Even the monotonous yet dangerous nature of guard duty did little to deter Anastasia’s buoyancy. It was, after all, an important mission, and it seemed that Fleet Admiral Wright, though surely disappointed, had accepted the decision of the Ethics Committee and was not intent on harboring destructive grudges, at least not at such a crucial time. Landus was where the Inferno was most needed.
It was Commander Zeeman who interrupted her meditations. “It sure is good to have you back, Captain. I knew those charges would never stick.”
Anastasia laughed uneasily. “I’m glad you were so confident, Victor. I was scared out of my mind.”
The Commander returned a warm smile. “You really thought Atgard would have ruled against you?”
“Had he thought the charges were warranted, yes. Yes, I’m sure he would have,” she replied. “I thought for a while that he would.”
Lieutenant Romano spun in her seat to face the Captain. “What else could you have done? They didn’t really expect you to watch those people die, did they?”
“It’s a bit more complicated than that, I’m afraid,” the Captain answered, unsure why she was defending the countervailing position. “Perhaps we could have prevented the capture of Denegar had we been there. People died there too.”
“But we got it back,” Lieutenant Matthews shot back, now facing the Captain as well. “Would it have been so easy to retake New Berkeley?”
“I don’t know,” Anastasia replied. “I guess that wasn’t the point. I guess the point was that I knew the people on New Berkeley would be killed—it was certain, it was imminent. All the rest were just possibilities. I had to prevent what I knew I could at the time.”
Commander Zeeman nodded. “It’s not a perfect world,” he said solemnly. “The best of all possible worlds, maybe. But far from perfect. Tough choices must be made.”
Anastasia nodded her assent. Though such choices usually came easily to her in the heat of the moment, she wondered sometimes if her gut reaction was always the right one. The arguments posed to her during her trial rang loudly in her mind. She had considered Atgard’s words, not just as an argument to be defeated, but as an idea to be examined. And it had much merit. The Captain sighed. Momentous decisions had always seemed so easy for Daniel, so meticulously thought out and well reasoned. Sometimes Anastasia was afraid that her emotions too strongly dictated her actions. She was worried that reason often never entered the picture.
“Well, what’s important is that you made the right choice,” Ariyana added. “Even the Ethics Committee agreed. I hope you’d do it again.”
Anastasia gave another uneasy smile. She would do it again. She hoped she wouldn’t have to.
. . . . .
Ryan tapped idly at his console, his mind clearly not on the readouts it dutifully displayed. The computer was running a sensor diagnostic—the third this week—and, though Lieutenant Taylor understood that the ship was at a heightened state of alert, even he found it excessive.
“Sensors reading a large grapefruit off the port bow,” Ensign Takasugi reported. “And three squadrons of flying toasters.”
“Uh-huh,” Ryan replied.
“Lieutenant? Are you paying attention?”
Ryan snapped himself out of his half-trance, looking to his assistant. Her brow was furrowed as she returned his stare.
“Oh, yes, yes. I’m sorry. I guess I just had other things on my mind.” He focused on his screens. “The diagnostics are running smoothly.”
The Ensign allowed herself a coy smile. “It’s not like you to be distracted at work. Anything on your mind?”
Ryan felt his cheeks begin to flush. Though they hadn’t advertised their involvement, everyone on the ship seemed to know of his relationship with Alexis.
“No, Ensign,” he replied, “just these diagnostics.”
Ensign Takasugi suppressed a chuckle. “I often become enthralled in diagnostic readouts myself,” she quipped. “Fascinating stuff.”
“Thank you, Ensign. That will be all.” Ryan hoped his dark skin hid the crimson flush creeping into his cheeks.
Suddenly, the diagnostic screen went blank, replaced by a status display as the program terminated unexpectedly. An alarm rang out from the speakers.
“We have a contact!” shouted Ryan. “Battle stations.”
There was a flurry of activity as the crew scrambled to their consoles. Ryan caught a glimpse of Alexis as she rushed into the room and found her station. Their eyes met as she glanced at him from across the room.
