She knew in her heart there would most likely be only one final engagement left. Like two deadly samurais meeting, this next battle would not be an exchange of cuts and parries. Each side would be delivering their death blow—and hoping that time, speed, and chance gave them the advantage.
***
Three dozen black and matte-gray tri-fighters came howling out of the darkness beyond the defense guns of Bantaar Reef. There was a brief moment of confusion, as general quarters hadn’t even been sounded. The fighters were already inside the “lagoon,” as the harbor of the crescent-shaped debris field was known, before return fire began.
Admiral Landoo watched it all from her vantage in strategic command headquarters, not believing what she was seeing. Tri-fighters, the strange wicked little fighters that had destroyed her last fleet, were suddenly racing to hit targets inside the heavily defended lagoon. But why? Once the Republic ships engaged their auto-turrets and interlocked fire via the Freedom’s coordinated fire control system in her advanced CIC section, three dozen fighters wouldn’t stand a chance.
The call to battle stations erupted across the nets, comms, and speakers all across Bantaar Reef.
“What the hell is going on out there!” screamed Landoo as her command team tried to get a handle on the rapidly developing situation.
Two tri-fighters made a run on her carrier, blasters blazing. One of them managed to score a direct hit on the aft reactor. How much damage it did wouldn’t be known until the reports came flooding in.
A flight of Lancers on patrol came roaring in, peeled off, and went after separate groups of tri-fighters. One of those tri-fighter groups hit the engines of a corvette with a torpedo of some sort. The explosion from the main engine compartment rippled up along the spine and blew the ship apart from stem to stern, sending debris into a nearby escort missile frigate group.
Then SSM munitions went up. The whole facility. Out there along the reef, rock and structure exploded out into the lagoon, slamming into other ships that had not managed to get their deflectors up in time.
At last the ship’s batteries picked up the dancing tri-fighters and engaged at close range with turret fire. And just as quickly as it had begun, it was over. The fighters scattered and streaked away from the lagoon, leaving a few burning corvettes and damaged ships and facilities in their wake.
“Get me the watch officer at Base Sensor Array!” shouted Landoo as damage control reports began to come in from across the fleet.
When the final losses were tallied, they would prove to be small but quite meaningful. Key ships in the command and control structure of this new fleet had been damaged so badly they’d need months of refit. And the loss of ship-to-ship munitions—the heavy ship-killer torpedoes—was devastating. Much of Landoo’s strategy had been to refit many of the smaller ships with the heavy SSMs, effectively turning them into one-shot platforms. Her strategy had been to follow a wave of these missiles with her main battle group and attempt to board the battleship using legionnaires.
Now the SSMs were a rare commodity.
And of course, the watch officer at Base Sensor Array had disappeared. A fleet-wide alert was put out, instructing all personnel to be on the lookout for the career officer who had not one black mark on his record.
But of course, he was never found.
03
The armored shuttle proved not only to be Major Owens’s courtroom, but also his prison transport. Almost as soon as the tribunal acquiesced to Orrin Kaar’s sentencing request, they were up and gone, leaving Owens under guard with the basics.
Owens had thought about overpowering the men and seizing control of the ship—he was relatively sure he could do it. He’d seen only two basics and Pratell since they’d set out, and he wouldn’t be surprised if that, plus a pilot, was the extent of the crew. These shuttles didn’t require much personnel, not for a simple prisoner transport. But if he did take over the ship… then what? Live out his life on the run, occasionally pinging Captain Ford for advice on how to navigate the treacherous slices of space on galaxy’s edge?
No, Owens was a soldier. And, for now anyway, he would wait on the process. Allow Legion Commander Keller—who surely would have been taken off guard by what happened—to pull some strings and get things figured out. The initial panic of the sentence had passed, and Owens felt firmly in control of his emotions, and himself.
