A Call to Arms

by Bradley Hutchinson

  Chapter Two

  “Got a minute?”

  James Hunter didn’t even look up from his computer terminal as he waved his brother, Michael, into his office. Secretly, he was grateful for the distraction – he’d been pouring over this case file for two hours now, and could almost feel his brains dribbling out of his ears from the boredom.

  “Michael, what’s up?”

  “The purchase of McIntyre Industries has been finalised,” his brother said as he walked through the doorway from James’ outer office. James’ virtual-vision revealed him to be highlighted by a soft yellow radiance – the internal security networks way of identifying him as a visitor. Michael brandished a datapad and handed it to James. “I thought I’d ask you take a look at the new partnership agreements we’ve drafted for the family, make sure they’re in order.”

  “I don’t know what possessed the old man to buy further into the shipyard business.” James took the pad and started to glance over it, but lost interest when he saw how large it was – Commonwealth regulations and red-tape demanded that simple mergers or buy-outs meant that the documents were always several thousand pages long.

  “Money, of course,” Michael replied smugly, though he was smiling. “They were willing to sell, and we were willing to buy. With a war brewing, heavy industries are raking it in, and we don’t want to be left behind.” He shrugged, almost apologetically. “Doesn’t hurt to diversify our holdings… especially since we already design and manufacture weapon and propulsion systems anyway.”

  “I suppose,” James muttered, unconvinced. It was a logical step, though, albeit an expensive one in the short-term. “But you know, Troy’s allegedly a lawyer, too. Why do I have to look this over?”

  Michael’s lips thinned as he squinted. “Would you really trust Troy to look over these, James? It’s not like he’s making a career out of his law degree… aside from the few civil cases he takes on to qualify to keep his licence and remain a member of the Bar.”

  He’s got you there, James. Troy’s legal expertise these days extended to being a consultant to various government agencies on Bastion, and even then, it was only on a part-time basis. Sighing, James leaned back into his chair and looked out the window. The afternoon sun was obscured by low-lying clouds, and it had been raining most of the morning until it eased off just before lunch-time.

  “Alright, fine, leave it with me,” James said, throwing the pad on top of a stack of others. He gestured to the pile. “As you can see, I’m a bit busy this morning.”

  “In the middle of a crime spree, are we?” Michael arched an eyebrow as his left hand brushed over some of the pads. He picked one up. “Oh yes, I remember reading about this on –” He was cut off as James snatched the pad from him, scowling.

  “All of this is confidential, you prat.” He made a shooing motion with his hands. “You can go now.”

  Michael made a mock half-bow and proceeded to head back to the door, his trench coat trailing behind him like a cape. He paused in the doorway. “Were you coming to dinner at dad’s tonight?”

  “Jen and I are both going to be there,” James affirmed, nodding. “But I don’t get the urgency of it… Dad’s divorce isn’t finalised yet, so there’s no point celebrating…”

  To account for a wide variety of differing personal schedules, family dinners were almost always planned weeks – or even months – in advance, but last night Patrick Hunter had strongly requested that all six of his children – as well as a handful of nephews, nieces and cousins – come over to the family estate tonight.

  “No one’s told you?” Michael asked dubiously. James shrugged expressively, and Michael grimaced. “Strange. Anyway… Sarah’s been called up for active duty.” Michael frowned. “Or she volunteered. Depends who you ask.”

  James scowled. “I’m trying to be surprised, but I’m not.” Sarah had been a reservist for a few years now, but had refrained from volunteering for active duty, preferring to practice medicine as a civilian. Now, it seemed, the Navy had forced her hand.

  Michael chortled, nodding in complete agreement, and departed. After James’ outer door had closed behind him with a soft bang, he called out to his assistant. “Negin, have you heard from Judge Alizadeh yet?”

  He waited for a response, but there was none, which was incredibly odd – he had not seen Negin leave, and she was usually very swift with her responses.

