The Deftly Paradox

by Matthew D. White

  Mercer gulped in air against the pounding in his chest, determined to survive and to never let go. The ground was spread out far beneath his feet, with gray settlements speckled among the greenery extending out to the horizon. The battleship continued to burn in the distance and he looked on with a misplaced remorse as to the fate of those who he couldn’t reach. Although the macabre vision smoldered likewise within his heart, the lieutenant’s mind slid toward his current station as he worked his arms through the restraints on the seat. He had evidently passed the narrow gate and earned his life, if for nothing more than the day.

  30

  “Distress call has been sent,” the transport pilot announced as Lorde dropped down into the jump seat behind him.

  “Good. That’s all we can do. Get us clear of this mess,” the liaison replied, staring intently at the rush of stars and debris outside as they escaped the plummeting cruiser. Their ship rumbled as it made the transition from the tiny landing bay to high orbit, but the sound quickly dwindled against the backdrop of explosions and burning wrecks in the distance.

  The space on the flight deck was cramped to say the least, with barely room for the two-man crew much less a passenger. Lorde held his breath as he scanned the horizon, unwilling and unable to accept a position as a DV, remaining firmly planted in the cushy passenger cabin behind them. If death were to meet them, he wanted to see its approach.

  “Orders, sir?” the navigator asked.

  “I’m out of tricks. Get us out of the way,” Lorde said. “No sense getting caught in the middle of all this.”

  Lorde sighed in dismay at the thought of outliving their usefulness in the mission. His breath caught as the sky outside turned black, occluding the stars and planetary haze alike. The instantaneous feeling of them being no longer needed faded as an immense wall of gray steel flashed into existence, rushing straight for them.

  “Sir…” the pilot stammered, swinging the shuttle hard to the side.

  “Dammit, that’s the fleet responding!” Lorde exploded. “Evade! Get out of its way!”

  The towering metal flank of the arriving flagship rushed aside as the pilot ripped the controls back, nosing them straight at Avalon’s surface far below. They picked up speed, watching the flying city move ever closer to engage the OSIRIS’s force. Lorde clenched his teeth, holding on tight to the stamped aluminum armrests, the embarrassment of being tagged by their allies or planting on their windshield at the forefront of his mind.

  Three more shadows appeared before them as additional fleet vessels emerged from the warp. Again, they cut the transport hard to the side, slicing close between the hulls of the two materializing battleships below. They cleared the gap and flew free into the hazy upper atmosphere of Avalon.

  Lorde held his breath as they broke through the formation, escaping toward the planet’s surface. His heart was still racing when they leveled out, skimming lightly along and out of range of the battle. “I’ve had enough of this,” he said with a sigh. “Return to base. Just get us on the ground.”

  ***

  Leo couldn’t shake the image of Lieutenant Mercer’s final gaze as he watched his transport slide off the battleship’s ramp. He was right, there was no room to move in the cargo bay, the air was stifling, and the descent to Avalon’s surface had the finesse of a falling cinder block. She couldn’t move and couldn’t breathe; she stood transfixed, hoping to see his face emerge from the rushing haze outside the service window.

  They touched down hard onto the concrete outside Heddings Field and immediately dropped the ramp. Cool air washed over the bay as Leo, followed by a dozen others, tumbled out onto the pad, desperate after the suffocating evacuation.

  She pulled herself along to the side of the ship and away from the cacophony of voices, shouts, and cheers at their fortune. Mercer’s face stayed with her. Leo endlessly replayed the event, intent on finding a flaw in his logic. Somehow, he could have made it. They could have made the space and gone with a little less oxygen. She wanted to climb back into space and pull him off the damn ship herself.

  Everything and likely everyone she knew on New Loeria, her entire life, was gone. Knowing the OSIRIS’s plan, the council would be wiped away as well. She stared at the ground. Apparently, it was too much to ask that a single acquaintance would survive along with her.

