by Nick Cole
14
Punching through Ackabar’s violent atmosphere revealed the chaos of the immovable force suddenly meeting a hundred objects desperate to escape. All manner of freighters and star liners, along with other private ships, were hurtling past the Republican corvette blockade, and Lancer squadrons were scrambling to disable the fleeing ships with accurate turbo-fire before they could make the jump to light speed and escape Ackabar—and the Republic.
“Captain,” the ship said. “I’m receiving a transmission from the corvette Victory to stand down and back off our throttle… or we will be intercepted. I suggest—”
“Let ’em eat static!” Rechs shouted as he spun the Crow on its yaw axis while trying to make for the calculated jump point the ship had selected. A train of Lancers had picked up his tail and were throwing everything they could at the Crow. Evasive maneuvers that messed with their targeting computers were the only possible reply.
Two massive Republican cruisers moved in to block access to the jump. Whether they were running a course intercept algorithm to defeat prospective jumps, or it was by blind luck, Rechs had no idea. But it didn’t matter—they were there now. Great.
“Nachu tenda?” asked the wobanki.
“Of course I do,” Rechs growled. “How could I miss them? They’re right where we want to go!”
More Lancer fire slammed into their collapsing rear deflector. He spun his captain’s chair about to face the master bus panel. He snapped off several internal systems, including the life support generator, and re-routed the excess power to the deflectors. “If we don’t get in close to one of the big ships, they’ll keep shooting at us.”
The life support alarm began to shriek, as did the proximity alert.
The Lancer pilots were good. Not great, but good enough. The lead pulled alongside and above, flipped his fighter over onto its belly, and motioned for Rechs to shut it down. There was only a brief moment of contact, as both ships were shooting toward the waist of the first big corvette.
Rechs had no intention of backing off the throttle.
Suddenly, he executed a near-vertical turn and sent the Crow screaming amidships. Turret fire from across all decks of the corvette began to fill the space ahead of the speeding freighter. Rechs got a target termination blink on the near-space proximity map. One of the Lancers had just gotten knocked out of the fight by the corvette’s gun batteries.
Rechs stood and looked out the aft viewing panel of the flight deck cupola. The fighter was an exploding vapor cloud with debris trails streaking out in all directions. Another fighter shot from the expanding debris cloud half a second later. In the background, the big corvette heeled over in pursuit, hurling large-caliber blaster fire at the Crow.
“Bring us about and take us around behind the engines!” Rechs shouted.
The ship streaked past the massive dull glowing engines at the aft of the corvette. Holding on as the inertial dampeners fought to maintain gravity aboard the freighter, Rechs moved the master deflector to their starboard array.
Ion streams from the powerful cruiser’s engines buffeted the Crow, and the wobanki did everything he could to hold course through the sudden energy storm. Then they were out of the thermal tempest and in clear space.
Rechs waited to see if the fighter pilot was dumb enough to follow.
He wasn’t. The Repub fighter pilot had peeled off, and was now coming back around, over the cruiser’s engineering hull, to reacquire the Crow.
Ahead, Rechs could see that the other cruiser was angling in to cut them off, its engines on full burn. It had most likely computed their jump point by now and was moving to shut it down.
They were caught between two giants.
Long-range gun batteries opened up from both cruisers, and Rechs threw the Crow into a series of automated evasive actions designed to confuse their attackers’ targeting computers. A fighter squadron departed from the launch deck of the corvette ahead and came howling toward them.
It’s getting a little hectic. Rechs wondered if he’d bitten off more than he could chew this time.
“Abu watangi murrowe tap,” purred the wobanki, who was busy trying to keep the ship out of the corvette’s area target fire.
“No,” replied Rechs. “This is all going according to plan.”
The wobanki yowled. He didn’t believe a lie that bald. “Choda?” he hissed softly.
“No surrender,” Rechs replied.
Power array batteries went offline after another hit. Now the Republican fighter squadron was within blaster range and coming straight at them.
At least the big turrets have backed off. They’ll let the fighters try and take us out.
“Distance to jump?” Rechs asked.
The wobanki cackled out the answer and added his opinion on the odds of success.
“We’re gonna make it,” Rechs replied.
The wobanki sighed and continued to maneuver the ship.
Rechs climbed out of his seat and shouted, “Lyra! Charge up the omni-cannon.”
A moment later the bounty hunter was pounding down the curving corridor inside the Obsidian Crow’s main hull, racing toward the access hatch that led to the lone gunnery turret.
Rechs crawled into the gunnery ball and flicked on the master controls and the inter-ship comm. “Keep us moving toward the jump point, but make your turns lazy and slow so I can lead them. Keep your speed up though,” he told the wobanki. “I need the belly of the Crow facing them at all times, Catman!”
The ship heeled over in obedience as the wobanki cried, “Tu mangu Skrizz.”
Rechs spun up the antique tri-barreled omni-cannon and started to unload on the nearest Lancer. It disintegrated as he drew a bright line of blaster fire across one of its jump nacelles.
“Good for you… Skrizz,” Rechs muttered.
