by Nick Webb
“Captain, control yourself. We’ve taken their queen. We can afford to lose a pawn or two.”
Titus fumed. “The Honorius, was not … a pawn,” he said through gritted teeth.
An icy, sidelong glance from the Admiral shut him up. “Have a care, Captain. That is the last outburst I will tolerate from you today.”
The tactical officer announced, breaking the sudden tension on the bridge, “Sir, the newly arrived ships have engaged the enemy. More gravitic signatures, sir! And there goes—” Another blinding flash from the screen interrupted him. “—the Raven,” he finished, seemingly starstruck by the catastrophic explosion. Another of the rebel starships followed suit, being torn apart by a disastrous blast. “And the Falcon.”
Ensign Evans looked up from his station. “Sir, the rebels are sounding a general retreat. Shall I signal pursuit?”
“By all means, Ensign. Remind the captains to target weapons systems first, and to leave their gravitic capabilities alone.” He turned to Titus with a sly grin. “Let them do the hard work for us. But how fortunate that all these new warships are staffed by former Resistance fighters. Makes it easier for us to snuff them all out—having them all in one place.”
Captain Titus began to realize the breadth, the completeness of Trajan’s plan. The Havoc raid, the rare earths, the delivery to the shipyards … it all started to make sense. “I presume this was all in the plan, sir?”
“Do you realize how hard it is to refine neodymium, Captain? Nearly all of the rare earths are chemically identical to one another, and it wasn’t until a cadre of Scandinavian scientists began their work in the seventeenth century that progress was finally made to understand them and to differentiate them. As it so happens, the shipment received by the Resistance’s construction crew at Geneseo Station must have been contaminated with traces of some other lanthanides, such as promethium, or gadolinium, for example. It seems that these new rebel gravitic drives have a particular susceptibility to perturbations in their crystal field. How else do you explain what you’re seeing, Captain?”
How else indeed, thought Titus.
***
When Jake woke up, he wished he hadn’t. A splitting headache pierced his skull, and his hand revealed a trickle of blood running down his neck. He winced, and managed to pull himself up, but he nearly tripped on a fallen beam in his path.
“Status?” He spun around, looking to see who was still up, but the motion made the room spin far more than it should have, and he grabbed onto his console to fight off the wave of vertigo. He heard vague explosions in the background.
The bridge was a mess. Besides the corpse of the XO, half a dozen other bridge members looked to be in bad shape, including most of the tactical octagon.
Po.
His head snapped to Po’s station. She was on the floor next to her chair, but moved, rising slowly to her knees, and then to her feet, but very wobbly.
He looked at the empty chair in the center of the bridge. “Where’s the Captain?” he shouted at Po. She shook her head, and winced.
Jake scanned the bridge, finally locating the Captain’s epaulettes near the port bulkhead. Dead? Jake couldn’t tell. He ran over to the man, nearly stumbling with a combination of rocking explosions and vertigo, and rolled the Captain over.
He was bleeding, and several limbs seemed to be out of place.
But he breathed.
“Captain, stay with us, sir.”
Watson groaned, and tried to open his eyes.
“Sickbay, Commander Mercer. Doc, the Captain is down. We’re sending him there now.”
The doctor’s voice roared over the comm. “Yeah? And where the hell am I going to put him? I’ve got bodies laying in the hall here!” He grumbled something else inaudible before continuing. “Fine. Get him down here fast.”
“Acknowledged.” Jake scanned the bridge again, and saw two marines near the opposite bulkhead stagger to their feet. He motioned to them. “Hey! You two. Get the Captain to sickbay. Now!”
When they came to their senses, they vaulted over fallen beams, bodies, and debris while Jake passed them to look at the command console.
Ben’s voice sounded softly in the cacophony. “Jake, damage reports are coming in. Heavy casualties. Life support on auxiliary power.”
Jake glanced up at his friend, whose ashen face accentuated the bloody wound on his temple. “What do we do?”
“Helm,” Ben began, “can we make the shift?”
The helmsman, now back in his chair, wiped his bloody nose and shook his head. “Gravitic drive is out, sir. All we’ve got are thrusters. Barely.”
