Flashpoint (Book One of the Drive Maker Trilogy)

by Adam Quinn

  The vision of the forest of string seized Taylor again, blocking out her vision of the real world. There was a tree right next to her now, its multitude of string branches swirling around her. Far away—maybe below her, maybe above, it was hard to tell in this abstract space—the string converged into a smattering of distant trees.

  Taylor pulled herself forcefully back into the real world. She was relieved to find that she had managed to remain standing up this time. She was not so relieved to find the ship much closer to the ground than it was a few seconds ago.

  “Our hull is literally burning up!” someone said.

  “Then get away from the hull!” Taylor said. “And hold onto something, because this is going to be rough!”

  “You heard her,” Brook said. “Brace positions!”

  Just a thousand meters up.

  The little auxiliary thrusters were firing as hard as they could, and the air was buffeting against the Spirit’s sides, but they were still coming in very fast and very heavy. Taylor slid her SX-7 visor back down over her face.

  With a scream of twisting metal and a gravelly grind of perturbed rock, the MRS Kindred Spirit bit into the boulevard. Taylor was hurled across the room and smacked into the ceiling. Someone screamed. A piece of the Spirit’s hull came hurtling toward them, tearing a jagged hole in the ship’s bridge. The lights went out. Smoke was everywhere. Taylor’s head spun, and her SX-7 complained. The only place she could see anything was out the jagged hole, where she saw the deserted boulevard below, lit by the wan light of a Trascionese dusk.

  After a few seconds, a figure—no, two figures, Brook and JP—stood, silhouetted by the reflected light, and clambered out through that hole. Brook’s hair was frazzled, though she appeared to be uninjured, while JP clutched his arm.

  Despite her earlier concern over brain trauma, Taylor’s SX-7 assured her that it had protected her from injury during the rough landing—but she was not the only one left on the darkened bridge. “Hezekiah?”

  A male human groan emanated from the shadows—but it was Saifan.

  Taylor shoved herself up from where she had come to rest against a wall. She tapped a control on the side of her helmet, and a band of lights around the top of her helmet ignited, bathing the bridge in a harsh glow.

  Hezekiah was lying, motionless, in the middle of the floor.

  IES officers—human and Archavian—were strewn across the room, but there might as well have been a narrow tunnel constricting her vision to him. Her SX-7’s metal knees clanked against the floor of the bridge as she half stumbled, half dragged herself across the floor.

  Taylor splayed her hand across his collarbone, searching for a pulse while her eyes scanned his body. There was soot everywhere, and a bruise on his arm, and a hairline cut down his chin, but she did not take the non-lethality of these wounds for granted—internal trauma could be just as deadly as external injuries.

  She could not find a pulse. Terror clawed at her. She could still see him smiling—on Cryzdeklith, on the Kindred Spirit, in the back of that gunboat in Telahmir. If he hadn’t come here, he would have lived. There might have been something between them, eventually.

  Taylor realized she was trying to feel a man’s pulse through a centimeter-thick armored glove.

  She tore herself from her SX-7, shoving the metal husk away, and bent over Hezekiah, placing her bare hand where her glove had rested just a second ago.

  There was a pulse.

  Taylor bowed her body until her forehead touched his chest. The smoky atmosphere conspired to draw tears to her eyes. That was too close. Far too close.

  Taylor let out a choked laugh—all this time she’d been coddling the current balance of power in order to prevent things like this, but if death and destruction were going to find the people she cared about anyway, what was the point? She’d be better off focusing on those things that she actually had some power to fix. Like Hezekiah. And the Kaleknarian invasion that had almost killed him. And the Alliance.

  Taylor crawled back into her SX-7, sliding her arms under Hezekiah’s body and lifting him easily. She was certainly done sacrificing the safety of the people she cared about on the altar of a political order that, like the gods of times past, did not care about her, and was at any rate indifferent to her sacrifices. In fact, the best way to ensure their safety might be to dismantle that order, starting with the nearest threat: the Kaleknarians.

  Cradling Hezekiah in her arms, Taylor gave the bridge a final visual sweep. Saifan and several of the bridge officers must have left while she was tending to him—the few who remained were indisputably dead.

