Last Man Out (Poor Man's Fight Book 5)

by Elliott Kay

  Chapter Thirty:

  Crashing the Party

  “Until recent years, Union treaties have been generally successful in preventing an arms race. Metrics have naturally been open to criticism, particularly regarding warships for large corporate fleets. Yet the basic principles stood for decades until the Debtor’s War. Ironically, the loss of warships has incentivized a buildup. Experts hope the easing of tensions will reduce that demand, barring another major crisis.”

  --The Solar Herald, August 2280

  “Five minutes to jump.”

  “Y’know, watching a timer tick down only makes it move slower,” said the pilot.

  “Not this time. I feel like it goes faster and faster the closer we get to rolling the dice with all our lives,” grumbled Gina.

  Naomi sat behind Emily’s chair, uncertain where she fell on this divide. The risks were all too real. At this point, she wanted to get it over with. She’d already had enough of the loud hum of the engines and the red-lining of so many indicators on the control panel.

  If nothing else, she figured chatter might fill the time. “How do you know when to go?”

  “You mean when the ship is ready? We’ve got the FTL all revved up now,” said Emily.

  “No, I mean what’s the line between jumping and not jumping?”

  “With a risk like this, it’s mostly a judgment call,” said Gina. “Some systems mandate you have to go all the way out past the farthest planetary orbit before jumping in or out, but that’s becoming less and less common. Some of that is more about monitoring traffic than a safety measure. A lot of the risk comes down to your ship. Some are built for more stress than others.”

  “We’re looking at an arbitrary line,” agreed Emily. “Every second adds a few hundredths of a percent to our odds of survival. We can wait four more minutes and have a marginally better chance or go right now and have only a marginally worse.”

  “So it’s still a gamble either way, right?” asked Naomi. “Either we jump or we don’t?”

  “Yeah,” said Emily.

  Gina bit her lip. “Which means we could go right now.”

  Emily looked to Gina, then around her seat to Naomi. “It’s a risk no matter what.”

  “Yeah,” said Naomi.

  “The class knows,” said Gina. “We didn’t get into a long talk about it, but they know.”

  “I can tell you what my family would say,” said Emily.

  Nobody spoke. Questioning looks turned to nods. The pilot turned back to her seat and hit the interior warning. Soft yellow lights flashed, though nobody needed to take action for it. Seat belts or vac helmets wouldn’t do any good if the jump tore the ship apart. “FTL drive is good,” said Emily. “Course is set and clear. We’re good to go.”

  Naomi sank back into her chair. Her eyes drifted to a sensor screen, where Minos lay surrounded by dark and unfriendly starships far behind the shuttle… with a sudden rush of new arrivals between them.

  “Stop! Stop oh shit stopstopstop!” Naomi blurted.

  “What?” snapped the pilot.

  “Look back. Look back on our course!”

  “Holy shit, those are Union ships—and Archangel’s?” said Gina.

  “Turn around!” Naomi urged.

  “Yeah, I’m on it. You can’t turn on a dime at this speed,” said Emily. Screens and indicators on the control panel provided plenty of details. Artificial gravity worked as hard as any other system. The shuttle’s occupants felt little change as the shuttle pulled away from its original course. At this pace, the shuttle covered significant distance with every degree of correction. “Gina, can you signal?”

  “Figuring that out now,” said Gina. She had the communications suite up on her panel as a holographic overlay. “Damn, that’s a big spread of ships. Look at this. Archangel, Quilombo, Lai Wa… Christ, they’ve even got a couple of NorthStar ships. Is Beowulf in the lead? I don’t see anything bigger.”

  “Does it matter?” asked Naomi.

  “Only for who to signal. There’s more to the protocol than that, but I can’t remember and right now I don’t care.”

  “They’re headed for Minos and moving fast,” noted Emily. “This image is a couple minutes old. Our signal is gonna take time to catch up to them, too.”