He waited out the jump through hyperspace in a satisfactory prison cell. The only opportunities for escape came when one of the two basics came to deliver him food and water. During those moments, instead of killing the guard and having his run of the ship, Owens made small talk. He spoke to his captors about their families and the nascent war. He laughed at bad jokes and discussed the contrasts of life as a Republic Army soldier versus that of a legionnaire. He told stories of how the Legion was before points. He openly lamented the state of the Legion of today, now that war was upon them.
The guards seemed to take a liking to him over the days it took to arrive at Herbeer. And when the armored shuttle approached planetary orbit, they both entered his holding cell.
“Hey, Major,” said Mal, the older of the two basics, though not by much. “We’ve arrived in-system. Lieutenant Pratell sent us to see if you want to observe our entry into Herbeer. It’s supposed to really be something…”
“Sure, why not?” Owens said, snorting his sinuses clear and lazily standing up to stretch. “Probably the last chance I’ll get to see a sun. Synth mining is completely subterranean.”
The basic looked down glumly. “Yeah.”
Owens clapped the soldier on his arm. “Don’t worry about it, Mal. Let’s go see that view.”
Mal led Owens to the main command hub. The basics had lost any pretense of alertness. Mal barely even touched the rifle slung over his shoulder, and they hadn’t even thought to put ener-chains on Owens. They had made the mistake of growing too comfortable with their prisoner. He knew they thought of him now more as a friend than a captive.
It would be so easy to take command of the ship.
Instead, Owens followed the soldiers through the automated door to the command hub.
The hub was a rectangular room that sat above and to the rear of the shuttle’s cockpit. It boasted a triple-layered transparent impervisteel forward window, with smaller triangular windows on the sides. This allowed the command crew, who often directed complicated space-to-space battles from armored shuttles such as this one, to have visuals no matter what. Holotransmissions and external viewers could be jammed fairly easily.
Lieutenant Pratell stood alone in the hub, facing the window, arms clasped behind her back, gazing down at the roiling auburn surface of Herbeer. She turned at the sound of the door opening, looking first at the basic escort and then at Owens. When her eyes went to the prisoner’s unmanacled wrists, her brow hardened into a scowl. Owens waited for the tirade to begin, but instead the lieutenant turned back to face the planet.
“Have you ever seen Herbeer before, Major?” she asked.
Owens stepped up beside the lieutenant, standing shoulder to shoulder as they viewed the churning surface of the planet. It looked like a roiling, tumultuous cloud the color of Owens’s beard. He wondered if they’d make him lose it—the beard—during processing. They might shave his entire head. He’d been to leej camp, that part wouldn’t bother him. But he’d rather keep his beard.
“Major?” Pratell prompted again, gently.
“Mind was somewhere else,” Owens said, shaking the thoughts from his head. “No. Seen a lot of hellholes, but not this one before.”
“That’s… understandable,” Pratell managed. She paused and looked to be struggling with something internally. “For whatever it might be worth, I disagree with how your trial was handled. We all do.”
Owens nodded. “Yeah, me too.”
Quiet fell as the planet neared.
“How about you? You ever see Herbeer before?”
Pratell gave a fractional nod. “Two weeks
ago, a stop while on my way to being stationed on the supply station.”
“Picking up or dropping off?”
“Dropping off,” Pratell said, the slightest edge in her voice. “My former commander at Fort Bantam.”
“Bantam, huh?” Owens shrugged his shoulders forward and popped his neck. “And then off to a mid-core station. And now… you’re back on the edge.”
“For the time being,” Pratell said, still staring out of the viewport as the planet grew larger.
Owens snickered to himself. “I’ve got the extended vacation package.”
The sun peeked over the horizon of Herbeer, and a ray of sunlight flooded the command hub. The viewport darkened instantly, preventing those looking through it from being blinded.
