“I need to get to the console,” Jack whispered. His voice wavered and was weak.
“All right, get ready,” Gavin said. He held onto the pistol with both hands and got ready to sprint. Now was the time to do, or to die.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
“Hiro, focus everything on those new ships. Hold fire on the Qin fleet,” Kane said. He turned away to Admiral Moss before Hiro could protest. “Get Doctor Shan, now!”
Kane leaned over a technician and studied the orbital display. The line of new starships rose in a wedge shape. As one of the ships came under focused fire it fell back and let a new ship rise up into its place. Arc cannon barrages tore into both the Qin and TU. At the pace they were rising, the newcomers would shred all nearby ships.
“Doctor Shan is ready,” Admiral Moss said. She pointed to a console. “General Amit is reporting that the attacks have halted on the planet.”
Kane pushed through the crowd and sat at a console. A comms tech sat next to him. Kane glanced over at the young woman. “What’s your name, sailor?”
“Lieutenant Sam Rahamastra, sir.”
“Rahamastra, eh? Well, Lieutenant Rahamastra, you need to patch Doctor Shan into that Qin frequency. Can you do that?”
“Yes, sir!”
Kane turned to Doctor Shan. “I need this to be brief, Doctor. I want a truce with the Qin fleet. We’re both going to get wiped out unless we can focus on those new ships. Understand?”
Doctor Shan gave a slight bow. “I am ready when you are, Sky Marshall.”
Kane gave the signal to Rahamastra. He turned to look at the starscape while the comms array swung into place. The Qin had finally halted firing on the TU ships, but were using the opportunity to flee. He knew that even if the Qin ships got away, it was likely the new ships would catch them.
“Connecting in three, two, one.” Lieutenant Rahamastra tapped on the console, and suddenly the smooth, gray face of a Qin filled the screen.
The Qin spoke a short phrase. Its eyes glittered as it spoke. Behind it, an electrical panel exploded.
Kane watched it and felt complete revulsion. Can I trust it? Good God, am I really doing this?
Doctor Shan spoke in a series of clicks and consonants, and ended in a low, guttural vowel. This continued back and forth for a minute. Doctor Shan betrayed no emotion on his time-stained face. Nor did the Qin, unreadable as ever, show anything.
Finally, the comm link severed and Lieutenant Rahamastra looked at Kane with a questioning face. “They dropped it, sir.”
Doctor Shan sat back and slapped the console. “We have a truce, Sky Marshall! But only as long as those ships are on the field. They will focus fire on whichever ship we do.”
“Thank you, Doctor!” Kane said as he stood and pushed through the crowd.
The whole room shook as a barrage laid into the carrier. Vacuum alarms sounded down the halls. The door suddenly shut. The marine standing guard set the lock and put on a vacuum mask.
Kane grasped a console and struggled to stand. The consoles flickered on and off. The room lights dimmed and then flickered back. “Hiro! Focus fire! We have a truce with the Qin! Hiro! Do you hear me?”
Another barrage smashed into the carrier and the lights went completely out. A second later, a line of blue emergency lighting blinked on, and the room was eerily quiet.
It was then that Kane realized that it was vacuum outside the room. The battle for the Summer system and the planet New America was now out of his hands.
####
“You move when I do. You need to get into cover fast, got it?” Gavin said to Jack. The two men were huddled behind a line of consoles. The room was almost completely silent.
Jack strained to listen for Rob. He knew he was near, somewhere hidden in the consoles around him. Maybe first tier? Or second? He didn’t know. But he had to get to the top and disengage his program. This was his last chance to set things right.
“I’m ready.”
Gavin clenched the pistol tight. He slid over half a meter and peeked out around a console. His eyes scanned from side to side. The pistol was at ready, wavering just before him.
This was it. Jack could feel it. The blood loss was getting to him. Already he was feeling weak. But it didn’t matter, not now.