  Taylor carried Hezekiah to the hole torn in the side of the bridge and, clutching him securely to her chest, leaped to the ground below.

  The first person Taylor saw was Brook. The captain paced, yelling and gesticulating, on top of an overturned control boat. “Come on, come on, let’s get those ships in the air!”

  The crowd of survivors—more than Taylor expected­—seemed to swirl around Brook’s improvised platform, some still staggering out of the smoking wreckage of the Spirit while others darted back in to recover those who could not walk.

  They were working quickly, but Taylor supposed she should not have been surprised—this was the Emergency Service, after all. Even as she watched, an Archavian pilot carefully lifted one of the IES’s control boats out of its hangar bay. Although Taylor’s decision to open the Spirit’s hangar bay doors allowed some of the control boats, like the one Brook was standing on, to fall out of the Spirit, it also allowed the survivors to access the remaining control boats in spite of the Spirit’s power failure.

  “There we go! Now we’re getting somewhere!” Brook’s eyes tracked the control boat—until she spotted Taylor. “Ghatzi!”

  “Captain.” For half a second, Taylor feared a reprimand, but Brook’s eyes held far more relief than judgment.

  “We’re trying to salvage as many control boats as we can, so that we can get out of here. So could you…” Brook wiggled her fingers in an imitation of telekinesis, then stuck her thumb in the direction of a pair of TKG soldiers who were already helping to wrest a control boat from a pile of wreckage.

  “Right away.” Taylor saw why JP and the other IES officers were willing to follow Brook, even into dangerous situations like this one.

  Taylor set Hezekiah down gently on Brook’s overturned control boat, then moved to help the TKG soldiers. They had lifted the control boat out of the wreckage where it had fallen, and she was about to help them carry it to open ground when a streak of light caught her eye.

  A fraction of a second later, the rocket tore through their control boat, flames blooming from its windshield and doors as the starship was reduced to a charred husk. The TKG soldiers released the burning vehicle, and it crashed to the ground.

  A hundred meters down the boulevard, a pair of distinctly Kaleknarian hovertanks backed up a detachment of maybe twenty Kaleknarian soldiers.

  Brook dropped to her stomach, drawing her incapacitator. “Kaleknarians to the North!”

  The Kaleknarian infantry opened fire with their sear guns as the IES officers scrambled to grab their incapacitators and get to cover. One of their hovertanks fired another rocket, but Taylor telekinetically diverted it into the ground before it reached them. She had no doubt that the IES could hold its own against a few Kaleknarians, but the hovertanks were another matter, so she stretched out her arms in front of her to activate her SX-7’s thrusters.

  She needn’t have bothered.

  A trio of dark gray gunboats roared over the boulevard, pulverized the Kaleknarian force with a volley of rockets, and disappeared behind the buildings on the opposite side of the street, all within the space of half a second.

  Taylor caught sight of the three gunboats again as they soared up into the air, bleeding off speed, turned around, and banked back toward the Kindred Spirit. By the time the smoke from their rocket strike had cleared to reveal a crater in the boulevard—and no Kalekna
rians—the gunboats were hovering just a few meters above the pavement in front of the stunned IES.

  Thin, silvery lines dropped from the gunboats, and a team of five soldiers in steely-gray armor roped down to the pavement. Each soldier wore a helmet and toted some manner of gun—Taylor wasn’t sure all of them were sear guns—except for their leader, whose unprotected head was topped with immaculate wavy brown hair, and who carried no weapon, save for what appeared to be a gold-hilted sword strapped to his hip.

  The leader greeted Brook with a deep bow. “Good evening, Captain Jareyn Brook. My name is Mars Keagan, and it is a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

  Brook rose to her feet, holstering her incapacitator. “Likewise, Mr. Keagan.”

  Taylor flipped up her visor. “Mr. Keagan, I’m Admiral Taylor Ghatzi, and we’re very grateful for your help. Are you here on the behalf of the, ah, Trascionese militia?”

