Rebel Fleet

by B. V. Larson

When the carrier exited the rift I relaxed at first. There was no incoming fire, and I was glad we hadn’t jumped into the middle of a pitched battle.

  But as I scanned our surroundings with my sym, I realized we were far from anything at all…

  “We’ve scattered!” I shouted in disbelief.

  “Are you sure?” Samson asked.

  Gwen and Dr. Chang worked at their screens.

  “It’s true,” Dr. Chang said at last. “I’m getting a direct feed from Killer’s external array. There isn’t anything out here. Not even a star.”

  My heart pounded, and I contacted Shaw. I wasn’t supposed to do that yet, but this was too big.

  “Lieutenant?” I asked. “We’ve scattered. You know that, don’t you?”

  “No shit, Blake,” he said, although I was sure he’d said it differently in his own language. “The pilots are panicking. Killer is trying to build up a charge to jump again. It will take several minutes, even if nothing goes wrong.”

  “Several minutes? Without our secret weapon? Can’t we tell the other ships to pull out? To withdraw from battle?”

  “No,” he said. “We’re too far away. A couple of lightyears at least. The rest of the fleet jumped in close to the enemy in order to get the fighters into hacking range—but Killer’s fighters won’t be there.”

  “They all know the theory,” I said. “Maybe they’ll be able to work it out in the heat of battle.”

  Shaw shook his head. “I doubt it. Even on this ship, your crew is the best at this particular bit of sabotage.”

  He was right, I knew. I’d been surprised how poorly the Kher Rebels did when it came to hacking with their syms. I supposed every sub-race had their specialties. Some had better reaction times than we did. Others could take more injuries and stress. The cat-people, for example, couldn’t even use basic perception tricks. Their syms served mostly as communication devices.

  But there was something about our human brains that was different when they combined us with symbiotic slime.

  It all came down to our brain structure. The syms worked with the materials they were given, and they synched best with our brains. They didn’t replace our intellect, but they worked to enhance what we could already do. In the case of individuals like the turtles or the beetles, you couldn’t do much for them. It was like putting a turbo engine on a skateboard. Small wheels could only spin so fast before they melted.

  Despite the fact they weren’t well-suited for it, I’d done my best to train the others. Those few who were primate-related did the best, along with the wolf-packs. Those were the only sub-groups with minds capable of doing this kind of gymnastics.

  We waited for long minutes while Killer recharged and formed a new rift. When we dove through the rip in space-time at last, we were prepared to encounter the worst, and we weren’t disappointed.

  Our Rebel Fleet was half the size of the enemy flotilla, and it was immediately obvious their ships were better organized.

  The only piece of good news was we’d taken the Imperials by surprise. We’d rammed right into the midst of their fleet, causing confusion.

  While we’d been lightyears away, the Rebels had fought hard and done fairly well all things considered. But the superior weight of the Imperial Fleet was beginning to change the tide of the battle.

  At first, the Imperials had been startled by the ferocity of the Rebel attack, and they’d retreated into a defensive sphere formation. Then they’d realized there weren’t another thousand ships coming in behind the first few hundred that had assailed them, and they’d begun to counterattack.

  That’s when Killer finally showed up.

  “Launch!” Shaw shouted, his voice almost cracking. “Open the bay doors! Launch everything we’ve got right now!”

  The ships had been lining up to be fired out of the launch cannon, but that approach would have taken several minutes. Instead, the big doors yawned, and a growing rectangle of black space stretched between them.

  Sucked out with the ship’s venting air, we were lifted up and tossed out into space with the rest. We did our best to avoid slamming into other fighters before we were outside and able to fire up our engines.

  Instead of moving directly to the predetermined rally points, I shot upward, away from the central mass of fighters. A moment later I executed a hard banking turn and poured on the power. We were flying toward the battle at maximum acceleration.

  Only a few pilots had matched my move. Most of them trailed behind us.

  “Chief,” Samson said, “Ra-tikh is requesting that we wait for him and follow the plan.”