The catman yowled in victory—whether at the destroyed pursuer, or the use of its proper name, it was impossible for Rechs to determine. Most of the galaxy found the wobanki cats to be enigmatic to the point of bizarre.
Rechs doled out a few short bursts from the cannon as the squadron swarmed all over the slower freighter heading toward the jump point.
“More fighters inbound,” the ship announced.
Rechs grunted as he sent a full burst into a Lancer that tried a strafing run on the turret. Rechs laced it with fire from wing to fuselage, and it exploded violently against the black velvet of space. The look on the pilot’s face, even at that unreal speed in the heat of battle, was clear enough to Rechs in the last second before the fighter exploded.
Everyone dies alone.
The wobanki announced they were clear for jump.
Three more fighters closed in for the kill.
Rechs shut down the cannon.
The big corvettes were hurling hot bolts of charged energy across their path, but the wobanki was now twisting and twirling the ship well in advance of the trajectories of plotted fire.
For a moment…
Just for a moment…
It was all so beautiful to Rechs.
The big ships.
The dancing fighters.
The debris and expanding vapor clouds of destruction.
The stars.
The galaxy.
It was all he’d ever really wanted.
“Jump now,” he whispered into the comm.
And then the battle was gone as everything shifted over to light speed by orders of sudden mind-numbing magnitude.
***
Within the Crow’s passenger lounge, if it could be called that, Prisma stared wide-eyed and straight ahead. She’d never been in a battle before, much less one in space. Her tiny knuckles had turned white from the death grip she’d maintained on the safety bars that surrounded her after she’d been tossed into a crash seat by the wobanki.
She’d been fearless in her pursuit of a bounty hunter to obtain the justice she so badly craved. But back there, during the battle, as the junky old freighter she’d found herself in was g
etting hammered by blaster fire, and the enemy fighters were swarming so close to the outer hull she could hear their hollow ghostly engines thrumming through the superstructure, and the electrical snaps and discharges were sounding all throughout the strange dark ship as the deflectors fought to disrupt and distribute the blaster energy from the Republican fighters…
Back there she’d begun to fear.
And in those moments, she missed her daddy more than she’d ever thought possible.
She wanted to say, “I really need you now, Daddy.”
And she’d been trying not to cry when she realized she could never say that again to him.
It was in that moment that she realized: this fear wasn’t about a battle. It wasn’t about almost being murdered in space. It wasn’t about death at all. It was about being lost and alone forever no matter what happened… in a galaxy that was too big to care about little girls all on their own. It was about knowing that there’s no place like home. And that home doesn’t exist anymore on any known map.
And then, in the middle of that howling battle, as the lights and life support failed, in the comfort of near darkness… she did begin to cry. Just one tear, as some Republican fighter swept in close overhead, screeching blasters that made that death-rattle hiss of discharged energy.
In that moment she desperately wanted her daddy to hold her and tell her there was nothing that could ever get them. Not ever. Like he did when they left the capital for the edge. For Wayste, where he would be the governor, and a daddy who was always there. His time away from her was done.
She’d been so afraid of leaving the known for the unknown back then. But excited, too. As the carrier they’d been transported to powered up toward jump, lumbering away from the center of the Republic, from the bright jewel that was the center of the galaxy’s core and all that was known to her, she’d been so afraid of, and excited by, the unknown. She could still feel his big hand holding her tiny hand.
“What will we find out there?” she’d asked as she leaned into his dress uniform. The one with the diplomatic medals sash.
“Our future,” he told her softly. Squeezing her hand in that way that only daddies know—a way that makes you feel as if there’s an anchor on which the galaxy hangs. A way of holding close, and holding on, to all that matters. Creating a barrier the galaxy can never ever blast its way into.
Or at least that’s how it had felt.
“I’m afraid,” she’d mewled like a common house kitten.
“Never. Ever. Be afraid,” he’d told her slowly. Pronouncing each word as though it were its own sentence. Its own island. Its own world, galaxy, reality.
Its own truth.
“Never, Prisma.”
And she’d promised herself she wouldn’t. No matter what happened. Even after the times when she’d been so afraid during… what had happened on Wayste.
And after. When she’d been on her own and all alone.
And then on the junky ship that took her away from Wayste.
And on Ackabar, in the middle of all that chaos and searching for someone to give her revenge.
And now.
In a ship being pounded by Republican fire and feeling like it was going to come apart at any second.
She’d wanted to scream at the galaxy that she was just a little girl and nothing more.
She squeezed her eyes tight shut when life support went off and the lights went out. She promised herself she wouldn’t whimper, but she must have, because Crash asked, looming silently in the dark next to her, “Are you all right, miss?”
“Yes,” she managed. She felt her features contorting into her ugly crying face, and she was grateful for the darkness.
I will not cry.
I will not cry.
I will not cry.
She could hear the bounty hunter shouting commands from the flight deck. Then running past them, his boots sounding exactly like the metallic clank of the legionnaires who’d chased her in that long-abandoned ship.
Then the whine and blur of some weapon firing back. Distant explosions rocking the hull. All of it feeling like the end of the galaxy all around her.