“It’s a Vr’amil’een attack party,” Takasugi reported. “Multiple contacts. We are maneuvering to intercept.”
Ryan could almost imagine Captain Woolslair on the bridge rushing the ship into battle. The man must think the Brigadier was invincible. Ryan supposed it was a testament to his crew’s efficiency.
Within seconds, the sensor displays were cluttered with hundreds of ships from both fleets, bright pinpricks of red and green. A green blip appeared on the edge of the screen and promptly spawned a dozen smaller ships, all rushing into battle. Ryan smiled as he realized that Zach’s squad had returned from its mission just in time.
. . . . .
“They have me doing what?” fumed the Commander once he had returned to the bridge, causing the Cerberus’ crewmembers to snap even more rigidly to attention.
“Well, sir,” repeated Zip calmly, “they want us to go to Charnus Prime and quell the riots there.”
“Charnus Prime?” Dex roared, casting his gaze about the bridge as if looking for someone to be angry at. “There hasn’t been a day this year that there haven’t been riots on Charnus Prime! The locals love it.”
“Not all of them, sir,” interjected Retro. “I actually lived there for a while, and the vast silent majority didn’t go along with most of the radical ideas espoused by the vocal few who—”
Commander Rutcliffe’s gaze showed that he was not in the mood for such socio-political explanations, and Retro wisely left his sentence unfinished.
“I suppose this is punishment, then,” Dex sighed.
Zip cleared his throat. “They did say you should consider yourself lucky you haven’t been court-martialed.” Hastily, he appended, “Sir.”
“They weren’t going to court-martial me,” Dex replied, visibly disgusted. “They needed us to go to Denegar. They had the whole mission planned before they even talked to me. And they can’t overtly do anything to me now that it’s done. This is how they’re punishing me—sending me off on riot duty, knowing that I have to stay in line after … well, after the debriefing.”
Zip looked down at the metallic floor. “I heard what happened at the meeting, sir.” He met Dex’s gaze again. “They say you threatened to kill Fleet Admiral Wright.”
“I did no such thing,” Dex replied, allowing himself a small chuckle. “But those bastards were trying to blame Anastasia for everything that happened over New Berkeley. They wanted me to go along with it.” He cleared his throat. “I just let them know that I wouldn’t.”
A slight smile formed at the edge of Zip’s mouth. “I would have loved to have been there to see it, sir.”
“Me too,” added Retro.
“Anyway,” the Commander continued, “what’s done is done. And now we’re stuck with riot duty.”
Zip shook his head. “So what do we do, Commander? Do we go to Charnus Prime?”
“I suppose we had better,” he sighed. “There’s not much else we can do now, and I can’t give them an excuse to discipline me. None of us can do anyone any good if we’re all court-martialed.” He sat heavily in his command chair. “Set a course and engage.”
Zip entered the coordinates, grumbling under his breath. “I hate riot duty.”
“I know,” replied the Commander as the ship began to move. “I’d rather just charge into a Vr’amil’een camp, guns blazing, than have to sit back and let civilians take pot-shots at us.” He shook his head. “That kind of duty can be the most dangerous.”
“We’ll be able to handle the Charnus riff-raff,” promised Zip. “Even the SPACERs.”
Commander Rutcliffe nodded, but did not share Zip’s enthusiasm. Sure, his squad, an elite military Commando unit, would be able to handle whatever they encountered on Charnus Prime. They’d be able to handle them all too well, because they wouldn’t be facing a trained military force, but merely a bunch of angry civilians with rocks and blasters. And though Dex had killed his share of soldiers—human and alien—on the battlefield before, he would not lead his unit on a mission to neutralize civilian rioters.
But if he didn’t follow his orders, someone else would be sent in his place, perhaps someone with fewer moral compunctions about the duty they had been assigned. Someone unwilling to quibble over ethics while the Confederation degenerated into anarchy.
Dex leaned forward in his chair and rubbed his temples with callused fingers. He looked to his tactical console, which showed the Cerberus en route to Charnus Prime. He let out a heavy sigh.