“Looks like there’s quite a storm raging on the surface,” Pratell observed. The shuttle was now rapidly approaching the planet’s atmosphere. Hemisphere-wide clouds of dust tumbled helter skelter, with white-blue streaks of lighting blinking everywhere like the flashing indicator lights of a starfighter cockpit.
“Think I’ll just keep looking at the sun,” Owens said, not removing his gaze from the massive orb inferno. “Might be a while ’til I see it again.”
A singsong chime sounded, alerting all on board that the shuttle’s captain was about to speak over general comms.
“We’re two minutes to re-entry.” The pilot’s voice and inflection were as calm and professional as that of a commercial starliner captain. “All hands, secure persons and possessions for landing.”
Pratell made her way to a command chair. As she lowered herself into the seat, she paused long enough to say, “Major Owens, you’d better get strapped in. I’ve sat through one of these Herbeer landings before.”
“Yeah,” Owens agreed. He stared at the sun until the last possible moment, until the click of Pratell’s restraints spurred him to motion. He found a seat and fastened himself in, watching the orange flaming glow of re-entry begin to build around the main viewport window.
The shuttle bucked as it skipped its way into the atmosphere. Its engines whined in protest as they switched from smooth propulsion through space into the labored stress of atmosphere flight. These armored birds were heavy. Soon Owens felt like his ears were overwhelmed.
The ship passed from the upper atmosphere into the roiling surface storms that covered the entirety of the planet. Countless particles of sand-like glass and grit pelted the shuttle, scouring its armor like a chemical solvent. It sounded to Owens as though he were standing at the base of a colossal waterfall, or plunged to the bottom of a surging tidal wave tearing apart a coral reef.
Visibility went to zero. Through the viewport, it looked as if the shuttle were burrowing deep into a desert. The sun refracted inside the grains of ground glass to provide an amber light. Owens knew that they were on auto-pilot, following a slave recall signal down to a surface landing pad. But, Oba, it didn’t seem like anything—even hypo-spectra signals—could find its way from sender to receiver through this. A part of Owens braced for the shuttle to just… nose into the planet’s surface and go up in a spectacular ball of flames.
But the sensation of motion slowed, and though the noise drowned out the mechanical extrusion of landing struts, Owens could feel the massive armored shuttle settle onto a solid surface. First the two struts at the aft of the shuttle, then the single landing gear beneath the cockpit. The sound of the whirling storm continued to rage for a few seconds, and then Owens felt his stomach fly up into his chest—the sensation of a sudden and unexpected drop.
Through the front viewport, the swirling storm gave way to smooth, concave walls. A brilliant light flashed as the shuttle descended on what had to be some sort of docking platform lift. It was quieter now, much quieter, and Owens could make out a resounding boom as something closed overhead—probably a valve to keep the storm out, for the glass sands had died down completely. Streams of sand still tumbled down in front of the viewport like a dry waterfall, but the grains were no longer whipped into a frenzy by the naked atmosphere.
The shuttle descended quickly, the blue lights and painted yellow lines on the walls of this express docking platform going by in a blur. The mine was deep beneath the surface. Eventually repulsors kicked in to slow the descent, and the platform settled down gently on the subterranean level that served as a hub for the synth mines themselves.
Abandon all hope, ye who enter.
Owens didn’t actually see that written anywhere. The viewport showed a basic docking bay. Power and recharge cells, maintenance and mechanical bots, hover pallets, tugs, coupling hoses, and a customs bot instead of a Republic official or naval officer.
“Prepare Ellek…” Pratell paused. “Prepare the prisoner for transfer.”
Owens released himself from his harness before the lieutenant or her soldiers did. It seemed that the reality of the situation—that they were escorting a Dark Ops legionnaire to serve a life sentence—hit the captors all at once. They tensed upon seeing Owens up and free, no doubt wondering if this would be the moment when he would attempt to take control of the situation. The soldiers got up awkwardly, holding their rifles as though the weapons felt uncomfortable in their hands. Pratell hurried to extricate herself from her seat.
