Death Drop (The D-Evolution)

by Sean Allen

  “Tell ya the truth, don’t think it makes much difference—we’re almost out of bullets as it is!”

  “All right,” Dezmara said, punching rapidly at her keyboard, “let’s break for the closest system with a planet we can use. I can stay ahead of ‘em for a while. Looks like Clara 591 is the winner. Hold on to your goggles!”

  Dezmara leveled the ship and jammed the throttle forward. Fuel dumped into the cycling combustion chambers of the Ghost’s engines, and the roar that followed would have cowered a supernova. The Ghost was faster than both of her pursuers, but not by much. Rilek always made a close race in the Lodestar, and the Maelstrom had been the number one ship before Dezmara started running. She could outpace them—she just hoped she could get far enough ahead to stay out of range of their guns. She also prayed she had enough fuel left to do battle when they got to where they were going.

  The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, and Dezmara didn’t have the time or the fuel to zigzag around the universe. Unfortunately, the course charted for Clara 591 took them right through The Cloud of Lost Kings.

  Scholars of ages past would have said it was one of the coldest regions in space: an area spanning millions and millions of light-years where the elements were coming together to form stars—the birth of a new galaxy. But any sailor or pilot in any dive pub from Luxon to Angwar would tell a different story—the real story. They knew it as the mysterious vapor that swallowed the envoy of Vladonik Draoncul, the last king of Rulunsk, as they fled the legions of Durax that chased them from their home world.

  Of course, navigating through stardust—as it was commonly known—wasn’t exactly easy, and the king had had an entire legion of the most relentless, evil murdering sons-of-bitches in the universe chasing him. Dezmara figured that Draoncul and his envoy of ships had been tracked down in the cloud and blown to pieces. However, sailors, never passing on a perfect opportunity to add to the lexicon of superstition that sustains their colorful lives, say that King Draoncul and his envoy became hopelessly lost and, in their haste to escape, didn’t put enough provisions aboard and they starved to death. If the theory stopped there, Dezmara wouldn’t have such a hard time believing it, but the embellishments of sailors is beyond compare, and the story continues that the angry spirit of King Draoncul and his phantom fleet sail the dreaded Cloud of Lost Kings and attack any ship unlucky enough to pass through the haunted miasma.

  At first, Dezmara was cheered by the thought of passing through the cloud. It was another obstacle between her and her attackers and she longed desperately for its cover. She also didn’t believe in King Draoncul and his ghost armada, and the only true sources of her worry were the stories about strange electrical failures and the loss of all navigational instruments when flying through this particular patch of stardust. But as their unrelenting speed brought them closer, the sailor inside Dezmara caused her heart to pound a little faster.

  The Cloud of Lost Kings looked like an enormous explosion in space. Billows of vapor that looked like roiling flames blossomed from one another in every direction. Creases of red and orange burned around dark smoke-like clusters as flashes of pure white stood surrounded by the encroaching necrotic rot of hellfire gas that would slowly snuff out its light in the eternity to come.

  Dezmara’s sudden apprehension at entering the cloud was pushed aside as cannon fire exploded just short of the Ghost’s engines, and several shockwaves battered the ship in quick succession. The tail end of the star freighter lurched upward and it was still trembling as she pierced the perimeter of the cloud and was enveloped. If they had had enough fuel, Dezmara would have played a few games inside the haze, perhaps pulled a half-loop and doubled back to the Straits while Rilek and Saraunt fumbled around in the dark. Unfortunately, she wasn’t sure whether they would be able to make it on the fuel they had left—it was a direct course to Clara 591 or nothing. The only thing they had going for them was that Rilek didn’t know they were low on fuel. He would expect her to change course and try to lose them in the cloud. “But what if he expects that you expect him to expect you to change course, so he just blasts away on this trajectory?” she thought to herself. “He’s smart and there’s two of ‘em—you’re screwed!”