  ***

  The missile field stretched for a hundred miles in every direction. Shafer stood at the edge of the landing platform above the network’s central command center, listening in on the bevy of traffic that ran nonstop across the radio channels.

  After the first volley of ballistic missiles were lost upon First Fleet’s arrival, their team’s hearts had collectively sank, resigned to the failure of the mission. Colonel Baylor had been the sole voice of optimism and likely broke every system safety rule in the Fleet Instructions to cycle and reload the silos.

  Shafer scanned across the horizon, watching the multitude of smoke plumes gently rise from the ground, the last sign of their previous firings which had left the hemisphere undefended. He heard Baylor switch topics once half had reported in and called for the firing solutions.

  OSIRIS’s surviving battlegroup continued their methodical advance toward Heddings Field and the neighboring civilian skyline of Orellius. In the dim light, Shafer caught sight of their reflective bodies hanging high above the field. He felt a chill then the shriek of a rocket engine inbound.

  He collapsed to the deck as the silver projectile sliced overhead, emanating not from their battery but from orbit. It hit out of site behind the platform in a detonation that shook the ground on which he stood. Shafer’s ears rang, but he heard Baylor’s voice crackle over the radio. As more projectiles descended from orbit, riding trails of glowing smoke, Shafer knew OSIRIS was finishing its mission and taking the last of their defenses.

  ***

  There was nothing left, Maddie decided. The inner console was blank, the core was dark, and not a sound carried through the chamber. The sensation was maddening, to be so cut off from the battle that was likely raging above. Her team had told her to wait for them to return, but there was nothing left for which to wait. Taking one last walk around the platform, she examined the ring of museum plaques in a casual inspection before retreating back to the surface.

  OSIRIS’s bunker was sketched in detail on one, listing all of its data gathering systems and the access point back under Heddings Field. Others detailed the backup systems, as well as all the Fleet vessels, devices of OSIRIS’s own creation. Something caught her eye as she glanced over the Galaxy-Class battleship’s specifications.

  Leading edges hardened against planetary and artificial-body collisions to 15 Giga-Newtons.

  Designed in the 425th Year of the OSIRIS.

  The number was impossibly large, suggesting that the Galaxy battleship were designed as a ram instead of a standoff weapon. Maddie ran the numbers in her head. OSIRIS’s last instructed genocide by its admission was in 419. It hadn’t built for them an offensive weapon and it wasn’t planning to bombard the council’s chamber.

  Her blood ran cold. The target was the bunker itself, with the only weapon system that could puncture it straight from the surface. Maddie broke for the highway without a glance back.

  ***

  “Dammit, what the hell?”

  Erikson turned away from his vantage point at the exclamation from the captain. He had been watching the battle unfold through the forward screens, staying safely removed from the officers on deck who still had duties to perform.

  “All offending ships just opened fire on the missile fields, broke lock with us and turned to retreat.” The captain paused in the midst of his announcement. “No…they’re going straight for Orellius.”

  Erikson didn’t move, but spied the enemy indicators flash across the active map at the center of the bridge.

  “Stay on them! They’ve got fifty miles on us, but we can’t let them get a shot off on the population center!” he ordered, parsing commands
between his stations. “Get Heddings Field on the line; have them recall every ship in the air or they’ll have no defenses left.”

  “Sir, the field confirms. Everything in the air is on its way, but it’s a short list. Closest is a shuttle carrying a council liaison and a flight of three damaged destroyers.”

  Erikson sat up straight at the mention of the shuttle. It could only be one person. He cautiously retreated from the bridge and switched on his squad radio, hoping it’d be able to cover the distance. Lorde’s voice came back instantly.

  “Hate to tell you this,” he reported, “but you’re not out of this yet.”

  “Bullshit,” Lorde curtly replied. “We’re in a damned transport sitting on no weapons and not much more fuel. We’re heading back to Heddings Field.”

  “So are OSIRIS’s last five battleships. The captain up here think’s they’re going to take out the council,” Erikson said. “Keep your heading and you’ll run right into them.”