  “Imagine that,” I said, “a tiger begging to follow my orders. He just wants to get in on the glory. That bunch couldn’t hack a joystick—no offense, Mia.”

  She shot me a look and lifted her lip to show me a fang. “None taken,” she said.

  “They’ve got Dalton aboard that ship,” Gwen said from the back.

  I cranked my head around to look at her. “Yeah… they do. All right, but tell them to catch up fast.”

  Easing off on the throttle, I allowed a group of fighters to straggle closer. They’d all been assigned to me, and I knew they couldn’t do much without my help. All the same, waiting for them to catch up was almost unbearable.

  By the time we fired up our afterburners and accelerated on our attack approach, two more cruisers had blown up in the distance. Both of them were Rebel ships.

  Unfortunately, I knew our Rebels by now. They would soon break and run if things didn’t improve. That would result in a rout, and further losses.

  At last my group was ready, and we were accelerating at full throttle toward the battle.

  “Blake, you’re out of position,” Shaw called to me a few minutes later.

  “Negative, sir,” I said. “We’re going for the nearest enemy ship that has her shields down.”

  “Dammit, that’s not the plan!”

  “None of this is going as planned, Lieutenant,” I said in exasperation.

  “You’re going to cost me every status point I have, aren’t you?” he demanded. “Before this is over, I’ll be playing support-man on that fighter with you. Is that your secret plan for revenge?”

  That made me laugh. “I’ll assign you to cleaning out the black-water tanks, sir.”

  He didn’t seem to think it was funny, and he closed the channel. I was glad to have gotten the last laugh.

  We plunged on in silence for a full minute before enemy defensive guns began to strike along our line. One of our fighters blew up—I wasn’t sure if it had run into a mine, or been caught by a lucky hit from the target ship. Either way, the whole crew had died instantly.

  I kept pouring on the power, pushing Hammerhead to her limits. We weren’t close enough, not yet.

  One of the beetle ships exploded next. I actually felt bad about that. Those guys had shaped up since we’d last fought together, and they were close to becoming extinct.

  “We’re within range now,” Gwen said. “Someone has knocked the target’s shield down.”

  “Samson,” I said, “go all-out with our defensive measures while our syms work the math.”

  Mia made a sound of disgust, throwing her hands in the air. She wanted to work her heavy cannon, and I was screwing that up for her. She crossed her arms over her breasts in frustration.

  Samson was the busiest of us after that. He was our countermeasures specialist, and he was also the worst of my bunch when it came to hacking. He performed the critical function, however, of keeping my tiny ship in one piece.

  Samson was reporting casualties into my ear as we let our syms do their work.

  “We’ve lost twenty-two percent of our capital ships,” Samson said. “No enemy interceptors yet in our quadrant—but it’s just matter of time.”

  Dalton responded with a nasty chuckle. “Only a matter of minutes before these cowards pull out and run. We’ll be in the soup then, won’t we?”

  “Yeah…” Samson said.

&nbs
p; I wished they would shut up, but they were doing their jobs.

  I could feel the target now. It was a small ship—an Imperial destroyer. I hadn’t chosen it for its size, but rather for its availability. As a screening ship, it had been out in front of the Imperial battlewagons.

  Our hack went smoothly. I was shocked by how easy it was to complete. Either our syms had gotten better at this through training, or we had. In either case, it was clear the Imperials had no defense against this kind of attack. I suspected they weren’t even aware of the influence we were exerting over them. They must not have gotten any reports indicating what we were capable of.

  With contemptuous ease, I flipped the enemy destroyer onto her back. Then I directed her toward the nearest enemy cruiser.

  “Wait!” Mia called, gaining my attention.

  I looked and saw she was gesturing wildly toward a battleship in the middle of the enemy forces.

  “Go for that big bastard, Leo,” she said. “We have to gamble to win this now.”