Then, in a sudden movement, the room erupted in gunfire. Gavin stood quickly and advanced with the pistol held just before him. The heavy-barreled semiautomatic fired out one round after another. Further down on the first tier, someone else fired.
Jack ran up the stairs toward the top tier. He was clear of the cover of the second and felt naked as he climbed higher. He could just make out his program on the screens above when the bullet slammed into his back. To him it felt like someone had sucker punched him right in kidneys.
He fell onto the steps and clawed his way higher.
Still the gunfire snapped off, one round, then another, then another. There was no rhythm or pattern to it: a set of random clacks and bursts from three distinct points.
Jack felt the searing pain and didn’t bother to feel the wound, not this time. Just a few more meters and he’d be there. But with every bit he crawled, it felt farther away. The room dimmed on him; he looked up at the starscape and knew he was close to passing out. The TU and Qin fleets were focusing on the rising line of Rob’s ships.
If I fail, the fleet falls. If the fleet falls, the troops fall. If the troops fall. The war is lost. If we lose the war…
Jack growled and used both of his arms to propel himself up the last couple of meters. More gunshots rang out almost simultaneously. A console exploded beside him. He kneeled before a console and tapped on the keys with bloodstained fingers.
Wildcard.
He’d had a hunch that Rob was going to escape, to flee from the planet. So he’d added a new layer to the code that would fire upon any unknown ships. But instead of a shuttle or small cutter, there was a whole flotilla of battleships rising from the planet.
A battleship was armored to the core, but even they couldn’t withstand a close-range orbital defense. The massive pulse cannons would shred the heavy armor, and those massive ships would fall back to the planet beneath, dead.
Jack entered the last few commands just as his vision blurred. Then, with a sigh, he engaged the wildcard.
The program blurred as lines of code dived down and disappeared. A cursor blinked, a window opened and closed, and then a simple window announced success.
He fell backward onto the floor and stared straight up. There, above him, he watched the first orbital defense platform open fire on Rob’s ship.
“Take that, you bastard,” Jack yelled as he lost consciousness.
####
Gavin aimed his pistol once more and raced out from cover. He dodged from one console to the next. Somewhere before him, Rob was lurking, waiting with his own pistol, but all he could see was a blur of movement—if he saw anything at all.
Cross dropped down to the lowest tier. He held the pistol with one hand and slid a chair so that it crashed down the steps. He watched with determined eyes, but Rob didn’t take the bait.
It was a standoff.
Above them, the starscape fundamentally changed. Instead of a thousand icons fleeing into the distance, they were all converging on the rising ships. Both the Qin and the TU formed into one line and struggled to hold. The pulse cannons fired, one after the next. Damage icons appeared on the rising starships.
Gavin watched it for a second and knew that Rob was beat. “You’re screwed now! Those ships are being eaten alive!”
A loud bang sounded from across the room.
Gavin ran forward, crouched.
Cross sprinted from where he was on the opposite side from the noise.
“There he is!” Claire called out weakly.
Gavin spun around and realized he and Cross had both taken the bait. His pistol rose up, and he held his breath as he aimed.
Rob stood with half his body behind a support strut. His pistol
was pointed directly at Cross. The barrel spewed fire three times.
In that moment, Gavin sighted along the barrel, clenched the grip, felt the tightness in his chest, and calmly squeezed the trigger. He knew it was a good shot.
Rob disappeared from view.
“I’m hit!” Cross yelled.
Gavin knew if Cross spoke it was because he was hit bad. The sniper would keep quiet if he was still a combat asset, but if he said anything it meant that he had to notify Gavin that he was alone.
“You’re done, Rob!” Gavin called. Where was he? He sighted down the barrel and cautiously stepped ahead. A few meters down, he saw Cross lying with a bullet wound in his chest. The sniper was struggling to tear his combat medic pack from a pocket. Gavin knelt down next to him and broke it free.
“Get him,” Cross said.