And then she’d felt the shift.
That sudden lightness of being that everyone who dares space flight knows as… the jump to light speed. That overwhelming, otherworldly thick silence that was there… and not there.
To Prisma Maydoon, yet one more of the galaxy’s orphans, hyperspace was a kind of safety. A running from danger. A safe and hidden place beyond the reach of the galaxy.
I never want to leave hyperspace, she thought, and wondered how she might stay here forever. Cocooned in the old rubber and cracked vinyl of the crash chair that had been designed and newly installed long before her grandparents had even been considered. She breathed in its warm, close, industrial fuel scent, and found the dust of its being from an age long before as some kind comfort she’d never imagined knowing.
The comfort of all ships that had stories from long ago somehow reassured her that she, too, would one day have her own stories. It was a feeling she would take with her for the rest of her life. No matter what, and who, she became.
They can’t get you here, she told herself.
And she asked…
How does one manage a life in hyperspace forever?
There is no answer to this from the galaxy. She is just a small girl, and the galaxy is too big for any one person to know everything and to mean anything in the grand scheme of it all. Especially a little girl who wanted nothing but…
She couldn’t remember what she’d ever wanted. Except that she really could. It just hurt too much to carry with her now.
Now, the only thing she’d ever wanted was…
Revenge.
She had wanted her daddy back. But in lieu of that, she would take revenge.
Revenge would be enough.
Revenge would do.
The life support came back on. The soft hum and whir of ventilation. Even heat. Lighting flickered back to that bare shadowy deep blue that humans needed to not go stark raving mad.
“Oh good, miss,” rumbled KRS-88. “It seems we’ve escaped instantaneous death.”
The old bot seemed content with just that. As if continued runtime was all the galaxy needed to offer it. Just one more day in which to follow its programming in a seemingly endless series of days. That was all it needed to be happy, or at least content.
If happy was even a thing for bots.
Who knew?
Who really knew?
From down the curving corridor came the bounty hunter. He didn’t have his helmet on now. His armor was beat up and covered in blast marks—and, she noticed for the first time, it was adorned with strange and arcane markings. A patch with the letters “NASA” on it. Some old flag she didn’t recognize.
He is stranger than anyone I have ever known, she thought as she studied him.
He looked tired.
He sat down with a thump in one of the bolted chairs that swiveled in the small dark lounge. His armor creaked and scraped as he adjusted himself to lean back, one leg out, one leg back. An arm hooked over the back of the seat he’d taken.
His hair was iron gray. Blue, washed-out eyes the color of a sky she’d once seen, watched her. If there was kindness in them she could not tell. He had a small beard. Gray salt and once-dark pepper.
“Now,” he asked her. “Who exactly are you?”
And then… not “why,” but:
“Who do you want me to kill?”
15
When the shooting started, Prisma did what she was told to do. She ran as fast as she could, and then she’d hid. They’d only been on Wayste for three days. Three days since the landing at the old star port out past “the Barrens,” as the locals called the dead lake where the occasional rare ship set down in a sudden blast of sand and thrust-driven debris. A Republican shuttle had dropped them off in just such a manner and left in a hurry of grit and dust.
It was just the
three of them standing on the burning, dead lake at the edge world no one really ever came too. Kael Maydoon, his daughter, and their bot.
“When will the official greeting committee for your sector governorship arrive, sir?” intoned the massive KRS-88 in his deep-bass voice modulation of courtesy, respect, and decorum.
“It’s not that kind of governorship,” replied Kael Maydoon absently.
“What kind is it, Daddy?” Prisma asked in her tiny soprano, her voice piercing the desert silence now that the shuttle had leapt back up into the sky to rendezvous with the carrier. A small wind came out of the vast glaring desert from beyond distant iron-gray mountains, tossing her hair across her face. Toward the west they could see Bacci Cantara, the only actual city on Wayste. In reality it was more of a settlement than a city. Prisma was holding a tiny case. It contained everything she’d found valuable enough to take with her.
Kael bent down, one knee hovering above the parched and cracked dirt that spread away in every direction. Over his shoulder a tired old moon hung low above the bright, burning horizon. Every crater of it was visible in the clear silence, even though it was so low to the atmosphere. It must be very near to this planet, thought Prisma. If there’d been an ocean on this world, it would have been very turbulent. But there wasn’t. Prisma had learned everything she could about Wayste on her datapad.
“It’s the kind,” Kael Maydoon began gently, his smile broadening across handsome yet worry-lined features, “where we can be together now. Finally, Poppet.”
Prisma smiled.
He held her close and whispered, “Finally,” again. As though he were pronouncing some law or new statute that the galaxy must obey because the Republican Council had declared it a law for all time. A special ordinance just for the two of them.
He was a handsome man. His hair was brown, tousled and turning gray at the temples. The gray was definitely well before its time. Laugh lines, and other lines some might call worry, creased his face and especially his eyes. Those eyes were gray, and one could tell at a glance that they had seen far too many things that could never be unseen. One could tell that about him. Even in the most casual of conversations.