Ben ran over to the comm station and pushed the charred, bloody body of the communication’s officer out of his seat and onto the floor.
“What are you doing?” Jake said, jogging over to lean over Ben’s shoulder.
“Signaling our surrender.” Jake squeezed Ben’s shoulder hard in protest, and his friend looked up at him. “Jake, we’ve got nothing left. It’s our only choice.”
Another blast knocked both of them backwards onto the floor. When Jake rolled over, he glanced at Ben who rolled back onto his knees.
Our only choice?
“Bullshit,” Jake said.
He wasn’t going to lose to the Empire. Not again.
“Jake, the Captain is down, and the XO is dead. I’m in command. We’re signaling our surrender. It’s our only chance right now, dammit!” He crawled back to his feet and opened a comm channel to the Caligula.
“NPQR Caligula, this is the commanding officer on the NPQR Phoenix. Admiral Trajan, we surrender. Repeat, we surrender. I’ve instructed our weapons crews to stand down,” he said, glancing at Po, who shrugged, indicating the dead or fallen tactical team underneath her. “And we await further instruction. I repeat, The Phoenix surrenders unconditionally and awaits further instruction.”
Jake grit his teeth and swore. He looked down at one of the tactical team members—his head was nothing more than a bloody, unrecognizable mess. Another man nearby moaned, and coughed. Blood spewed out his nose and sprayed the deck plate under his face. The Fidelius. The Firebird. No. Jake knew that Admiral Trajan had no intention of accepting their surrender. The man was out for blood, and would stop at nothing until the Resistance was completely and irrevocably crushed.
“Ben, you’re insane! Do you realize what they’re going to do to us?”
Ben nodded, flicking off the comm. “We’ll be put away for a long time.”
“No! We’ll be executed, Ben. We’re dead!” Jake advanced on his friend and yelled in his face. “You really think Trajan, after sacrificing the crew of the Fidelius and putting the rest of his fleet at risk just to nail our asses to the wall, do you really think he’s going to just throw us in jail? He’s going to kill us, Ben.”
Ben brought his face down to Jake’s and yelled back. “What the fuck do you want us to do, Jake? Keep on firing and get our asses handed to us? It’s over! We’re dead in the water! We’ve got nothing left!” He’d grabbed Jake’s uniform with his fist and looked about ready to toss his friend aside, and Jake’s own fist reared back, looking for a target.
Po, looking up from attending to a prone Ensign Ayala, pounded the deck plate. “Jake! Get a handle on yourself. Ben, he’s right. We’re dead. We can’t surrender. Jake, Ben’s right, if we don’t signal our surrender, we’ll be dead in minutes instead of weeks. Get a hold of yourselves, both of you.”
Another secondary explosion rocked the ship and threw them both back to the floor, and Ben’s head hit the command console on his way down, knocking him cold. Jake scrambled back to the comm station, and, seeing an incoming message from the Caligula, piped it through audio.
The voice of the imperial comm officer sounded triumphant. “This is the NPQR Caligula. Admiral Trajan’s orders are that you open your fighter deck bay doors and prepare to be boarded. All able-bodied men and women are to be kneeling with their hands behind their heads when approached by the boarding p
arties. Caligula out.”
Jake pointed at Po. “Megan. What’s the status of the quantum field missile launchers? Can we launch all of them at once, and hope one gets through?”
She shook her head as she studied her board. “Launchers are offline. And the launch tubes look too damaged to get anything out of them.”
Jake floundered for another option. “What about … what about gravitics? Are they up yet?” He turned to the helmsman.
“No sir. Thrusters only,” the man said with a moan. In the chaos, Jake couldn’t even remember the young officer’s name.
Jake thumbed the internal comm open. “Engineering, bridge. What’s the status of gravitics? When can we shift?”
The sound of yelling and klaxons met their ears. After a moment, an agitated voice, heavy with an Italian accent, answered. “This is engineering. Jake, is that you?”
“Bernoulli? Thank God you’re alive. What’s our status?”
