by Mark Tufo
Beckert and Pender were both quiet.
“Nothing?” I asked.
“Sir, you specifically said not to answer unless it was what you wanted to hear,” Beckert said.
“When the hell has that ever stopped you?” I told him.
“Their computers would be working overtime with vectors, trajectories, making sure all was clear…it may or may not add time on to the exit point, but I think it could be done.”
“Confidence in your statement?” I asked.
“Sixty-forty sir,” he answered.
“Pender?”
“They can definitely do it. It’s not a norm for them because it increases the risks of a safe buckle, but it can and has been done. The good news, sir, is after this first buckle we’ll have their signature on file.”
“So, if we see an imminent arrival, say in the north-east quadrant, we know we have two hours until they get here. Could they then hit the turn button and show in the south west, for instance, with no warning?”
“In theory, there should still be a warning. They won’t be sliding; they haven’t figured that trick out yet, so it won’t be instantaneous. Could be as much as a few minutes,” Pender said. “Longer if they allow for a greater safety margin.”
“As much as or more? How about as little as?” I asked.
“Few seconds, theoretically.”
“Fuck.” I went to stand; my seatbelt held me fast; I hoped no one noticed. “Ideas? Is it better to stand and fight or run to a different spot?”
“Different spot, General. At least then we’d know what kind of time frame we’re looking at from notification to arrival,” Fields said.
“Not this first time we won’t. Don’t have the signature yet, we don’t even know what we’re looking for,” I said to him. “Nope. We have to stay long enough to get their fingerprints. Although, how we’re going to be able to stand against three ships, I don’t know.”
“Five,” Tracy said. “Another two just buckled.”
“They’re going to stagger them, harangue us across the damn universe,” I sighed. So close; our prize was right in front of us. “Alright folks. I realize that this is technically a dictatorship like BT says; I’m in the chair. I'm in charge, at least up here.” I looked to Tracy. “What I say mostly goes. But this is different, I am keenly aware that my decisions impact all of our lives, and this one might not be good. Our slide drive is out of commission. We’re in a bluffing contest with the High Council, and we’re both stalling for time–them for their ships to come out of buckles, and us for Beckert to get his ass in gear.”
“Comm is still on, thank you, sir,” Beckert said sardonically.
“Our goal is right there, right fucking there. We have close to two hours.” I paused. Yep, nothing had changed. “I can’t lie and piss around like these assholes can. My vote is to lay as much waste upon them as is humanly possible. I want everyone here to have a say.”
“I’m in,” BT said.
“As am I,” Fields replied.
“Hear, hear, sir,” Lane said as she nodded.
“Til death do us part,” Tracy said as her way of affirmation.
“Why not? It’d be much easier to just die than try to fix this thing under your timeline, sir,” Beckert said by way of a joke.
Everyone was looking at Pender. “We bothering you?” I asked.
“What’s up?” he asked. “Sorry just thought I saw something weird.”
“You in or are you out?” BT asked.
“Oh absolutely. I say we give them everything we can,” he smiled.
“That shuttle launch yet?” I asked.
“No sir,” Lane said.
“Pity. I’d like to send the High Command a little message about what I think of their bluff. Fields, target everything that poses a threat to us on the planet.”
He’d no sooner hit fire when we were being hailed.
“We are in talks!” Dendrun yelled.
“No, we’re not. You’re stalling until your ships get into place. In the interim, I’m going to destroy all that you value.”
“You are unworthy savages!”
“Unworthy? I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure we’ve paid with enough lives and blood to be completely worthy. Savages? On that, I agree. And we’re just getting started. Dendrun, I’ve never met you, but I hate you. I hate all of your kind. Once upon a time, in fairy tale land, I thought maybe we could work together. Build something better, maybe even have an alliance against the Stryvers.”
“You know of them?” Dendrun’s demeanor changed.
“We fought with them, for a bit. They wanted to align with us against you, but come to find out they only wanted us as long as we were of use to them; pretty much just like you. Neither of you ever believed we lowly humans to be on equal footing. We sure did change everyone’s collective opinions, though.”
“Did they know where you were going?”
He sounded scared; I was going to keep going off on my tangent as I watched the fireworks upon the planet’s surface. Despite all the destruction we were inflicting down there right now, Dendrun seemed wholly unconcerned; he was definitely more worried about the Stryvers’ whereabouts.
“Of course they do. I told them as much. Gave them the coordinates,” I lied.
“You didn’t! You can’t!”
“Sure I could; was pretty easy, in fact. I figured if I couldn’t finish the job, they’d do it for me. That a problem?”
“You have truly destroyed us all.” He sounded defeated. “The only advantage we have held in the war is that they have never known from where we originated.”
“Wow, that’s a hell of a secret. Pretty impressed. Not really sorry I spilled the beans, though.” How I wished what I was saying was true.
“We have incoming,” Fields said.
“And the ships are moving toward us,” Tracy added.
“I thought I told you to take care of that?” I said to Fields.
“It’s a large planet, sir.”