  The murk didn’t move; it just changed color outside the viewing panes—a solid sheet, like a tarpaulin wrapped tightly around the nose of the ship, streaked with deep purple, blood red, fiery orange, and charred black that unraveled endlessly as Dezmara charged on at full throttle. Visibility was zero. Silent white bursts ignited around the Ghost in a strobing pulse, and she squinted, shielding her eyes with her hand, each time a flash invaded the cockpit. “Dammit!” she cursed, rapping the control panel with her fist after a particularly bright flare. “Sy, come in! Come in, Sy, over!” The com crackled and buzzed. The instruments were haywire. Dezmara didn’t know much about stardust—most sailors and pilots avoided the stuff at all cost—and she was hoping the light show was just another mystery of the elements unknown to all but the bravest of captains and crew who dared to venture here. But part of her, the battle-worn part, thought the flashes looked a lot like cannon fire.

  The mute explosions circled the Ghost, and Dezmara kept a nervous record in her head as to the position and proximity of each, trying to decide whether she could recognize a pattern. If she were Rilek, she would be pounding away with her guns in some sort of grid and hoping for a lucky shot. With her instruments malfunctioning and zero visibility, there was nothing left for Dezmara to do but study the lights and hope that her steady hand would stay true to the course she had set for Clara 591 before they entered the cloud. Her palms were wet, and she took turns wiping one on the nearest leg of her flight suit as the other carefully gripped the control stick, then repeating the action with the opposite hand. She held her breath and counted the flashes.

  They came in ones. They came in twos. They came in brilliant, blinding uncountable clusters that brightened the insides of her clamped eyelids like a thousand white-hot suns. She kept her hand at the ready, her index finger curved over her brow, and her thumb gently nestled in her temple as she dared to look out at them again and again. And then, slowly, the intensity of the flashes faded. They came less and less toward the front of the ship, and then they were farther off. Whatever they were, cannon fire or strange lightning, the fact that they were moving away was good. The cloud thinned out and swirled past the viewing panes in stretches of purple-red mist. They would be out soon.

  Dezmara dropped her hand down and let out a long sigh. Her shoulders rolled forward as she relaxed slightly in her captain’s chair. She had set a course that pierced one end of the cloud on a diagonal line to Clara 591, and now that the stardust was beginning to fade, she knew they were going to make it out alive. She had held the course almost perfectly.

  There was another flash in the distance on the port side of the cockpit, and she bolted upright, clutching the control stick with crushing force, then leaned slowly forward and waited. Another flash. She blinked her eyes rapidly, shook her head and stared out again. Multiple bursts erupted in every possible direction around the ship, illuminating a huge swath of cloudscape in the distance. Dezmara strained to see the slightest hint of what she thought might have been there, but the lights flickered off, and it was dark again. She was on edge and the mind played strange tricks when it was stressed and the senses obscured, but Dezmara could have sworn that in one of those flashes, silhouetted against the eerie purple vapor of The Cloud of Lost Kings, was the outline of a hull.

  The fact that the vessel wasn’t visible in the last flash didn’t comfort her. There was something strange about the shape of that shadow that was almost surreal, like a dream she knew she had dreamt at one time but she couldn’t remember when: was it this life or the one before she was found?

  “You saw that, right, Doj?” she said without looking away from the viewing panes. Diodojo let out a troubled growl. “Well, it sure as hell wasn’t the Lodestar or the Maelstrom—can’t miss
the shape of either of them—and I don’t believe in ghosts!”

  Diodojo cocked his head and gave her what seemed to be a questioning look.

  “You know what I mean, Doj,” she said, realizing the irony of her statement. “I don’t believe in real ghosts. But still, if that wasn’t Rilek or his other ship or Draoncul’s phantom boat, who the hell was it?”

  KABOOOOM!

  The straps of her four-point harness pulled unbelievably tight across her legs and shoulders as the Ghost jumped and fishtailed, turning onto one side and shuddering like a dying animal. The ship rolled into a death spiral and Dezmara was screaming through clenched teeth as she gripped the control stick with both hands and fought against the centrifugal force. Wide paths of purple, swirling mist trailed from the wings as the fuselage corkscrewed faster and faster. She tried her best to keep the ship on a level flight path. Even if she regained control, she couldn’t afford to get turned around inside the cloud, but it was becoming impossible to tell which way was up as the ship continued to spin, and worse yet, she was starting to black out.