“Commander Xi is missing. There was a whole compartment that got blown open to space. Jake, there’s a lot of bodies down here, and many that are left have severe rad exposure. We’re looking grim.”
“And the gravitic drive? Can it be fixed? Alessandro, if we don’t get out of here now, the Caligula’s going to either blast us to hell, or board us and blast our fucking brains out.”
“I don’t know, Jake. We got hit pretty hard. But Jake, you saw the Firebird, right? And the Raven? Those birds didn’t go down from railgun fire. I saw it on our screen down here, and Jake, I tell you, those were anti-matter induced blasts.”
“Are you saying they lost anti-matter containment?”
“Not at all. Well, eventually they did. But their explosion patterns matched those accidents from CERN. CERN, Jake! Where we did the experiments on the new gravitic drives! Jake, I think they’ve been tampered with.”
Jake glanced up at Po. “How many of ours are left?”
She tapped her board and gaped. “Three. Barely. Us, the Roc, and the Heron. “
Alessandro overheard. “Exactly, ma’am. And if I were to guess, I’d say that if you were to scan them, you’d see that their gravitic drives are out, too. They couldn’t get away, and that’s the only reason they’re alive.”
Po’s fingers danced across her console. A grave shadow passed over her face, and she looked up. “He’s right.”
Jake flustered. “That proves nothing, Alessandro. They’re probably just like us, they just got hit so hard that—look, buddy, it doesn’t matter. We’ve got to get out of here. The question is, can you fix it?”
“Well if I were to realign the gravitic field generators such that the harmonic resonance more closely matched the quantum state of the—”
“Alessandro, I don’t have time. Yes or no, and give me a time.”
“Yes, Jake. Two hours.” An explosion sounded through the speaker. “Maybe.”
“You’ve got one. Mercer out.” He smashed a fist onto the console, turning the comm off.
“Jake,” Po began, her voice steady, but her jaw beginning to clench, “the Caligula is awaiting our reply. They say they’ll resume their attack in two minutes if we don’t.”
Jake took a deep breath, and pointed a finger at the station. “Patch me through.”
She opened the channel, and Jake cleared his throat, spitting out a wad of blood that had seeped out from an empty tooth socket—he tried to remember when he’d lost it, but couldn’t. “This is Jacob Mercer of the Phoenix. Your terms are acknowledged, Caligula, but we’re having catastrophic system failure over here. We can’t get our bay doors down. We request technical assistance to restore power and systems control. Otherwise, it’s likely to be several hours before we can resu—”
“Lieutenant Commander Mercer, this is Admiral Trajan. Where is your Captain?”
So. The Admiral speaks.
“Sir, Captain Watson is in sickbay. His condition is grave.”
“And your XO?”
“Dead, sir. I’m in command of the bridge at the moment.” He glanced down at his friend, Ben Jemez, and felt slightly guilty for not picking him up and running him down to sickbay. The fall might have snapped his neck for all he knew.
“Our sensors indicate you have auxiliary power. You should be able to get the doors down just fine. Redirect power from life-support if you have to.”
“The pneumatics are shot, sir. It’s not a matter of power only, but of damage to the equipment. Our crews are on it, but it’ll take time, sir. Again, we request assistance with—”
“You lie, Commander. And let me tell you what I do with liars. You are familiar with the planet Glazov, I presume?”
Glazov. The imperial prison world, notorious for its frigid labor camps on the icy tundra, just like the Soviet Gulags of old. Jake had heard stories from captured Resistance fighters who had been sentenced to serve there. Those that made it out reported a vicious climate, alternating between extreme hot and extreme cold, and even more brutal guards.
“I am, sir.” He struggled to rein in his mouth. He wanted nothing more than to strike out with a flurry of insults and curses at the butcher on the other end of the comm.
“Then you might be aware of a particular little labor camp on one of the frozen southern islands. Balaka. The tongues of liars freeze my very soul, Commander, and as reward for the web of falsehoods they weave, they live out the rest of their days in the diamond mines of Balaka, where their hands freeze to their picks by the end of every long, bitter day, and their noses and ears fall off from frostbite by the end of the first week. Now tell me Commander, what is the status of those doors?”