  “You’ve lost your ever-loving mind,” Lorde replied, catching the eye of the navigator.

  “Sir, what’s wrong?”

  Lorde switched off the channel. “How can we engage a battleship?”

  Both the pilot and navigator burst out laughing, stopping only at Lorde’s unchanging expression.

  “The OSIRIS is sending its last five of them to hit Orellius and Heddings Field. We’re all that’s left to stop them.”

  “We can’t,” the navigator said.

  “We don’t have that luxury. What can we do? Take out guns, targeting, engines, nav, something?”

  “No, there’s nothing in the ship that can do that kind of damage,” the navigator reiterated. “This is a DV shuttle. All protection comes from escorts.”

  “Then the fuel, the engines, the ship itself. What will stop them?” Lorde demanded.

  “If you rupture our engine just right, it’ll melt down,” the pilot confirmed. “Do that close enough to a battleship’s lower engine ducting and you might cause some damage, but that’d be the end of us.”

  Lorde looked between his crewmembers, then off to the horizon. “In that case, bail now and I’ll do it myself.”

  “Sir…”

  “Get out,” he said. “Just tell me how,” the liaison added before switching back to his radio. “Erikson, we might have a way to take out one, but we can’t do any more than that.”

  “Good show. We’ll owe you one once we get back on the ground.”

  Lorde turned off the radio without another word.

  “You didn’t tell him?” the navigator asked.

  “Would it change anything?” Lorde replied, rhetorically.

  “I’ve got you set up,” the pilot reported. “All the vents are closed and we’re at max acceleration. The engines will overheat in a few minutes and you’ll a flying bomb. One jolt and that’ll be it. Aim for the lower-rear quarter and maybe you can take out the primary engine.” He got to his feet. “Good luck.”

  “Luck nothing,” Lorde grumbled. “This is all as the OSIRIS has willed.” He exchanged places with the officer. “Get out before we get any closer.”

  The minutes passed as Lorde watched the ground slice by beneath the shuttle. In what felt like hours, he caught sight of the fleet’s last formation, rocketing as fast as possible in atmosphere and packed in a far tighter vicinity than any human pilot would have attempted. Lorde’s hands shook as he processed the magnitude of their size. Part of him felt greedy, that if one lost control it’d take out the rest along with it. If the OSIRIS willed it, he’d never know.

  Keeping the throttle at one hundred percent, he guided the shuttle low, ignoring the bevy of warnings and sirens that blared nonstop around his head. Over speed in atmosphere, heat, proximity, he checked them all off and kept moving.

  Overtaking the first and then the second, Lorde aimed for the lead battleship and guided himself to the underside of the engine as the pilot had recommended. Crossing the slipstream, the shuttle shook violently against the disturbed air as he located his mark. There was nothing else to be done. He clenched his jaw and closed his eyes before ripping back on the control stick with all his might.

  31

  The expected inferno was nowhere to be felt. Lorde’s eyes snapped open as every panel in the cabin fell dark and the engine died out, leaving him alone aside from the atmosphere rushing by outside.

  He cursed as the shuttle fell away from the formation, tumbling harmlessly as he furiously attacked the controls. Lorde’s head spun as he fell, watching the planet’s surface slice across his field of view. He was no pilot; the controls were as alien to him as anything from another galaxy.

  Scouring the panels, Lorde searched for recognizable symbols, words or anything that looked promising enough to restart the engine. His right hand found a momentary switch marked with the symbol of a turbine and depressed it. Over the rush of air outside, he felt the engine rumble and held the circuit closed.

  The ground outside grew in size and fidelity as the shuttle’s power system sputtered one last time before roaring to life. Instantly, the panels flickered on and the ship righted itself, slamming Lorde straight into the back of his seat. The shuttle picked up speed, plunging fast toward the ground. He reached out with both hands, simultaneously cutting back the power as he pulled the nose up to level the descent.

