the new Javelin barrel Byzzie had installed just over the viewport of the ship. It was bright but was no more effective than turning a flashlight on. It went back out again.

  “Byzzie, what was that?” Ritz said, concern creeping into his voice. Just then, the ship rocked as they were hit by a Tesla round. Byzzie and Hector were strapped into their chairs, but Ritz had neglected to do the same and was thrown halfway across the room. He clenched his teeth and struggled back to his good leg while consoles and energy shield warnings blared.

  “Hold on, hold on, let me recalibrate.” Byzzie tapped away at her keyboard.

  Two more Tesla rounds zagged by them as Hector dipped and rolled the ship, the viewport spun around in front of them and as it did they caught a glimpse of the other corvette coming to bear on their flank.

  “Okay, Javelin away,” Byzzie said, pulling the trigger again. This time a fat glob of white energy streaked out of the ship’s barrel and smashed into the corvette just as it began to fire another volley. The corvette’s shields flared as the impact sent it into a spin, its shots going wide.

  “Yeah!” Hector said, throwing his arms up. “That’s what I’m talking about.”

  “Hold on,” Byzzie said. “I think I can do you one better. Line me up on that other one coming in on our flank.” Her hands flew over the controls and she put her finger back on the trigger.”

  The pilot did as he was asked and the viewport was suddenly occupied by another ship, Tesla coils warming up.

  Byzzie pulled the trigger again and this time, the light began as a thin stream, but as it came within proximity of the ship it blossomed into a thick spear that punched through the hull and cut it in half, its shield flaring and being blown out the other side like a punctured air balloon.

  “Holy shit,” Ritz said, as the rest of the crew on the bridge sent up hoots and hollers. “How did you do that?”

  “I sent the Javelin round on an acceleration path, which means it builds energy as it travels,” she said breathlessly. “It’s kinda complicated, but I was able to calculate a path where it would hit critical mass just as it passed beyond the ship’s shields.”

  “Let’s not celebrate too early,” Hector said, pointing toward the viewport. “That other ship is coming around.”

  Ritz saw that he was right. The other corvette was coming in at an angle now, weapons bristling. In addition, the third ship had abandoned its post at the shield and was now accelerating up alongside its companion.

  “Shit,” he said. “Byzzie, we got more where that came from?”

  Byzzie shook her head, her frizzy hair bouncing as she did. “Sorry captain, not for a while. We used too much energy, and if we fire any more Javelin rounds we won’t have enough to jump the gate. Most I can do now is switch to the Chopper.”

  “The Chopper?”

  “Yeah, it’s a smaller version of the Javelin. It uses the same barrel but substantially less energy. It fires hard light rounds kinda like miniature versions of the big one we hit the other ship with. The problem is they only fire in a straight line so I can only hit something if we’re pointed directly at it.”

  “Okay, we still got our ballistics hooked up along the sides?” The Leopold had rows of large-caliber ballistic machine guns with airtight firing cambers along the left and right side of the ship. The barrels could swivel and track if they had a lock but couldn’t do much against a ship’s shields. “Let’s see if we can wear the shields down on one of them with the Chopper and then we can hit it with the ballistics. The machine gun rounds won’t blow it out of the sky, but it might be able to damage the hull enough to vent the ship’s atmosphere. If we can manage to punch a hole in the bridge, then we’re golden. While we’re finishing one with the guns we might be able to start on the next one with the Chopper. Hector, do you think you can make evasive maneuvers while raking the nose up and down the length of the ships?”

  “Affirmative,” Hector said.

  “Good. Byzzie, can you track two ships at once?”

  “Not with our locking system I can’t.”

  “How about with your brain? Can you fire on a ship with the Chopper while also firing on another with the guns?”

  She cracked her knuckles. “Been a while since I’ve been on a drum set, but I think my hands can still focus on doing two things at once.”

  “How about shields, are they-”

  The ship rocked as they were hit by another round, and this time they didn’t need to look at the shield’s percentage meter to know where they stood. They had seen it crackle and die in front of the viewport. Their shields were down.

  “Go, go, go!” Ritz barked as another volley came from the other direction, passing close enough to leave specks of bright light swimming in everyone’s vision.

  The Leopold ducked and weaved through the big Tesla rounds as it peppered one ship’s shields and then another’s; big wedges of white light spewing out of the Javelin barrel like huge tracer rounds. Unfortunately, there was no way to tell how well they were doing. They had never used the Chopper before, and therefore couldn’t tell how far they had drained the other ships’ shields. At this point, it was just a matter of not getting hit. Taking the corvettes down was secondary.