“Hold on.” Gavin peeled open the pack and stripped out the coagulation pouch. The backing fell away and he pressed it tight onto Cross’s wound.
“There!” Cross swung his arm up, laid the pistol on Gavin’s shoulder, and fired twice.
Rob cried out.
Gavin dropped and rolled. He looked and Rob was gone.
“I can get the wound sealed.” Cross said through clenched teeth. “Get him, dammit!”
Gavin crawled until he reached the end of the aisle.
A line of blood speckles ran right toward the exit of the room and disappeared down the hall.
“He’s gone,” Gavin said.
“You need to kill him!” Claire said. She struggled to her feet.
“Why?” Gavin said. “We need to get out of here and get medical attention.”
“These aren’t the only ships that he has. If he gets into orbit, he can launch more.”
“From where?” Gavin said. He was already moving toward the blood trail.
Claire looked up. “Grandfather had factories here, on the planet, and more, up there, on the moon.”
Gavin saw that with the fleets driving into orbit, it would only take a few more ships high up in the gravity well to totally obliterate them all, and they’d be clear of the orbital batteries.
Gavin looked to Claire. “Get Cross and Jack, get them to the sub. Get them out of here.”
“And you?” Claire said.
“If I’m not back by the time they’re ready, go.”
Claire looked back at him and nodded. “Go.”
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
“We’ve got a feed coming in!” Lieutenant Rahamastra said. She crawled out from a service access, her face shrouded by a vacuum mask. She hurriedly closed the gasketed seal.
The room was an eerie blue with a yellowish smoke floating through the air. The core command staff all moved to watch a single console.
Kane stood in silence with his arms across his chest. Lieutenant Rahamastra stood next to him.
The display winked to life, and nothing but static washed over it. A technician sat and pecked at the keys, and suddenly it changed to a low-level defense feed. Instead of an all-encompassing view, they were watching what a small-caliber railgun crew would watch.
Kane held his breath as the data streamed in. Did Hiro get his message? It all hinged on whether those last transmissions had gotten through. There was no way they could face the ground batteries, the newcomers, and the Qin.
“How bad is it? Can you get a maintenance feed?” someone asked.
Another person replied, “It must be bad. The orbitals quit firing on us.”
Kane felt a touch of hope. He pushed past the technician and leaned in close to the display. He could make out one flank of the carrier. Farther down, lights were still on.
Then he saw it: a pulse cannon fired just on the edge of what the display showed. His eyes followed the rising cloud of energy as it punched through the night sky. Up it rose, higher, and slammed right into one of the ships driving up from the planet below.
“They’re alive,” Kane whispered. No, it’s just the Qin switching from us to them. He couldn’t let his hopes grow, not at a time like this. He’d let his hopes grow after the Qin took his children, and that nearly wrecked him. Now he turned himself to stone and watched as a commander first and a grieving father second.
“We’re getting the best of them!” a woman’s voice called out.
“Can you see the Qin? Are they firing?”
Someone jabbed a finger at the display. “There, see the raiders? They’re driving down. Good God, look at the fire those ships are pouring out!”
“Zoom it in, Steve. C’mon, zoom it in!”
The technician hunched over the keyboard and grunted as he tried a dozen different combinations. Finally, the view swung away and zoomed in. It went blurry, then clear, then blurry again. Explosions came into focus, and then one of the rising ships.
“There, hold it there!” Admiral Moss said.
Kane studied the ship with a professional eye. One side of it was shredded and gouged as if a giant plow had run along the flank. Pulse cannon, he guessed. Then, in the blink of an eye, the entire nose of it burst into a starburst of glowing steel.
The room broke into a cheer.
The ship wavered, seem to hang as if unsure what to do, and then slid slowly away back into the atmosphere.
“Another! Get us another!” Admiral Moss cried out excitedly.
The camera struggled to pan from side to side and focus on the other ships. It finally found one, but that ship was dropping down as well, with a gaping hole bored right through it.