  Sure enough, Negin was there at her ever-tidy desk, though her attention wasn’t on her work. Hailing from the outskirts of the city of Surat, India, Negin had been his assistant for almost three years now. She normally had silky long black hair, but had recently decided to keep it shorter, straighter – more professional she’d called it, in preparation for her transfer to a white-collar crime unit next month.

  Her attention was rapt on a holonews cast that was floating above her desk.

  “… Details are still emerging, but the UEC Navy has confirmed that the colony on New Haven is currently being blockaded by a N’xin patrol vessel, which has open fire upon any vessel that has attempted to land on the colony. It is unclear at this time what the N’xin aim to accomplish this, but the Navy has dispatched a taskforce to ensure that an already-overdue supply convoy delivers its cargo safely.”

  A spokesman for the Navy appeared on the feed, but James tuned them out, watching as Negin turned the program off, leaning back heavily in her seat, as if in shock. James was silent for a long moment, trying to recall her history.

  “You have family on New Haven, don’t you?” he asked softly. He remembered her telling him about them. “A sister?”

  “Yes,” she said, giving a slight start. She gave a sniff. “My sister, Reshma, and her family moved there last year. I was supposed to go visit them at the end of the year for Christmas.” She heaved a sigh. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “Well, there really isn’t anything you can do,” James said automatically, realising it was the wrong thing to say as she turned to face him, a severe scowl crossing her usual appealing face. He offered an apologetic smile as he waved his comment off. “Sorry, that’s not what I meant.”

  “You’re right, though,” she whispered in despair. “There really is nothing I can do. Except watch. And worry.”

  James nodded thoughtfully. “Well, I hope they’ll be fine, too.” He tried to smile reassuringly. “But our Navy has kept us safe for half a century, I’m sure they can keep us safe for at least another fifty.”

  *

  “That’s the third frigate to arrive in the last twelve hours.”

  Captain Celina Yuen accepted the datapad being handed to her and gazed over it, barely acknowledging her First Officer with a brief nod. It had taken a year, and it may have been in a different star system, but she was finally squaring off against the N’xin.

  “Evenly matched then,” Yuen said, handing the pad back as she gazed at the viewscreen mounted on the forward bulkhead. To the left, the blue-green world of New Haven spun lazily, with the black abyss – dotted with tiny pinpoints of white – occupying the other half of the screen. The N’xin warships were too far away to be seen, but they were there.

  Her ship, the cruiser Reverent – along with the cruiser Horatio and three smaller destroyers – had been tasked with safeguarding the successful delivery of supplies to the colony world of Haven. First contact with the N’xin had resulted in the destruction of a science outpost on Gallus IV over a decade earlier, and since then, relations between the Commonwealth and the N’xin had gradually disintegrated – they were blockading Haven, along with two other colonies, in response to the Commonwealths “aggressive” colonisation efforts, in an effort to force the Commonwealth to capitulate and abandon the worlds.

  Which isn’t going to happen. The colony below, not quite self-sufficient, was on the brink of starvation, and so the Commonwealth High Command had tasked Yuen and her hastily-assembled task force to safeguard the relief convoy – without, hopefully, starting a shooting match in the process, though
most, including Yuen, considered such a battle inevitable. They’d been facing off against each other for fifteen hours, with neither side blinking as reinforcements trickled in on both sides.

  “More or less,” Commander Shelby affirmed, her hands fixed firmly in the small of her back. “But they haven’t made a move or communicated since before we got here.”

  “Maybe they’re just waiting for us to move first, and thus, make their decisions for them.” Yuen sighed, her mind resolute. “Well, this has gone on long enough. If they’re not going to move for us, we will just have to call their bluff.” Yuen looked up at the taller woman and then returned to her command chair, fixated towards the aft of the bridge. “Instruct the convoy that they can begin landing at their discretion.”

  “Aye sir,” Shelby affirmed. Without moving away from her spot, she nodded at the communications officer, who immediately began relaying orders. Shelby then turned to the Tactical station. “Battle Stations.”

  The first two freighters – small, boxy things that weren’t of much use save for carrying foodstuffs – made it to the surface of Haven within an hour, and were already unloading their vital cargo when the third freighter – the Luna-class Acavus – began its decent.