  They caught a lucky break when they turned to begin another pass on one of the ships and after the first few chunks of hard light smashed into it, the large energy bubble popped and went out.

  “It’s down! It’s down!” Ritz barked. “Hit it!”

  Byzzie grabbed the left-hand control toggle and hit the trigger. The ship rumbled as huge lead rounds poured out of the barrels on the left side of the ship and then the right. The firing mechanisms were tied into the targeting system and only fired if the object they were locked onto was accessible from each barrel’s specific vantage point. That meant that as one of the corvettes passed overhead, the machine guns would fire on the left and then on the right as it moved across.

  They didn’t get it the first time—they scored some hits, but not on anything vital—but on their second pass, a round clipped the bridge and they watched all the air in the compartment blow out into space in a cloud of crystallized moisture and thrashing bodies.

  “Gosh, that�
�s horrible,” Hector said, turning away. “I’m just glad Kit’s not here to see this. He wouldn’t very happy with us.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s the way it is. He knows we’re engaging ships out here, and he knows that most ships that get brought down don’t have a lot of survivors. At least, not on the bridge.” If the ship was hit just right, some of the crew might have been able to make it to the escape pods even after the ship was hit. That is, as long as all of the compartments were individually sealed.

  “Guys,” Byzzie said. “We got incoming.”

  The viewport was empty, but when Ritz looked down at the radar, he saw a blip coming up behind them. Without having to be told, Hector took evasive actions and the Leopold spun away from a trio of Tesla rounds.

  “Byzzie, what’s our shield at?”

  “41%,” she said. “Not enough to take a round straight on yet.”

  “Okay, Hector, you keep us clear of those guns. We need to start making passes on the shield. We’ve been out here far too long. Soon, they’ll be sending reinforcements. And I don’t think we can handle much more than one ship at the moment.”

  “Too late,” Hector groaned, and as he did, Ritz watched in horror as his radar began to fill up with dots.

  “Fuck me…” he breathed. It was unprofessional and lowered morale, but what was the point? There must have been no less than ten ships on the screen and that was what he could see. No doubt there were more coming in. One ship they could deal with—they had dealt with two but that had been far from a sure thing. This many though? With less than 50% shields and what basically amounted to peashooters for weapons? They didn’t stand a chance.

  Ritz closed his eyes and waited for it. Soon, a massive wave of Tesla energy would roll over them and if they were lucky, they wouldn’t feel any of it. More than anything, he felt bad for the crew in their quarters. Each of the small rooms had a view screen that afforded them some glimpse of the battle and how it had been playing out. No doubt, they were glued to them at this very moment, waiting for whatever happened next. At least the flight crew had been able to do something—at least they had done their best to plan and maneuver and fight. The rest of the crew, though? When all was said and done, they will have had to watch while their captain fought and lost; like watching a soccer match on television where the outcome of the game decided whether you lived or died.

  The captain took a deep breath and waited for the end.

  “Captain! Captain look!” Both his pilot and his gunner were pointing at the viewport, and at first he wasn’t sure what they were so excited about. Then he saw it.

  The shield was down.

  Somehow, in all the shooting that had happened, a stray round must have hit the top Mirror Circuit, because the other two hung limply at the bottom. All that random semi-accurate fire hadn’t been for nothing. They had fought tooth and claw, and at some point, a sharp edge had managed to knick something vital.

  “Captain,” Byzzie shouted, still pointing. “Look! We gotta go.”

  And he saw the problem—he saw why it was so critical that they leave now. Other ships had begun to crowd in on their viewport, but one of them was too far away. And the reason it was too far away, Ritz realized, was because it wasn’t trying to fire on them.

  It was trying to fix the shield.

  In fact, over the last few seconds, it had dipped down enough to where it was almost in range to drop another Mirror Circuit. Ritz didn’t know what that would take exactly, but it could have been just as easy as kicking one out of an airlock and letting it sync up with the others. For all he knew, the shield could be up at any moment.

  “Hector,” he said urgently. “Are the coordinates in?”

  “Uh,” the pilot looked down at his console. “Yeah, they are now.”

  “Good. Hit it.” They were close enough to the gate. All they needed now was to engage the Light Core they had just stolen and installed in their ship and they’d be home-free.

  “Captain, if that shield goes up when we’re passing through then we could-”

  Ritz didn’t wait to hear him. Instead, he leaned down and punched the red “engage” button with his fist. Light suddenly flared around them on the edge of their vision while a black smudge appeared in the middle.

  “Captain,” Byzzie began to wail.