We were back in the thick of it. The smart thing would have been to buckle out and call the day victorious. We had delivered one hell of a vicious blow, and our opponent was staggering. The problem was we had not knocked them completely out; hell, we hadn’t even knocked them down. We’d come as a complete surprise and threw some good punches, but it wasn’t enough.
“Colonel, bring us closer to the surface.”
“Mike, not this again,” BT said. “Just thinking about mountain ranges gives me anxiety now.”
“The Prog ships won’t fire on us if we’re close. They’ll be too afraid of missing and hitting the surface.”
“You sure about that?”
“Sure.”
“Ships in pursuit,” Tracy said.
“Any news on the Rodeeshians? I want to release the biological weapons,” I said.
“Sir, you realize those were engineered for Earth, and mammals specifically. On the surface, their effect on the Progerians will have little direct effect,” Pender said.
“Do they have mammals on that planet?” I asked.
“From our readings, it would appear that eight percent of the planet’s population is of the mammalian classification,” he answered. “Most of that is domesticated livestock for consumption.”
“And if we take that eight percent out?” I asked.
“It could ultimately be devastating,” he answered.
“We might physically be here for the short term, but I want our legacy to be the long game. The more death we bring here, the less energy they’ll have to focus on Earth.”
“Sir, the base we dropped them off near has gone dark.” Lane said. “I was monitoring communication and their weapons. They haven’t fired anything in twenty minutes.”
“Fields?”
“Per your orders, sir, we have not targeted them.”
“Looks like our furry friends are getting their own measure of payback. If only they had a fleet of ships. Two more ships; just another couple and maybe we could ha
ve won this,” I said softly as I watched weaponry soar up from the planet.
Fields and Lane were doing their best to shoot down what was coming in as Tracy did her best to avoid it. But we were like a giant clay pigeon, and there was a line of decent marksman with shotguns; somebody was bound to hit us. The ship lurched violently to the side as we were struck. My restraints threatened to break my ribcage as they held me down, yet my body wanted to sail about freely; which would probably happen sooner than I’d like.
“Damage on decks seven, eight, and nine,” Lane shouted over the blaring alarm.
“Fucking high council,” I mumbled, and it was as if saying the words beneath the strobing red lights jarred something in my memory. “Fields, target the city where Geralt and Dendrun were broadcasting from and level it. I don’t even want a memory of them to exist.”
“With pleasure, sir,” he said through gritted teeth. He looked as if all the wind had been forcibly expelled from his lungs.
“Is that really a high priority target, other than appeasing your ego?” BT asked.
“While I do like to have my ego appeased, my good friend, this has nothing to do with that, or not much, anyway. I’ve spent more time with Progs than maybe any other human has, and the one thing that screws them up royally is the loss of their command. Sure, they have things in place should something happen, but it takes time for them, it is not an instantaneous process. And if we wipe out most of their government, it might be something they never have a chance to recover from, especially if I have a say in it.”
“You can stroke your ego all you want. I mean, maybe in private, but go for it,” he said. “Take out the queen.”
“Put it up on the main screen. I want to see it burn.”
The city was as alien looking as the Progs themselves. Most of the buildings were low-level types, domed or curved without a straight angle anywhere. I saw not a street or a sidewalk; if they had the flying cars I was promised as a youth, none of them were out and about right now. It was possible that all travel within the confines of that alien landscape was subterranean. And like the areas they originated from, there was not a whole bunch of color, as if they thought adornment was a waste of time. Greens and browns dominated nearly everything I saw creating a city of camouflage and making it difficult to distinguish between the urban confines and the surrounding fauna. Possibly this was done on purpose, but more likely it suited the starkness of Progerian personalities.
I was about to tell Lane to magnify my image when it flared out. One second there was what I figured was a thriving capital city, the next it was a blazing inferno that reduced it to ash, not even rubble; there was not even enough left to classify as debris. A modern day nuclear weapon would have looked like a stick of dynamite in comparison to what we’d just leveled that city with. There were no more pleas from the world for us to stop, for us to talk, for any type of peace or truce. We were bringing them the extinction event that they had once brought to us. I believed wholeheartedly that our conflict would never end until one of us was obliterated. To put it in simple terms, the universe was not big enough for the both of us. Paul was right. The gulf between our species was simply too wide; there was no bridge that could span it. What a fool I had been to believe that humans would forgive, much less forget, or that the Progs and Stryvers would eventually grow tired of our little blue world and go play somewhere else. We were nothing more than particularly irritating insects to them; mosquitos, gnats. Too arrogantly obnoxious to be enslaved, we were swatted at random and had finally decided to swarm. I’d like to say their world shut down, couldn’t function without its head, but that wasn’t necessarily the case. When you’re fighting for your life, you don’t generally need someone to tell you what to do, you just do. There was confusion though, we had most assuredly stirred up their pot. A few of the ships coming in for attack had peeled off. Response times on the planet had diminished, in some places considerably; not sure how long our reprieve would be, but we were just going to keep battering away.
“Right above their atmosphere, Colonel. Lane, how much time until the armada is in range?”
“For us, four minutes–for them six, sir.”