  “The destroyer we’ve gained control of is too small,” I said. “It can’t build up enough velocity in such a short distance to take out such a large—”

  She shook her head. “No,” she said. “We won’t kill it. But we could knock down her shields. Just one of her shields.”

  I thought it over for about a second then went with her plan. The destroyer swerved drunkenly and slewed around to go roaring toward the battleship. We followed directly in the destroyer’s wake, and the rest of our fighters followed me.

  In the final moments before impact, the captain of the battleship recognized the danger. He fired on the destroyer that was bearing down on him. Dodging wasn’t going to work—it was all happening too fast.

  The destroyer went orange with incoming fire, then flared white. She was breaking up. But such was her velocity and mass that she slammed into the battleship’s prow anyway. The larger ship’s protective shield flickered and died.

  “Now,” I told my crew, “it’s time to earn our pay.”

  “But we don’t get paid, Chief,” Samson said.

  “Shut up and focus.”

  He fell silent, and we all reached out to grab hold of the biggest vessel on the battlefield. She was bigger than any of the Imperial ships, even bigger than our battleships.

  It took only a half-minute or so. Somehow, I’d expected a larger vessel to be harder to hack, but it really wasn’t. A computer was a computer, no matter what it was attached to.

  The big ship became ours, and I didn’t waste any time. It was impolite, but I first had to get rid of the Imperials that were manning her.

  “Open the hatches,” I told my crew. “All of them—all at once.”

  They did it, and the results were as predictable as they were dramatic. Bodies and debris went spraying out of the big ship in every direction. Tiny flailing forms tumbled into space, ejected explosively.

  Then, with her defenders helpless, we took full ownership of the behemoth. We forced her to turn ponderously, focusing all her weapons on the nearest Imperial cruiser. She blasted her ally out of the sky inside the span of three fast heartbeats.

  It was wild and glorious—and a little bit sad to watch. One at a time, our treacherous monster blasted her sisters. They were so close and stuck in their formations at point-blank range. It was a disaster they were unprepared for. All their shields were positioned to defend against Rebel ships, not an attack from one of their own. A series of massive shots in the flank took them down one after another in rapid succession.

  After the eleventh kill, the Imperials figured out something had gone horribly wrong. They turned on their queen, and they tried to kill her.

  This greatly disrupted their formation. Our Rebel ships, many of which had been about to flee, suddenly took heart. They joined the fight in earnest, hitting the confused Imperials from two sides at once.

  As I watched, other Imperial cruisers occasionally switched allegiances to join us. Others I’d trained had gotten into the act and managed to commandeer more ships.

  The hacked ships ejected their crews, and then turncoat vessels began to pour fire into their former allies.

  It was a sweeping victory. Less than one Imperial ship in five managed to escape. When it was over, we were left with more ships than we’d started with, due to our numerous captures.

  Transmitted cheering went on and on after the battle had ended. It wasn’t just my crew making a racket, either. It seemed that every Rebel in the fleet was hooting and screeching at once.

  Letting Hammerhead drift, I surveyed the situation. I felt good—how could I not?

  But I was worried, too. The Imperials wouldn’t like this. They weren’t used to losing. How would they react?

  It was anyone’s guess.

  =48=

  After the destruction of their core fleet, the Imperials stopped coming into our region space. The Orion Front fell silent. A thousand inhabited planets were spared destruction, but many others hadn’t survived. Nearly two hundred islands of life had been left smoldering and devastated in the enemy’s wake.

  “Looks like they’ve given up and gone home,” I said to Shaw several months later.

  We were near Epsilon Aurigae, a beacon star in the Orion Spur. It was closer to the front lines than Rigel, and the fact we were able to stand guard here demonstrated how far we’d driven the enemy back.

  “Yes, they’ve pulled back,” Shaw said. “But if you read our histories, the situation is unprecedented.”

  I shrugged off his fears, but in truth, I felt uneasy as well. It would be easy to assume the enemy had been permanently beaten, but I knew they might not be. They were back inside their cluster licking their wounds.