  The other ship was in position. Any second. Any millisecond and the shield would be up. The nose of the Leopold stretched and the ship shot through the gate at the exact moment the Mirror Circuit engaged and the Light Shield flared to life.

  4

  Adrift

  Raquel was underwater. The thick liquid was black around her and here and there darted little streaks of silver. Something brushed against her leg. Something scaly. Something big. In the Void, an image swam into view. A river carved into a mountain and at its peak: a woman.

  She was smiling and radiant, wearing a purple summer dress that flapped and billowed in the wind. She turned and sat down at a small wooden picnic table, its surface packed with clay bowls and ceramic trays full of food. There were other people there too. Small children chasing each other around a tree. The clang of dishes inside a house that loomed in the background. Adults coming out with drinks in their hands.

  The woman turned back around, smiling again.

  It was her. Raquel.

  She was at one of her family’s picnics in Todos Santos, Mexico. The tang of salty ocean air on the wind. The hunched backs of the Sierra de la Laguna mountain range rolling across the skyline.

  But where was Mexico? What was Mexico? She had no idea who this woman was or where this picture had been taken. She had no clue how she even knew these words. She—

  She woke up, laying on the floor of her living quarters, her head pounding. The last thing she remembered was the battle at the gate…what had happened? They had been fighting the PUC vessels—using that new Javelin system that Byzzie had installed—wow that had been something. Had it been enough though?

  Now she remembered—remembered her viewing screen suddenly full of other ships. Reinforcements had arrived.

  Oh God, she thought. Am I dead?

  No, that couldn’t be. She was still in her living quarters with its sparse decorations of travel posters advertising other planets she had wanted to go to tacked to the walls, her little bed sitting there with sheets and comforter rumpled over the top. It was a decent place to sleep when you were tired but seemed a strange place to end up once you were dead.

  Okay, so probably not that.

  Maybe they had been taken. Maybe the PUC had hit them with some sort of shock-charge and knocked them all unconscious. She knew they had things like that but hadn’t ever actually seen one in use. If that was the case, then why was she awake? Maybe she had woken up earlier than they had expected her to and she was wasting valuable time trying to figure out what was going on.

  Then she remembered the dream and stopped cold.

  The dream. Swimming in the black. The woman in purple in a place that she didn’t know. What had that been?

  Excitement coursed through her as she thought about it. Could this be it? Could these be the answers she’d been hoping for the last five years? But if so, then what did they mean? How could she learn more?

  The door opened and she was brought back to her current situation.

  “Raquel, are you good?” It was Nadia. She stood there with her helmet off; long, wavy blonde hair framing her pale face.

  “Umm, maybe?” Raquel rubbed her head. “I don’t know. Am I dead?”

  “No more than the rest of us.”

  “Where are we? The last thing I remember was the battle, then I blacked out.”

  “I’m not sure but I think we made the jump. We should be in the Pillon System.”

  “Really?” Raquel shot to her feet. “We made it? We made the jump?”

  “Seems that way. I was just going to go check in with the captain and see what he says, but my view screen looks pretty blank at the moment.”

 
When Nadia and Raquel walked in followed by King, Ritz barely heard the hatch open behind him. Instead, his focus was directed at the viewport and the schematics rolling across Hector’s screen.

  “Hector,” Ritz said, sounding much calmer than he felt. “Where are we?”

  Hector didn’t answer. Instead, he tapped at his keyboard, trying to figure something out. The silence stretched and was wrought with so much tension that anyone observing might have had to look away.

  They weren’t in the Pillon System; nowhere near it. In fact, according to the readouts, they hadn’t come out any gate known to the ship’s onboard database, which had been brought up to date not three months ago.

  They should have seen the lush planet of Desia stretching out right in front of them, but instead, all they saw was a dim red star with what may have been the silhouettes of a few unknown planets in front of it.

  “Did you check the coordinates before you hit jump?” Ritz asked.

  “I checked them and rechecked them,” Hector said irritably. “And you’re the one who hit jump if you remember correctly.”

  Ritz wanted to discipline Hector that very moment—wanted to relieve him of his duties and send him back to his quarters—but he knew that if he did that he would be acting as a slighted man with a hurt ego, not a captain making decisions. He let it slide.

  “What about you, Byzzie? Are you sure you installed the Light Core correctly?”

  “I am as certain as I can be,” she replied. “We weren’t able to run any tests or diagnostics, but as you know: installing Light Cores was my literal job before this.”

  “Well, what then?” Ritz all-but-yelled. “What happened? Why are we here? Does anyone have any answers?”

  Byzzie was the first to speak up. “It is possible…” She stopped and thought about it for another second.

  “Yes?” the captain prompted.