“Mike, they’re fanning out,” Tracy said.
We had a two-minute window, but that wasn’t going to be enough time to destroy a ship, and that would give the others enough time to get in and get their licks.
“Fields, if you’re holding anything back, don’t. If you want me to have BT go and rip out some kitchen sinks, he’ll do that.”
“Gee thanks,” BT said.
“No worries, big guy.”
“Being this low should foul up their planet-based shooting vectors,” Pender said. “They’re set to shoot at objects much higher; gives them time to adjust and change course. They won’t have that ability now.”
“That seems pretty important, Pender, you think you could have given us a heads up before we started venting into outer space?” I asked.
“Sir, this is all new to me, too. I didn’t know until I started to understand what they’re launching now. They should be able to lock on to us easier, but that’s not the case. They’ve been so used to ships that traverse space, they’ve never had to worry about anything being up close, especially with the number of ships they have to keep invaders at bay.”
“Speaking of which, why do they have so many war ships around their planet if the Stryvers have never found the place?” I was wondering about that, then I thought of my brother who, at one point, had more guns than most gun stores yet he had never been robbed. Better to have them and not need them, I suppose, though it would have been nice if the Progs on this planet had been pacifists and had decided they didn’t want all that dangerous hardware floating around above them.
BT was looking over at me, eyeing me up and down, actually.
“What the hell are you doing? Freaking me out a little,” I said.
“I’m trying to gauge when exactly you are going to pull the next rabbit out of your ass.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Oh, you know what I’m talking about. Is it uncomfortable having that many of them shoved up there?”
“Dude, do you need some down time? Is the stress of this shit starting to get to you? You can go take a nap, if that helps.”
“Naw man, you’re fucking with us right now.” He was pointing and smiling; it was weird, and I tilted my head to listen to him. “It looks like we’re going to be all dead and shit in like, what? Three minutes as those ships converge? But then you’re going to pull this giant, somehow still white, rabbit right out of your asshole, and you’re going to hold it all up to us and shout, surprise!”
I was genuinely concerned that my friend had snapped; I’d seen this kind of thing before. Hell, I was close to the edge myself; I guess he’d just beat me to the punch. I felt bad that I’d not seen the signs before now.
“Dude, BT, man, I can assure you there’s no rabbit.”
“You can’t fool me.” He stopped pointing, but he was all smiles and shaking his head at some private joke. It was disconcerting, to say the least.
Fields had swiveled some of his arsenal away from Aradinia and was firing on one of the ships who appeared to be taking one for the team as they were the first across our range threshold. Flames and ocean liner-sized pieces of the craft were trailing behind it as we pummeled the crap out of it.
“Lane, there’s another ship in range. Going to need you to take that one.”
Got it, Captain,” she responded. I would imagine the planet took a deep breath as we gave it a deferment on its continued eradication. The first ship was nearly destroyed by the time it came into its own weapons range, what was fired from it looked like the spit of a man lost for days in the desert. It no sooner loosed what it could, when it was consumed by fire and destroyed. Fields moved on to the next two as Lane waged war with the ship she was entangled with. She was getting some positively wrecking haymaker shots in, but this ship was goin
g to cross over into its range in much better shape than its predecessor and this trend would continue as more and more of them did so. Our fire power and ability to deflect theirs would be eclipsed in less than two minutes. I warred within myself whether to protect ourselves from the ships or to fuck up as much of the planet as we could before the end came. And still, BT sat there smiling like a loon.
“Anytime now would be great,” he said, giving me a thumbs up. “Just you wait, this is going to be great.” He sat back, grinning like he’d seen this movie before and the good part was about to be revealed and he was doing his best to not give spoilers away.
“General?” Tracy looked over her shoulder. For a moment, I thought she was going to ask for the rabbit.
“Beckert, I realize we can’t slide…but what about buckling?” This question was akin to surrender as far as I was concerned.; the moment we left we would not be able to come back. Well, we would, but it would be into a curtain of fire.
“Have you lost your fucking mind?” No lie, those were his exact words. I realized every officer onboard had now asked me that. It gave me pause; had I lost whatever I came in with?
Tracy, as my executive officer, looked like she was going to jump out of her seat, march over to the monitor and pull his ass through it so she could dress him down in person. I motioned for her to stay where she was, that I would take care of it.
“Listen, Beckert, just because we’re about sixty seconds from Kingdom Come and you and I have a history plus you shared your horrible Scotch with me, don’t you ever fucking address me that way again. Am I clear?”
“Crystal, sir.”
“So, I’m taking it that buckling is out of the question then?”
“That’s safe to say, sir.”
“Colonel Talbot, make some magic,” I told my wife. Had a feeling Tracy shared Beckert’s opinion of my mind being lost though she said nothing.
“The crowd goes wild! Against all odds Mike Talbot pulls a victory from the jaws of defeat…” BT said the words, but they did not contain the same verve as those just a moment before and his smile was definitely strained at this point. You can have faith, and I highly encourage it, but when you’re staring down the barrel of a high caliber weapon and the trigger has been depressed, well, at some point you have to switch over from hope to reality.