  “Sir!” Lieutenant Hargrove called from the helm. “N’xin frigates beginning to manoeuvre, looks like they’re preparing to make a run on the Acavus.”

  “Visual!” Yuen snapped, shutting down her virtual-array and bringing her attention to the viewscreen. Sure enough, three N’xin frigates were bearing down like dive-bombers on the Acavus. “Lock weapons, prep torpedo tubes one through six.”

  “Inform the N’xin that if they don’t break off we will open fire,” Shelby added, almost talking over her.

  “Engines ahead, two-thirds,” Yuen continued smoothly, without skipping a beat. “Bring our destroyers up to act as a shield and intercept the frigates, while we take on their Heavy Cruisers.” The Commonwealth destroyers easily outmatched the N’xin frigates, but the N’xin Heavy Cruisers outgunned the Reverent and the Horatio, and they also had a destroyer of their own that Yuen would have to contend with.

  “No response to our hails,” Lieutenant Harper reported after nearly a minute of tense stillness.

  “Weapons range in twenty seconds,” Shelby said, leaning over the railing behind Yuen’s command chair. “Destroyers will be entering range in ten.”

  Yuen watched in silence as the frigates got closer to the Acavus, silently annoyed that none of the military ships she had available were capable of atmospheric flight – otherwise she would have had a ship escorting the freighters down from the start, instead of watching like a hawk all the way up here.

  “They’re not slowing down,” Shelby continued, watching the sensor screen. “Or adjusting course.”

  Yuen had been in this sort of situation before, back when Fairfax had been sabotaged – the Commonwealth technical term for the ‘terrorist’ attack on the shipyards. Then, all Yuen could do was clean up the mess.

  But now, Yuen could do something about it.

  Knowing full well how history would record this date, and how her role in it would be recorded for posterity, Yuen nodded once, resigned. “Fire at will.”

  *

  “Return fire!”

  Captain Tryla Shanthi braced herself as the deck underneath threatened to keel over. So far as she could determine, her ship had been hit by – and survived – three separate salvos from the N’xin attackers.

  “Damage report!” she snapped, leaning back into the command chair as a quintet of effervescent plasma javelins leaped forward, crossing the distance between the Horatio and its target in an instant, and cleaving the craft in two, its forward section tumbling lazily towards the planet, its engine compartment careering towards the void of deep space.

  “Shields at thirty percent,” her engineering officer reported. “Moderate damage to decks ten and eleven – there’s a fire raging down there. Hull breach, deck thirteen.”

  “Seal bulkheads!” Commander Valonis ordered, coming up to stand beside Shanthi’s command chair. In the blackness that pervaded the bridge – made worse by flickering light panels, and smoke wafting from a destroyed auxiliary console – she could barely see him. “Assign damage control teams.”

  “We have a torpedo lock on the port cruiser,” her sensor officer reported. “And a pair of frigates attempting to flank us.”

  “Where’s the other cruiser?”

  “Seven hundred kilometres off our starboard bow, Captain.”

  So, if we come in for a scrape with either cruiser we can get pecked to death by those frigates.

  “Fire at will on the portside cruiser,” Shanthi ordered. “Evasive manoeuvres, regroup with the Reverent. Bring our fighter squadrons up to shield us.”

  The Horatio banked to port sharply, firing a quartet of torpedoes as she did. After a split second, the ship reversed the turn, snap-rolling onto its starboard wing as it did so, heaving itself above a diving N’xin frigate and firing another spread of torpedoes at the second N’xin cruiser. As the Horatio circled back, angling for the distant Reverent, a swarm of 32 fighters appeared in its wake, aimed squarely at the N’xin frigates, which were turning in pursuit of the Horatio.

  Both torpedo spreads hit, seconds apart, but their payloads simply washed against the near-full strength shields of the cruisers, reducing them to almost nothing. But the follow-up salvo from the Reverent penetrated: detonations raked up and down the portside cruiser, and it promptly disintegrated. The starboard cruiser – tentatively identified as the N’xin flagship – fared a little better, two gaping holes appearing in its flank, but there was no serious detonation.