  Taylor had figured any force opposing the Kaleknarians on Trascion would have been defeated by this point, but perhaps a detachment of the militia was still operating.

  “I’m afraid this planet’s militia is no more, Ms. Ghatzi,” Keagan said. “I’m here on Trascion on the behalf of the Jacobin organization.”

  The Jacobins. They were the organization Harrison had attempted to frame for the Anniversary and Treaty Day Attacks—and anyone whom Harrison disliked that much was okay by Taylor. Not to mention they were obviously fighting against the Kaleknarian occupation. Taylor felt a surge of excitement—if they could strike a deal with Keagan and the Jacobins here on Trascion, together they might be able to eliminate this Kaleknarian occupation and take care of the Alliance. After all, the Jacobins were basically a bunch of revolutionaries—the ultimate anathema to the status quo—and they certainly commanded more firepower than the Kindred Spirit.

  One of the Jacobins muttered something in Keagan’s ear.

  “We have to go,” he said. “The crayfish don’t appreciate us blowing up their brigade. I can explain further on the way.”

  “Crayfish?” JP said. Taylor had not noticed him moving to Brook’s side until he spoke.

  “Sorry, Mr. Keagan,” Brook said, “but I don’t think we can come with you.”

  “What?” Taylor turned toward Brook. “Why not?”

  Brook folded her arms. “Because we’re in the middle of a mission. And it’s looking like we’re going to have to get a new ship. Again.”

  Taylor winced inwardly—probably half of a new crew, as well, but this was not the time for that. “We need a new ship because the Kaleknarians shot us down—over a planet that’s supposed to be under Meltian protection. Even if this doesn’t boil over into a war—which it could—doesn’t that make them the greater immediate threat?”

  “We need to leave.” Keagan glanced at the skies. “Now.”

  “What about the Alliance?” Saifan said.

  Taylor turned around to find the ex-Firestormer’s fists clenched. “I want to go after them just as much as you do—they have Marissa, after all—but without her, we have no way to get to them at the moment. In fact, we know the Alliance has business here on Trascion, so if we want to maximize our chances of catching up with them, there’s no better place in the galaxy for us to be. Mr. Keagan might even be willing to help us if we can help him with this Kaleknarian occupation.”

  She looked to Keagan for confirmation.

  “That could be arranged,” he said, “so long as we do not dawdle here until the crayfish blow us into the next solar system.”

  Taylor saw Brook looking thoughtfully at the crowd of humans and Archavians assembled around her. Of course—if it were just Brook, she probably would have gone with the Jacobins even before Taylor, but with a substantial fraction of her crew already dead, she was probably averse to risking the others.

  “Captain,” Taylor said. “There’s no path off this planet that does not go through the Kaleknarians. Especially if we make a run for it right now, the fleet will be ready to shoot us out of the sky before we can clear the atmosphere. In the long run, I think working with the Jacobins is going to be the safest—and best—option.”

  “I see,” Brook said.

  “You’re not the only one who has more skin in the game than their own.” Taylor opened her palm toward Hezekiah.

  “I would love to stay and chat,” Keagan said, “but we’re leaving, even if you’re not.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Brook said. “Everyone, get to a control boat or one of the Jacobin ships; it looks like we’re taking a little detour today.”

  The IES crew members rushed to board the gunboats and control boats that were already ready or to retrieve more of the latter from the Kindred Spirit.

  “Thank you,” Taylor said.

  “I’ll be thanking you, Ghatzi,” Brook said. “If this works.”

  If there was one thing the Jacobins were good at, it was evading the Kaleknarians—or “crayfish,” as they seemed to prefer calling them, though Taylor felt that Kaleknarians’ bodies bore a closer resemblance to centipedes than to crustaceans. Despite Keagan’s concerns, their fleet of five control boats, plus the three Jacobin gunboats soared away from the Kindred Spirit before any additional Kaleknarians showed up, and from there it was a short and thankfully uneventful ride to the Jacobins’ Trascionese headquarters.