Owens simply stood by patiently. There was nothing to be gained by seizing control of the ship at this point, far beneath the raging glass-storms of Herbeer’s surface.
“You’d probably better put some ener-chains on me,” Owens announced.
Pratell nodded at one of her soldiers, who shouldered his weapon to apply the restraints.
“Thank you for that, Major,” said Pratell.
Owens shrugged. “Rather not get shot by some overanxious guard who sees me coming out of the shuttle unrestrained.”
Owens was frog-marched through the ship and down its ramp. Two black-uniformed guards waited at the bottom of the ramp, each of them carrying disagreeable-looking shotguns. Owens was marched to a halt in front of them. He looked up at the ship and raised both eyebrows appreciatively at the way it shone. Every last bit of paint had been scoured clean by the glass-sand storm. There was no Republic emblem, no identification numbers, no black and yellow warning stripes—nothing. Just unvarnished impervisteel, sand-blasted clean. If an organic was left to Herbeer’s planetary storms… it wouldn’t be pretty.
“Republic prisoner transfer of one Major Ellek Owens,” Pratell told the guards.
“Yes, ma’am,” came the reply. The guard nodded to a small room just off the docking platform. “You can take care of your paperwork over there. We’ll process the prisoner from here.”
There were no spoken goodbyes. Owens simply followed the directives of his new guards, leaving the basics he’d come to know behind him.
There was a layer of ground glass, almost a dusting, around the docking platform, and it crunched beneath Owens’s boots as he was led to a long corridor. Around him, dome-like cleaning bots systematically sucked the area clean. As the guards took Owens further down the corridor, the glass dust receded, and the walk grew quiet except for the jangle of cuffs hanging from the guards’ belts.
They stopped in front of a moving walkway. Owens noted that it moved only in one direction—farther down the corridor, which seemed to disappear into a curtain of blackness.
Owens took a deep breath. There was a slight gush of air from the inky beyond. It smelled subterranean. Moist and stale.
“Step on,” one of the guards ordered.
“Too long a walk?” asked Owens as he complied, taking a step and then standing in place as the walkway moved him farther down the corridor.
The guards stepped on a beat later. “Not really. But this way, you stay still. Which is important, because if you move a muscle, you’re dead.”
“And,” added the second guard, “you won’t be able to see your hand in front of your face in a few seconds. Fewer broken noses this way.”
“But don’t worry,” the first guard said in a patronizingly so
othing tone, “we can still see you just fine.”
The people mover carried Owens into darkness. The guards weren’t kidding—he couldn’t see a thing. His shades were still on, of course, but removing them wouldn’t have made a difference. The only sound was the soft whir of the moving walkway. It carried on straight for what seemed a quarter of kilometer, as best as Owens could reckon based on their speed before the light faded from the corridor. The flow of cavern breeze caressed his beard, then abruptly blew on the left side of his face before blowing from the front again. He surmised that they’d taken a right-hand turn and forked off into another passage. There were more turns. Owens worked to create a mental map of where he’d gone so far.
“Not much farther,” said one of the guards.
Owens repressed a half-dozen smart aleck replies and continued to mentally calculate distance and direction. And then he felt something soft but firm brush against his face. Whatever it was knocked his glasses off. He heard them clatter onto the floor.
“Easy, pal,” warned one of the guards. “Don’t get jumpy.”
Another soft tendril of something brushed against Owens. This time across the back of his neck. He resisted the urge to swat whatever this was away. Something told him these guards would be all too quick to pull their triggers if he made any abrupt moves.
“Your shades are about a meter behind you and to the right,” a guard said. “They’re riding along with us on the people mover. We’re about to stop. When we do, you can bend down and get them.”
Owens ground his molars. Was this a trap?
The people mover came to a stop, nothing too sudden, but enough for Owens to take a step to steady himself.
Prisoners of Darkness (Galaxy's Edge Book 6) Page 4