  The same could not be said for its return salvo, which discharged violently against the weakened aft shield of the Horatio. The shield collapsed completely, and a single missile landed high on its aft quarter.

  The impact pitched the bridge to port, tossing everyone that wasn’t belted-in to the deck; the helm dissolved into a blinding fireworks display, catching Ensign Ramirez in the face – he was dead before he hit the floor. The bridge plunged into darkness as the lights failed, and the emergency lights took agonizing seconds to initialize.

  “Damage report!” Shanthi shouted above the din, her eyes stinging from the smoke. Darkness surrounded her, and she could smell death. “Damage report, Lieutenant Caster!”

  “He’s dead, Captain,” someone – Lieutenant Perez, maybe – said. “Defence screens have failed. Hull breach, decks one and two. Heavy casualties. We have a fire on decks ten and eleven, which is spreading forward quickly… Fire suppression system is out.”

  “Assign damage control teams, then!” Shanthi snapped reflexively, albeit unnecessarily – those teams would have been scrambled immediately as soon as it became apparent the ships automated fire-control systems were rendered inoperative. “Prepare to vent those decks to space, if need be.”

  Perez paused in alarm at that pronouncement, but then continued, her voice tight and grim. “Weapons control is off-line, and propulsion is gone, too. We’re adrift.”

  Shanthi let out a pained groan as she used the arm of her chair to stand up. Her ship was crippled and on fire, unable to fight back… and unable to move. That fire in the midship would only get worse without the automated suppression systems, and there were too many casualties for a fire-crew to do the job manually.

  She had no choice. She had to protect what crew she had left.

  “Abandon ship!”

  *

  “Coming out of FTL in five… four….”

  Captain William Dawson felt his attention focus on the viewscreen on the forward bulkhead as the countdown finished. Right on cue, a blinding flash gave way to a darkness dotted with tiny pinpricks of light.

  And a shit-tonne of debris.

  “Full evasive!” Dawson snapped instantly, leaning forward in anticipation and alarm, before his ships forward momentum had come to a steady speed, clamping down on an order to raise shields
– the status board next to the command chair showed that they were already up and at full power. “Damage control teams to standby. Sound collision!”

  Even as Ensign Bates started rotating the Yorktown to port, the collision alarm was blaring. Bates managed to avoid the charred half of what had once been a Manchester-class cruiser, only to have to reverse the tilt and begin a steep decline to avoid the other half of the cruiser.

  “Report!” Commander Jeremy Hawthorne snapped, stepping up to the side of the command chair.

  “Radiation flares are blinding my scanners, Captain,” sensor specialist Mikayla Svetlanov said, furiously stabbing at her console in front of her as Dawson watched her work. On the viewscreen, the Yorktown was just clearing what had to be the remains of either the Horatio or the Reverent, coming in below the systems ecliptic.

  “Visual is telling me all I need, Lieutenant,” Dawson said, rising steadily from the command chair, his hand reaching to stroke his whitening beard. He took a step towards the viewscreen, incredulous as to how breathtaking wanton destruction could be.

  “My god,” Hawthorne breathed, coming up to stand beside Dawson.

  Stretching into the yellow abyss that was Haven’s sun was a string of broken, scorched and otherwise mauled pieces of metal that had once been spacecraft with people on board. Pulsating electrical arcs sprawled and tittered from one piece of debris to the next, and there were more than a few bodies – and pieces of bodies – strewn throughout the carnage.

  “Bring us to one third, Ensign Bates,” Hawthorne said, shuffling down slowly to the helm. “Clear from the debris field.”

  “I’m picking up beacons from lifeboats, Captain.”

  “Not all of this debris is from Commonwealth vessels.”

  “Commander,” Dawson called, holding up a hand to stall any other announcements. “If the area is secure, you can begin recovery actions.”

  “Aye, sir,” Hawthorne said, already bounding up beyond the command area to the starboard work area of the bridge. “Sickbay, prepare for casualties.”