  She could see their dismal fate: endlessly twisting through the suffocating cloud, their emaciated corpses still at their posts. Dezmara could barely hold onto the control stick now. Her eyes, resigned to death, led the slow march into oblivion as they rolled into the back of her skull. Her eyelids resisted longer, fluttering open and shut in protest. She was losing the fight, and just as the last of her consciousness flickered through her mind, the Ghost ripped from the cloud, streaming purple-red gas from its body.

  Dezmara’s screen was flashing wildly, announcing that the starboard engine was damaged, and the auxiliary stabilizers were engaging to level the ship. But her senses weren’t quite clear yet and she wouldn’t get to enjoy the good news. As the ship righted itself and Dezmara came to, she saw letters flash across the screen and then the holodex spoke. The Lodestar and the Maelstrom had tracked them through the cloud. They were already within cannon range. With one engine, Dezmara couldn’t maneuver and there was no hope of outrunning them. And then the impact warning wailed to life.

  Chapter 35: The Triton

  The Lodestar materialized out of the mist with forward cannons blazing, followed quickly by the Maelstrom in its cover position just off the lead ship’s portside stern and slightly elevated.

  “We’re in the shite, luv!” The com was working again and Simon was filling it with every curse he knew.

  “I know, godammit!” Dezmara shouted as she waggled the ship back and forth in a random zigzag pattern, trying to avoid the shell that would send them into the dark forever. But it was only a matter of time. Of course, she could escape herself—Simon had seen to that just before the run started by getting The Firebug online—but there were two attackers and no guarantee that she could draw them both away from the Ghost. The thought of leaving Simon and Diodojo in a wounded and defenseless ship made her sick to her stomach. There was also the Zebulon—her livelihood and the only home she had known for the past three long years—and she was surprised to find the thought of leaving it made her feel like she would be abandoning another friend.

  “You’ll all die if you don’t go; you have a chance to save them—go, godammit!” she thought to herself.

  “Sy, I’m coming for The Bug. Keep her headed for Clara until I get there.”

  “Copy that, luv,” Simon said. His tone was grave and it pierced Dezmara’s heart like an icy blade.

  She unbuckled her harness and turned in her chair to face Diodojo. He was staring at her with huge opaline eyes, and he let out several distressed grunts as if to say that he understood and he would miss her too. “I have to try and save us, Doj. If it doesn’t work out, I love you.” She bent down and kissed his wet nose and then got up from her captain’s chair for possibly the last time and stepped past him. Diodojo’s lips pulled back over his pearly incisors, and three short roars burst from his mouth in farewell. Dezmara dabbed at her tears with the back of her sleeve and ran for the door. She hung her head and reached for the controls to open the portal with a trembling hand.

  BOOM! BOOM!

  Suddenly, she was on her back as the ship quaked furiously. Spikes of pain drove deep into her head from where she had banged it on the floor, and it felt like something inside her was trying to crush the already broken pieces of her ribs into a fine powder.

  “Goddam you, Rilek!” she wheezed. She rolled to her stomach and pushed herself up from the floor. She stood on wobbly legs and clutched her side as she stumbled toward the control panel, steadying herself on the back of her chair. The impact warning was a constant screeching cry, and the words flashing on the screen in front of her might as well have read: You have seconds to live; you’ll never find out who you are, where you came from, or what happened to the rest of the Humans—sorry! Technically, the damage report said that the main deck had several holes in it from cannon fire.

  She couldn’t make it down to engineering now even if she wanted to. And if that dismal bit of news wasn’t bad enough, the words that followed it were the nail in the proverbial coffin: Portside engine failure.

  Rilek and Saraunt had managed to shoot out both of her engines. The Ghost was adrift in space with no defenses. They would be on Dezmara and company at any second. A well-placed shot at the fuel tank and it would all be over.

  Dezmara stumbled around her captain’s chair and flopped dejectedly backward into it with no regard for her injuries. She let out a pained breath as she slammed against the back of the seat and stared, bleary eyed, past a craggy gray moon to port and on to Clara 591. Looking at the planet and knowing she would never get there was like looking at the gates of some utopian paradise forbidden to her by the cruel gods of fate. Swirls of white clouds floated lazily above a deep blue as the land, in vast shapes of dark brown and fertile black in their life-sustaining richness, taunted her. The ship was entirely dark save for the red light of the impact warning pulsing through the viewing panes of the cockpit like fleeting heartbeats. With its engines dead, the Ghost glided past Clara’s moon, as silent and dark as the tomb it was.