  At least, that was what Taylor assumed they were hovering over, though the sign in front of the building identified it as a Wavemod Enterprises factory complex, and it appeared to be as deserted as all the surrounding buildings. As they waited, Keagan engaged in a short, muttered conversation via FSO transceiver and then motioned for their pilot to approach the building.

  In an instant, the structure transitioned from abandoned to full of activity. Taylor blinked, thinking for a moment that she had slipped into another hallucination before realizing the truth—they had just passed through an enormous hologram, much like her Newface, but on the scale of a factory complex.

  Clearly, the Jacobins were backed by some very wealthy people.

  Their eight ship fleet settled on the roof of the complex in two neat rows, and half a dozen Jacobin technicians rushed forward to tend to it.

  Keagan waved for her to follow him. “Come with me, Admiral. There’s someone who is anxious to see you.”

  Taylor could not imagine who could be waiting to see her inside a Jacobin encampment, but regardless, she had something more important to attend to. She telekinetically lifted Hezekiah from his position on the floor into her arms. “He needs medical attention. Before any meetings.”

  Taylor had used the gunboat’s limited medical supplies to patch Hezekiah’s exterior injuries and monitored his pulse for the entire trip, but she didn’t want to risk raising him back to consciousness without a medical professional—which she assumed the Jacobins had, if they were running military operations.

  “Of course,” Keagan said. “I shall take you there first.”

  Taylor followed him out of the gunboat, nodding to Brook, JP, and Saifan as she saw them disembark. She wanted to talk with each of them and make sure they were really behind her new plan, but Trascion’s star was already setting, and she really did want to meet with whichever Jacobin wanted to see her, if only to ascertain what plans had already been made and executed by their organization.

  Thus, Taylor dropped Hezekiah off with the Jacobins’ medical staff—after extracting a promise that they would do their best for him—and left her SX-7 as well, since she felt that arriving in full battle armor would make a poor first impression. She then followed Keagan back through the repurposed factory complex to the base of a bronze spiral staircase. A sedated atmosphere had settled over most of the base as all but the complex’s night guards headed for their beds, but a hum of activity emanated from the top of the staircase.

  Keagan bowed slightly, sweeping his hand up the staircase. “I present to you the nerve center of Trascion Command, the last true beacon of Trascionese freedom.”

  Whatever the Jacobin
s were, they weren’t terribly humble. Or maybe that was just Keagan. Taylor accepted his invitation to ascend the staircase, and Keagan followed her.

  Reaching the top, Taylor admitted to herself that “nerve center” was a good description for the place. With metal plates bolted over the room’s windows, most of the light came from a haphazard arrangement of military lamps and lighting strips. Beneath these illuminations, several dozen computer workstations were crowded into the small space, each cobbled together—like the Frankenstein—from parts that Taylor could not imagine were ever intended to work together. Every workstation was also wheeled—Taylor bet the entire setup could be evacuated in minutes, if necessary.

  “So.” Taylor glanced at Keagan. “Who am I meeting?”

  A substantial number of Jacobins shared the limited space with their computers, but no one seemed to be in charge.

  “You don’t recognize him?” Keagan nodded toward a corner of the room, where a Jacobin was intent on a thirty-centimeter-wide personal screen.

  Taylor squinted at him. The Jacobin Keagan pointed out was a small, lean man, with a scraggly salt-and-pepper beard and mustache. If she imagined him ten years younger and without the facial hair…

  “Dane?” Taylor asked.

  Dane McHue jumped up from a sitting to a standing position, his eyes meeting Taylor’s. “Taylor Ghatzi! Welcome to my—er, our—humble establishment here, and I hope you’ll forgive our clutter, but you’ll understand that we want to make use of everything we can get our hands on in such dire circumstances, especially with that crayfish fleet buzzing about overhead.”

  “No problem, Dane.” Taylor smiled.

  If Dane was in a position of power here, the… creative setup of Trascion Command’s nerve center made a lot more sense—Dane had been a tinkerer even ten years ago, when he served alongside Taylor in the Order War. Dane had paid an even greater price than Taylor in the war, losing the greater part of his former telekinesis, so she was glad to see that the conflict had not also stolen his inventive streak—or his propensity for rambling.