  “How did they even know what was going on?” Naomi wondered. “It’s only been a couple of hours since this started. Even if somebody sent out a drone in the first minute, it wouldn’t have gotten through to Qin Kai by now, would it?”

  “Don’t know and don’t care at the moment,” said Gina. “I’ll take any miracle we can get. Let’s hope we can reach them before they engage with all the wrong weapons.”

  * * *

  “First Platoon, this is your co-pilot. We are out of FTL and inbound for Minos, ETA nineteen minutes to drop window. Task force looks good. Bridge reports unidentified spacecraft in orbital range around the planet. I’ll let you know more as soon as it’s confirmed.”

  Groans and murmurs swept through the passenger cabin exactly as Alicia knew to expect. No drop had been any different for her, only now she sat up with the leadership. Her chair put her back to the forward bulkhead, with the cockpit on the other side. Now that she was in someone else’s shoes, she felt the strangest urge to handle it the exact same way—even if she’d thought it pointless and stupid before now.

  Don’t tell them to quiet down. Don’t tell them to shut up, Alicia argued internally. There’s no point. They have nothing better to do. Let ‘em blow it off.

  “Miss Wong.” Lieutenant Torres leaned over to speak quietly. “Channel six is unlocked on your comms suite if you want to listen in on coordination.”

  Alicia kept her jaw from falling open with an act of will. Holy shit, I get to hear this now? Sure enough, at the tap of a couple of buttons on the holocom at her wrist, her earpiece delivered new voices and new info. She immediately preferred the limited info of formation chatter to being in the dark without any clue at all.

  “Continue deceleration,” came a steady voice. “Fleet cruiser Java and escorts will make up starboard formation. Lai Wa cruiser Tianmen and escorts to port.”

  “I’m sayin’ two of those Lai Was ships were in the invasion,” said a marine near Alicia.

  “So? How’s it matter now? War’s over and Lai Wa hardly fired a shot anyway,” said another.

  “Hardly my ass. It matters.”

  “Weapons range in twenty-nine—”

  “—four times as many ships—”

  “—but what if it’s a trap?”

  “Your mom’s a trap.”

  “Oh my god shut up,” Alicia growled.

  The row in front of her fell silent.

  “Wondered when you’d do that,” said Torres.

  “Starboard passenger hatch opening,” announced a voice from inside the shuttle. A bo’sun stood near the hatch as it opened, offering a hand to another marine in combat gear. He promptly set to sealing the hatch again once the woman was on board. Alicia found herself surprised at the addition. First Platoon was all accounted for. The newcomer’s identity left her even more surprised.

  “Lieutenant Torres,” said Gunny Janeka. “I’ve been reassigned from the command platoon to yours for the mission. Where should I strap in?”

  “Up here is fine,” said Torres. He gestured to one of the few unclaimed collapsible chairs mounted against the bulkhead. “Miss Wong can get you tied in on the platoon net.”

  Opportunity put the gunny next to Alicia. The younger woman held Janeka’s rifle as she set up the crash chair and strapped in. “I figured Major Jimenez would want you close,” said Alicia. “What changed?”

  “Someone realized the Archangel Navy’s celebrity diplomat probably shouldn’t go into combat without someone watching her back.”

  “Celeb—? Oh god.” Alicia bumped her helmeted skull against the crash seat. “I’m gonna have to live with that now, aren’t I?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Ugh. Gotta
twist that knife, too, huh?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You’re really only here to watch me? You don’t have bigger responsibilities at your rank?”

  “Considering no one has ever seen the Nyuyinaro distinguish one human from another until you?” Janeka asked with her usual undertone of disapproval. “When you are the only person they have ever asked to see? No. I do not have bigger responsibilities. Command platoon will get along fine without me. To be honest, I’m surprised they’re letting you go at all.”

  Alicia frowned. “I didn’t even think about that.”

  “Not many people did, apparently.”

  “Who sent you to keep an eye on me?”

  The gunny looked at her without answering. She reclaimed her laser rifle and stowed it in the rack by her chair. “Shouldn’t you be monitoring fleet comms traffic, Miss Wong?”