The chronometer ticked another minute from the ETA.
. . . . .
A smile crept across Zach’s face as he maneuvered his fighter into a more advantageous angle of attack, one that placed the incoming ships out of line with either sun.
“Wolfpack squadron, form around me,” he barked into the headset. “Standard attack formation. Do not break until 10,000 kilos.”
His squadron did as they were told, their ships coalescing into a complex double-hexagon formation. They burned toward the incoming fighters at high speed, each pilot eager to enter the frenzied rush of battle. Though his last combat had been merely hours before, there was nothing that made Zach feel more alive than the fury of battle. It was dangerous, but he loved it. God help him, he did love it so.
It seemed to take forever for the Vr’amil’een ships to come into range, and Zach had plenty of time to study the readouts from the tactical computer. They were snubs, all right, standard Vr’amil’een fighters with tough armour but low maneuverability. One at a time, they were no great threat—not for a ZF-575, anyway—but the sensor screen showed a huge, red, amorphous mass of fighters streaming from Vr’amil’een carriers. Zach’s squad, as one of the first into the fray, was outnumbered at least eight to one.
Good odds.
“Wait for it …” Zach whispered into the headset, watching the enemy fighters approach. He looked out the plasticite viewpanel, visually gauging the distance of the closest of the ships. “Wait for it …
“Now!”
Viewed from afar, the movements of Wolfpack Squadron must have looked like an elaborate, artistic dance of light and power. Simultaneously breaking from precise formation, each of the twelve fighters looped and rolled amidst each other, emerging from the hexagonal cluster as a writing mass of chaotic beauty, sending iridescent shards of laser death streaking across the blackness toward their adversaries.
And just like that, the red glows of twelve Vr’amil’een fighters disappeared from the sensor screens.
Viewed from the inside of Zach Wallace’s cockpit, the spectacle was nothing more than a transient flash of light and pinwheeling stars. And once the preliminary attack had run its course, the firefight quickly degenerated into an embroiled cacophony of lasers and thrusters, a hundred pilots in a hundred ships each trying to kill the other.
Zach found himself in the thickest of the maelstrom, and it was all he could do to avoid colliding with the Vr’amil’een fighters. Several shots impacted his fighter’s shields, and Zach wondered how anyone could target in the confusion.
Once he had passed through the thickest of the fighters, Zach artfully spun his ship around, lasers blazing wildly at the nearest Vr’amil’een fighter. A few moments later, its armour succumbed to the barrage, yielding a brief but spectacular explosion that quickly dissipated into the void.
The chatter on the headsets had become almost indistinguishable, but Zach picked out Raven’s voice above the clutter. “Zach, watch your six.”
Without so much as a glance at the display, Zach brought his fighter to an abrupt halt, spinning 180 degrees and targeting the ship that had been following him. A quick missile shot and another red blip disappeared from the screens.
“Thanks, Raven,” he said, locking his sights on yet another fighter. “These flying garbage cans are getting on my nerves.”
“Roger that,” she replied, barely audible above the noise of ten other pilots. Zach caught a glimpse of her fighter streak past his viewpanel, firing relentlessly upon an alien snub. “Only about a hundred left to go, though.”
Zach smiled as a barrage of gunfire raked across his port bow. The computer blared a halfhearted warning and the port shield indicator light flashed from green to amber. Deftly slipping his ship between a pair of snub fighters, Zach accelerated upwards, leaving his pursuer far behind.
But soon another one was on his tail. Even as Zach outran and outmaneuvered countless Vr’amil’een ships, more always waited to take their places. And, though he had been destroying them at what seemed like a prodigious rate, the sensor screen still showed an angry mass of swarming red death.
Zach wondered how in the Seventeen Systems the tracking computers made sense of it all. More importantly, he wondered how he could.
Another explosion, and another red dot faded from existence. But another red cloud was visible on the edge of the display. Vr’amil’een reinforcements were on their way.
. . . . .