The consoles came alive. The emergency lighting cut out, and the main room lights flared back on. The command staff rushed back to their consoles.
Kane noticed more than a few faces with tears on them.
“Sir, look!” Admiral Moss pointed to the main tactical display.
Kane stepped up behind Admiral Moss and clasped his hands behind his back as if at parade rest. There on the display, the fleet that had threatened them all was in disarray. What wasn’t already burning was taking the brunt of the fire from the Terran Union, Qin, and the orbital defenses below. Railguns and torpedos lashed the massive starships. Qin arc cannons blasted into them in rapid succession. Even a few fighters danced through the wreckage.
It was only then that Kane noticed the butcher’s bills. The Terran Union fleet was in terrible condition. Status reports flowed across a screen, and the officer watching it simply stared. Carriers gone. Battleships gone. Half of the fleet in no condition to fight, and what was left was mauled.
Admiral Moss stood at Kane’s side and nodded to the Qin report console. She’d obviously seen the same thing Kane was watching. “They’re in just as bad shape as we are.”
“Yes,” Kane said. “But when they’re done shooting at them, are they going to start shooting at us?”
####
Gavin ran to the edge of the doorway and peered quickly in. He saw the blood trail disappearing around the bend. He followed after with his pistol raised up. He guessed Rob would be waiting, but at every corner he saw just more speckles of blood.
Finally, he saw the blood stop and disappear into a large hatch. He squeezed the grip of the pistol tight and stepped ahead cautiously.
A rumbling sound echoed out from the hatch.
Gavin moved faster and peeked inside.
Rob stood at a console with a line of small shuttles stretching out before him. One of the shuttles was pivoting, with massive hydraulic locks dropping away. A walkway system worked its way down from above and would be in position in a few seconds.
“Stop!” Gavin yelled.
Rob spun and fired two rounds toward the door. Both slammed into the wall with a clang. The slide of his pistol halted back, his weapon empty.
Gavin pulled the trigger.
A single round slammed into Rob’s leg, and he fell to the floor.
The gantry dropped lower as the loading ramp moved into position. Rob struggled to stand and started to limp toward the ramp.
Gavin squeezed the trigger once more, but
nothing happened. The pistol was empty. He threw the weapon away and ran toward Rob.
Rob grabbed the edge of the ramp and dragged his body up onto it. His legs kicked, and finally he was up. A second later, the walkway snapped down into position.
Gavin pumped his arms and grimaced in pain. His chest burned, and he could taste blood in his mouth. Every heartbeat brought a new, throbbing pain, and black spots flickered in his vision. He was almost done. But he had to do this.
He leaped up onto the ramp and tackled Rob.
Rob leaned down and punched Gavin in the top of the head. Rob cried out as his knuckles clacked on skull.
Gavin dug his grip tight and propped himself on top of Rob. He punched once. Twice.
Rob threw up his arms and took the blows. He jammed out an arm and laid a punch right to the wound in Gavin’s chest.
Gavin fell to his side and clutched at the wound. The pain was unbearable.
Rob was on him in a second. One hand held Gavin’s arm down while the other fist pummeled his brother. His eyes were alight with violence, his face locked into a sneer.
Behind them, the door opened on the Qin shuttle. A hiss sounded through the launch bay as the fueling lines dropped away.
Gavin tried to break free. One arm was held tight; the other flailed but just couldn’t absorb the punches.
In that moment, as the punches rained down, Gavin knew that if he failed, he’d be the one responsible. Rob would take everything he’d dedicated his life to and see it burn.
“No,” Gavin said.
He pulled back his hand, clenched it into a fist, and slammed it down onto the bullet wound in Rob’s leg.
Rob screamed and leaned back.
It was enough.
Gavin pushed Rob off and grasped him by the shoulders. He pulled Rob tight and slammed his skull into his brother’s face. He head-butted him again and again. Finally, he felt Rob wobble in his grasp.
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