  * * *

  “Formation is set,” announced a voice from the operations center. “All units in place. Course and speed are on track.”

  “Very well. Proceed,” said Khatri. The admiral loomed over the astrogation table in the ops center, studying the situation with her arms folded across her chest. Minos floated in the center, with icons for her formation and for each of the unidentified vessels in their respective positions. A smaller set of icons marked out debris where she would have expected satellites. In the other direction, beyond the two-light-minute bubble, a lone shuttle hurried away from Minos and presumably out of the system.

  “I’m a little unfamiliar with the set-up and the protocols here,” said Ambassador Young. He stood beside Khatri in a borrowed Archangel Navy vac suit much like hers and those of her staff. “We’re three light-minutes out from the planet, correct? They see us by now if their tech is on par with ours. How close do we get before we try to talk to them?”

  “We’re sending out a wave to establish contact now,” said Khatri. “Obviously we’re closing the distance, so the time delay will shrink. I’m much more concerned about the lack of other signals. We should be picking up something from Minos itself. Anything. But the satellites have all been destroyed and the communications spectrum is even darker than the atmosphere—and that concerns me, too.

  “As far as I can tell, the only thing to escape Minos is this shuttle,” she said, gesturing to the icon. “Either she launched from the surface after the trouble started or she was already in flight. It sure looks like she’s fleeing the system.”

  “She sees us by now, correct?” asked Young.

  “She should see us any second.”

  “Admiral Khatri?” The asteroid accent drew their attention to a holo projection on the other side of the table. Presumably Admiral Branch leaned over his own astrogation table on the command bridge. “I’m thinkin’ we might not want to wait on contact with these guys. I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess the signal silence and cloud cover that broad aren’t normal. We have a couple corvettes that aren’t loaded with landing parties. If we send them out on a wider angle to see if they can’t get around those clouds, we might get a better picture.”

  “Closing in on the flanks could be a provocation,” said Khatri.

  “Beggin’ your pardon, ma’am, but isn’t that wreckage around Minos kinda provocative?”

  Khatri flicked off the mic on the table. The diplomat tilted his head toward the other man’s holo projection. “He’s got a point,” Young murmured.

  “He is also fresh out of a war and accustomed to an aggressive posture,” said Khatri. “And he is used to being in charge. I expected this. It happens in joint operations. Best to resolve it now.”

  “He seemed pretty accommodating to me.”

  “Accommodation is not the same as falling in line.” Khatri flicked the mic on again. “Admiral, what’s done is done. If we have any chance of ending this without further bloodshed, we must take it. Our arrival is a show of force. We will maintain our approach and see if we can stop this without shooting before we goad the opposition into action.”

  “Aye, aye, ma’am. You’re in charge.”

  “Thank you for noticing, admiral. I have fourteen captains under my command and I do not have time for debate with any of them. Stand by for orders.”

  * * *

  Branch stepped back from his astrogation table and looked to Santos. “That went well.”

  “Like you said, she’s in charge,” said Santos.

  “Sure.”

  “Can’t say I blame her for wanting to get through this without starting another war with another alien race,” said Santos.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You think she’s wrong?”

  “Oh, I’d be happy to avoid yet another war,” said Branch. “Hell, maybe Minos Enterprises started it. Wouldn’t be the first time something like that happened.”

  “But…?”

  “But four million people live on that planet and I’m not of a mind to talk to anyone until I’m sure they’re okay. Especially not when the lights are blacked out and the front porch is covered in bloodstains.”

  The XO’s brow knit together. “Did we slip into a folksy crime scene metaphor there?”

  “Little bit.”

  “Captain,” called Hernandez from the ops center. “That shuttle pulled up from its course right in time with spotting our arrival.”

  “We’re getting a signal from them now, sir,” announced another officer at the comms station.

  “Contact!” warned a specialist at ops. “Dropped out of FTL zero-one-one by zero-zero-three at seventy-one thousand klicks, heading toward the planet. Looks like a yacht.”