  “Hostile ship approaching,” the holodex announced casually, “one kilometer.”

  This was it. Rilek was moving in for the kill.

  CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK!

  The Maelstrom was adding insult to injury by peppering the Ghost with machine gun fire from bow to stern for its part in the final coup de grace. Dezmara could hear the bullets rattling up the ship: if a single one pierced the armor covering engineering, Simon would be sucked through the hole and strained into space like a meat milkshake. The same went for her and Diodojo if one of the rounds found its way into the cockpit.

  “Hostile ship approaching—three hundred meters.”

  Besides Simon, Rilek’s gunner was the best Dezmara had seen, and she knew he wouldn’t miss now that they were so close. But the admiral must have realized that the Ghost was no longer a threat, and the Lodestar inched even closer to make certain he destroyed her completely.

  A CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK announced that Saraunt was still blasting away. “Hostile ship—fifty meters.”

  The Lodestar pulled alongside and Dezmara could see Rilek’s big deck guns swing to starboard and take aim at the fuel tanks located belowdecks under engineering. “Sy…” she said.

  “I know, luv, seen ‘em on my screen. Feel like we’ve been doin’ too much of this lately.”

  “There’s nothing left to say—this one’s the real deal.”

  “Right, luv…like I said, some things I wish I’d toldya”

  “Save it,” she said bluntly. “You’ve been my friend, Sy, and I’m gonna miss you. Dezmara out.”

  “So long, luv,” he said into the disconnected com. “I’m sorry.”

  Dezmara stood up. The thick material of her flight suit was made to keep out the cold and didn’t absorb moisture by design, but she dragged her sleeve across her face anyway, adding to the collection of damp streaks she had deposited there earl
ier. She sniffed heavily and then let out a steadying breath before tugging at the bottom of her flight jacket to straighten it. Dezmara was ready to die. She patted Diodojo on the head one last time, to which he purred loudly, and then she leaned over the console and put her middle finger to the viewing pane as her final goodbye to Admiral Rilek.

  Dezmara glared at the conning tower of the Lodestar—it was so close she could see the shapes of the crew at their posts and one dark figure standing in the center of the deck—but something moved into her peripheral vision. She fully intended to scowl at them until they blasted her to pieces—a last act of defiance and the only ammunition she had left—but she couldn’t fight her instincts, and her head drifted reluctantly upward followed by her eyes.

  This time, Dezmara wasn’t confused, and she wasn’t spinning out of control through the blinding haze of The Cloud of Lost Kings. All the instruments were working properly and her senses were heightened by her coming death. She was in clear space and there, on the port side of Rilek, appearing out of the center of Clara’s moon, was the gleaming silver bow of a ship, turning quickly to draw parallel with their course. Strange bolts of blue current danced wildly around the hull of the mystery craft, inching backward to reveal more and more of the strange vessel. As she drifted past, Dezmara could see that the ship wasn’t appearing from nowhere, but had been lying in wait; hovering close to the moon, its smooth skin appearing gray and cracked, marred with craters—a perfect reflection of the surface—and the crackling electric fire was erasing the flawless camouflage like millions of writhing, magical lights.

  Dezmara stood at the viewing panes of the cockpit with her crude gesturing finger frozen against the panel, but she had forgotten about Rilek completely and her eyes, bursting with amazement, were fixed on the new spectator at her execution. She had never seen anything like it before. The prow of the ship was pulled forward, converging to a point that was purposefully squared off at its end and capped by columns of arched blades that glimmered silver-blue in the glow of Clara 591’s indigo reflection. The underside of the battering ram flared abruptly downward for some distance and then curved slightly forward to form the tip of the vessel’s razor sharp keel. The bottom edge of the ship swept back, bowing thickly outward for three quarters of the craft’s length and then narrowing more quickly at the rear. The tail section of the ship consisted of two parts: the lower half was a spike that jutted wickedly down on a diagonal and looked like the tail fin of a menacing sea beast from some prehistoric world; the top half curved upward in a sweeping arch that curled over itself and ended in an elegant flourish.