  It caught the air just as the altitude ticked to zero. Lorde looked ahead to see an open plain rush forward to meet his tiny ship. He held tight as they collided, driving into the dirt and grinding to an unceremonious halt.

  Lorde’s head caught up with his body and scanned the tiny flight deck, spying a multitude of smoking fires within the cabin and a mountain of soil plowed up in the crash. The fumes suffocating, he reached up and hit the safety release on the canopy above his head. The glass disconnected and slid aside, letting the black smoke free, along with the pilot.

  He crawled free of the wreck, gulping in clean air while maintaining a death grip on the dusty field, as if Avalon itself were about to kick itself free of him. With eyes still burning, he traced the exhaust trails of the battleships across the sky and over the horizon, until the destination exploded in a blinding white light. Lying still in the dirt, Lorde shielded his head as a deafening pressure wave washed over the plain. His organs rocked within his chest and he lay motionless, willing the screeching in his head to subside.

  The air smelled of sulfur and burning oil. Moving methodically away from the remains of the shuttle, Lorde switched his radio back on, hoping to find a familiar voice once more.

  He coughed hard, tasting blood and bile rising in his throat. “Erikson, its Riley. I’m on the ground. What happened?”

  “Riley!” the voice came back through heavy static. “The whole formation just plowed into the field north of the city, right into OSIRIS’s bunker.”

  “It did?”

  “Yes. Eyes at the base report there’s nothing left. Heavy damage across the field, but everything to the north is gone.”

  “So the fleet…the OSIRIS.”

  “Gone. It’s over. All of it.”

  Lorde stared out across the sky, processing each word as if they were lies planted in his mind within a dream. “Well, in that case, can one of your boys give me a ride back to base?”

  “Sure, they’ll have a casualty collection point together before—”

  “Thanks. I’ll see you there,” Lorde cut him off and removed the headset. The infinite blue sky bathed the landscape in warming light at the dawning of a new day. He closed his eyes.

  ***

  The ascent had taken hours, Maddie was sure of it. After taking the full length of the sunken highway in a dead sprint, the ship impacted the core, instantly pulverizing every solid fragment of matter for miles around. She was on the ramp as the blast sent her to the ground and collapsed the roof, leaving a cracked and crumbling channel through which to crawl back to the surface.

  She couldn’t see through the dust and could barely breathe through the suit but k
ept moving forward, determined to never give up. Each time her hand went forward, it caught empty space, so she pushed herself along. Maddie barely sensed the armored fist that grasped her outstretched hand and pulled her to freedom.

  The visor was lifted from her face and she stared up at a pair of medical officers. They stared back and began blotting her face with bandages, each when lifted away was soaked with blood.

  A third face appeared. Maddie’s eyes adjusted and she could see John Shafer looking down at her. His expression flew between concern and joy, settling on a quiet smile. She couldn’t hear the exchange, but the medic on her right nodded in the affirmative. Shafer grinned again before leaving her with a wink.

  ***

  Shafer crossed the floor of the devastated bunker and assumed his seat beside the other MOC operators leaning up against a fallen support beam. Erikson and Lorde looked up, hopeful, while Leo remained between them with her head between her knees.

  “It’s her. They say she’ll recover.”

  “Hope so. Half the medical staff in the system is inbound right now,” Erikson replied. “We can still keep an eye on her; it’s not like we have a shift to show up for.”

  The words were muted in Leo’s ears. Every muscle burned within her, blocking out every sensation of the world around her. Her soul was a world unto itself, separated and absolute. She scanned across the others, then the teams of fleet crews to all sides.

  In the distance, a familiar face drifted across her view. As tattered and ragged as the rest of them, she got to her feet to see if her eyes deceived her. The lieutenant’s face was unmistakable, and she rushed toward him as he took in the enormity of the base’s destruction.

  Mercer saw her approach and grinned as she threw her arms around him. They stood silent for a moment amidst the sprawling madness.

  “I thought you were gone too,” Leo said to him with the waning energy within her.