  “Hell, what now?” the XO grumbled.

  “Give us the audio from the shuttle,” said Branch, already on his way over to the comms station. “Somebody else can deal with the stupid yacht.”

  * * *

  “This is Archangel Independent Shipping Guild vessel Phoenix, reporting in per the General Alert,” Elise announced in her sweetest, most innocent voice. She laid her accent on thick for added effect. “We are so eager to help.”

  “And they never got another government charter again,” Veronica sighed.

  “Elise, I said to play dumb, not insult them with sarcasm,” hissed Lynette. Like the XO, Lynette was strapped into her seat poring over information from the sensors. The rest of the bridge crew focused on getting their bearings.

  “Everyone is such a critic,” said Elise.

  “Phoenix, this is task force leader Beowulf,” came the reply. “You are in a potentially hostile situation. Alter your course by ninety degrees immediately to get clear.”

  “Which direction?” Elise asked.

  “Pick one, Phoenix. We don’t care.”

  “Already on it,” said Sanjay from the helm. He pointed Phoenix downward from its course, dropping the yacht out of the formation’s path though not turning as sharply as ordered.

  “Phoenix, the General Alert specifically instructed civilian vessels to stand by for further orders,” said the voice from Beowulf.

  “Our mistake. We were so excited. As long as we are here, we are ready to assist. How can we help?”

  Veronica slapped one hand over her own face. Without looking back, Elise flipped her off. She muted the mic. “You had two hours in FTL to come up with a better plan than this. If you wanted a bullshit artist, you should’ve hired one.”

  “I’ve been right here the whole time,” muttered Sanjay.

  “Ssshh, wait,” snapped Elise. She turned down the audio from Beowulf to bring up another transmission. “This sounds more important.”

  “…hidden underground on Minos. We have physical evidence including weapons and armor. The Minoans are attacking the cities and settlements with the intent to wipe them out.”

  “Is this from that shuttle?” asked Lynette. She could see the small vessel turning back toward the formation, though it had some catching up to do. “They’re broadcasting this?”

  “The attack is still underway,” continued the woman on the transm
ission. “Be advised, Minoan armor is highly resistant to laser weapons. Kinetic weapons are more effective. I repeat, laser weapons are not optimal.” She paused. “The Minoans also have some capacity for monitoring communications. Requesting point-to-point comms with formation leader. Archangel Intelligence Priority Black.”

  “Archangel Intelligence?” asked Veronica. “What the hell did we jump into?”

  “I don’t know their codes, but it sounds legitimate,” said Lynette.

  “Then why are they broadcasting all this?” wondered Sanjay.

  “It’s what everybody needs to know before moving another klick. She’s keeping the rest for a direct line.” Lynette hit a button on her chair. “Val, I think we’d better put our Interceptors on offense.”

  “Already giving the override,” came the gunner’s voice.

  “And here I thought putting defense guns on a yacht was paranoia,” said Veronica.

  “You made fun of Val for being excited about them when we bought the ship,” said Lynette.

  “Let’s be fair, I make fun of Val for a lot of things.”

  “The mic is still on and I know where you sleep, Veronica,” announced the gunner’s voice.

  “Hold up, new signal,” Elise interrupted.

  “Human vessels, halt your advance,” came a voice—deep but notably human. Elise routed the signal to an inset on the main canopy screen so all could see the speaker, a gold-skinned and bald man encased in black body armor. “We are the people you have called Minoans. I speak for She whom you will call Empress. Who leads this fleet?”

  “What the fuck?” asked Sanjay. “He doesn’t look like an alien. Is that make-up?”

  “Sanjay, bring us parallel to the formation as they catch up,” said Lynette. “I think they’re gonna be focused on bigger issues than us.”

  “Yeah, so am I,” said Sanjay.

  “Beowulf hasn’t responded yet,” noted Veronica. “Either they’re going to a direct beam or they’re taking their time. Maybe both.”