“Standby, Admiral, I’m receiving an update now …” He muted the comm channel and motioned over to Po. “Are those doors operational?”
“Of course they are. What did you think to gain by lying to him?”
“Time.” He keyed open another internal comm channel, wiping sweat and blood from his brow. “Flight deck, Commander Mercer. Who’s down there?”
“Lieutenant Grace, sir. What the hell is going on?”
“Too much to explain, Anya. Listen. You’re about to have visitors down there. First, get the flight crew out. It’s about to get a little hot down there.”
“Where’s the Captain?”
“Maybe dead. Just listen. Get everybody out, then I need you to do something for me.”
Momentary silence. “What is it?”
“Get in your bird. When their boarding party arrives, I need you to do one of those maneuvers we practiced.”
“The short range gravitic shifts?”
“Yeah. Their carriers will come in to land, and at the exact moment the last one passes the threshold, I want to you shift to the entrance of the flight deck, less than a meter away from the incoming carrier, and right next to the bay doors.”
“But, won’t that cause all sorts of trouble? You know you can’t have any other solid surface touching an object caught up in a gravitic field, localized or otherwise. We could damage the doors, and probably the carrier.”
“Lieutenant, I’m counting on it. Orders understood?”
Another momentary silence. He knew she was weighing her chances of survival. They didn’t look pretty. Then again, none of the odds looked pretty at that point.
“Yes, sir. Understood. Grace out.”
He flipped the mute off. “Admiral, good news. The crews have got power restored to the flight deck’s hydraulics. We can receive the boarding party there. I will personally turn myself over to the commander of the party, along with any other senior officers I can find alive.”
The Admiral’s husky voice sounded over the speaker. Jake could almost hear a sinister grin on the other side of the line. He’d heard rumors of the man’s ghoulish face, and had no desire to meet him yet. “Very wise, Commander. And if I hear any reports of gunfire directed at my troops, I will withdraw them, and blast your ship to oblivion. Trajan out.”
Jake breathed deep. A moan to his left caught his attention, and he saw Ben win
ce and move a hand vaguely up to his head. Jake reached down and started to hoist the man onto his shoulders.
“Po, you good here?” he said, wavering unsteadily on his still-sore ankle. She nodded. He wasn’t sure why he noticed, but her bun had come partly loose, her hair spilling over her left shoulder. The young grandmother had vanished, replaced by a dazed, but resolute Resistance officer. “I’m getting him to sickbay, and checking up on the Captain. Then I’m heading to the flight deck. When what happens, happens, ask the Caligula if there was a malfunction with one of the carrier’s gravitic drives, and if its crew requires assistance.”
“Sure thing, Jake,” she called after him as the door closed behind the pair.
***
Sickbay was a mess. A slick, bloody mess. Streaks of the red stuff marked the walls and the floors, with occasional bits of tattered, bloody uniforms that had been cut away by surgeon’s scissors. An entire hallway of moaning, shell-shocked men and women lying on the floor led up to sickbay itself, and the scene within revealed too many bodies and too few beds. Doc Nichols stood in the center and barked orders at his medical staff and volunteers like a man possessed.
“Doc! I’ve got one more. I don’t know what’s wrong with him, hit his head pretty hard or something, but I need him. We got hit hard on the bridge.”
“No shit?” Nichols waved his arms at Jake as if he were scaring a dog off his front lawn.
“Come on Doc, with the Captain down, the XO dead, and Xi missing, Ben and Po are all I’ve got up there.”
Nichols scowled but beckoned for him to follow. He pointed at a gurgling, struggling man laying on one of the tables. Jake thought he recognized him from engineering. “Put him there.”
“But Doc, there’s already someone there.”
“Not for long.” Nichols stood over the man, whose face looked half burned off. His uniform had melted to fuse with his skin, and thick, acrid fumes of the mixture of flesh and smoke rose up to meet Jake’s nose. The doctor reached for the man’s hand and held it as he struggled for breath. “Easy, son. You’re almost there,” he said in a voice far more soothing than Jake would have given him credit for.