The world of Landus was a somber brown globe, darkened except for a thin crescent of light creeping around its edge. The black shadows of magnificent mountain ranges could be seen across its arid surface, and Anastasia wondered how the settlers below lived on the barren border world.
Captain Mason had arrived to find that the “defense fleet” she had been sent to bolster consisted essentially of the Inferno. A small collection of sub-Capital ships ringed the planet, a group that would be little help were the Vr’amil’een to invade the system. Since arriving, however, there had not been so much as a blip on her long-range scanners, and Anastasia chastised herself as she experienced a feeling of boredom.
“Long range scans indicate no contacts,” Lieutenant Johnson reported, breaking the silence as he had precisely every hour. “All sectors are clear.”
“Thank you,” Anastasia replied, not sure whether to admire Byron for his adherence to protocol or to condemn him for his compulsive behavior. She sighed and sank lower into her chair.
“Guard duty is the worst, isn’t it?” Victor offered, beaming her a halfhearted smile. “You wait around, hoping nothing happens. But all this nothing happening is enough to drive you mad.”
The Captain chuckled. Victor had no idea how right he was—especially after Anastasia’s recent involuntary vacation on Earth.
A small movement on the viewscreen caught Anastasia’s eye. She looked lazily toward it, unable to see anything in the darkness. She shrugged and turned back to Victor, peripherally noting a strange silvery sheen where the light glinted off the object. She looked down to her console, calling up the short-range scans, and the screen showed a tiny red blip directly ahead.
It was a ship.
“Look alive,” she commanded, punching up a magnified view of the vessel on the viewscreen. Byron, in all his vigilance, had apparently only been watching the long-range scans, and for some reason this ship had failed to register.
Within a moment, Anastasia knew why.
Now comprising the majority of the viewscreen was an ovoid silver vessel, one whose skin seemed to convolve in rhythmic waves as if made out of a metallic liquid. The ship was small, no larger than some fighters, and sported no protrusions, windows, or visible weapons of any kind. It did not move, but simply hovered serenely between the Inferno and the desert world of Landus.
Anastasia found she lacked the air to scream.
The Lucani Ibron ship inched quietly closer to the brown globe below.
* * * * *
CHAPTER 12
&nb
sp; “Don’t worry, Halcyon,” Zach promised. “I’m on your bandit.”
The Vr’amil’een ship tailing Halcyon’s fighter somehow managed to follow him through a complex series of maneuvers, matching his every movement with adept precision. Zach could not help but be impressed by the Vr’amil’een pilot’s skill, shadowing a more maneuverable ship as precisely as he was. It almost seemed a pity, Zach thought as he aligned his targeting crosshairs on the swerving snub fighter, but an instant later the missile lock light flashed to life, and Zach thumbed the firing stud, sending his last missile to eradicate the skillful enemy pilot.
“Your six is clear, Halcyon,” Zach reported over the intercom, but a quick glance at his sensor display still showed too many Vr’amil’een fighters to count, and three ships from his squadron had already been disabled and removed from the fight. Plus Zach was out of missiles, and, though he had gotten the upper hand on at least a dozen enemy fighters so far, his shields were all but depleted, the lights on his status board waning from a now-reassuring amber to a sanguine red before his eyes.
As Zach was about to return his attention to the dogfight, a new light on the sensor display caught his eye and the computer trilled an urgent-sounding alarm.
“Warning,” it began, “new enemy vessel—”
Zach slapped at the mute switch, returning his attention to the chaos around him. He silently cursed the panicky computer and its incessant overreactions. After all, he thought, the new blip on his screen was merely that of a heavy Vr’amil’een fighter. A little tougher than the snubs, sure, but what was one more fighter amongst fifty?
Zach looked around for a new enemy to target, pushing the incoming vessel out of his mind for the moment. He would deal with the new threat when it arrived.
To his bewilderment, however, Zach’s front viewpanel was completely devoid of enemy fighters. It was as if they had suddenly decided to retreat, still enjoying a five to one advantage.
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