  “But—” I began to argue with him. An incoming call on my sym stopped me.

  “Blake?” Captain Ursahn said. “Get up here.”

  “Got to go,” I told Shaw.

  He nodded thoughtfully and watched me head for the lifts. I could only imagine what he was thinking. He might be jealous, or he might be overjoyed. Either reaction was justified.

  I’d garnered a lot of points for old Shaw by the end of the war. He was up for a promotion to lieutenant commander. It was even possible I’d make lieutenant myself, but I had to go through officer training first in order for it to become official.

  When I arrived at Ursahn’s office, I found she wasn’t there. A burly member of her species directed me toward the command module.

  I headed up the final set of broad steps with banging boots. All these big Kher seemed to walk with a heavy step. It was my turn to be heard at a distance.

  Captain Ursahn was on her bridge, standing in the middle of a team of Fleet officers. They were going over a vid file.

  I stopped dead in my tracks. I considered doing a U-turn and heading back to the hangar. Only the fact I couldn’t come up with a viable excuse for dodging her kept me from doing it.

  Projected in the air in front of her like a misty dream was a three-dimensional representation of Dr. Shug’s laboratory. I was hanging spread-eagle in the middle of the scene.

  Damn, I looked awful. I had bags under my eyes, puckered needle-tracks on my limbs and back, and not enough straps to hide anything important.

  The only consoling detail was that fact that while my junk was hanging low, my head was held high.

  “There you are, Blake,” Ursahn said over her broad shoulder. “Get up here and explain this.”

  Reluctantly, I joined the throng on the bridge. This wasn’t the imagery I’d hoped to see on display when I finally was summoned to Killer’s nerve-center.

  “What do you want to know, sir?” I asked her.

  She stared and frowned at me for a moment.

  “This is abuse,” she said at last. “This is unsanctioned. Did you offer some kind of offense to the Secretary or his team?”

  I shrugged. “You arrested me and took me up there yourself, Captain,” I pointed out. “Don’t you know what the charges were? Don’t you
know why they tormented me in Shug’s laboratory?”

  She narrowed her eyes. “No, I don’t. That’s why I’m concerned. This isn’t a contest. This isn’t a chance to advance in rank. Neither is this an interrogation of an enemy combatant.”

  “It’s illegal, then?” I asked hopefully.

  “As far as I’m concerned it is.”

  “Well, what are you going to do about it?” I demanded suddenly.

  “Do?” she asked as if startled. “I’m going to seek the truth.”

  “That’s all? You were duped into playing a part in a crime. All you want is an investigation? Maybe you should send them a strongly worded text.”

  She looked at me curiously. “How did you get out of that situation, anyway?”

  “It was a test of sorts,” I explained. “They wanted to know if I could hack my way out of my bonds. I did so, and they were so impressed they backed my attack plans.”

  “Hmm…” she said, and I could see she was thinking hard.

  “You’re not actually going to do anything, are you?” I demanded. “Are you afraid you’ll lose status points?”

  “Not at all,” she said, her hackles rising visibly on her neck. “I plan to gain points. I’m trying to figure out a way to use this to my advantage. Perhaps you could aid me in this matter instead of hurling insults.”

  I smiled. “If it screws this bunch of primates, I’d be happy to help.”

  She led me to a shuttle, and we cast off a few minutes later. We traveled to the battle station in orbit around Epsilon Aurigae.

  The star itself was quite far away as the station had been built at a safe distance. The central star was a white, F-class supergiant. It had a strange companion which I’d learned had puzzled human astronomers for years.

  Every twenty-seven years the main star dimmed. This had been observed from Earth for centuries. For about two years, the star’s brightness dropped a great deal, causing humans to classify it as a “variable” star.

  The truth was quite interesting. The orbital companion that dimmed the central star had turned out to be a sphere of heavy dust that was forming a large planet over time. When this dust-ball happened to get in between Earth and the star, Epsilon Aurigae appeared to dim from our perspective.