by Jay Allan
The preflight check appeared on her LHD while the talking head moved to one side so she could see it. The instructor went through the check with her, but told her that because she was a greeny he’d already done the Before Ignition checks without her.
Finally the tutorial was finished. The instructor told her to standby for launch while the other trainees finished their tutorials, and then he asked her if she’d like to give him a name while she waited. Alara thought about it for a moment before a name popped into her head.
“Ethan,” she said abruptly, not knowing why she’d picked that particular name.
“Very well. According to your identichip, your name is Alara Vastra. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Alara.”
Alara’s brow furrowed, and the surge of doubt and unreality she’d just barely been holding at bay now washed over her like a tidal wave. Alara squeezed her eyes tightly shut, feeling simultaneously dizzy and horrified.
“Are you okay, Alara?” the AI asked.
That was the first time anyone had told her that her identichip didn’t match who she thought she was. Identichips were hard if not impossible to fake, so either Alara Vastra had been killed and her chip stolen to surgically implant it in her wrist, or she really was Alara Vastra.
“Okay, listen up, greenies!” a harsh voice cut through Alara’s helmet speakers, interrupting her thoughts. “We’re just awaiting the launch codes and then your autopilot will take you through the launch tubes by wing pairs. Myself and Guardian Two are flying in the faster Mark II’s, so we’ll be the first ones out. We’ll be off the comms and lying low on sensors while we go ahead of you to do the preliminary recon, so you’ll be on your own for a bit. Until I’m back, you’ll defer to Guardian Three, Captain Reese. He’s XO of this squadron, and also XO of the Defiant. Reese will be your secondary commander whenever I’m unavailable. Next in the chain of command after him is Guardian Five, Lieutenant Gina Giord, and so on down the line. Let’s hope it never comes to that, or pretty soon one of you greenies will be leading the charge!” Ithicus laughed dryly before going on.
“As soon as you’re out the launch tubes, find the first nav point along your flight path and accelerate up to it. Most of you have been paired with an experienced nova pilot, so when in doubt, follow your wingmate’s lead. Make sure to stay either abreast of them or just behind them at all times, but try not to crash into them. Ruh-kah, greenies! Guardian One out.”
Alara frowned. There’d been more than a hint of condescension in the commander’s voice, but she supposed that he wasn’t used to training pilots, particularly not ones as green as them.
A flicker of light and sound drew her eye and she turned to see the two novas immediately to her left rising off the deck. Their engines were still dark, so she assumed they were using grav lifts. As they rose, Alara saw that these two looked different from the fighter she’d climbed into. They were smaller and sharper—more needle-nosed than the Mark I’s.
Expecting to see the fighters’ engines light up and send them rocketing out into space, she was surprised when they rather turned 90 degrees and started toward a pair of glowing red launch tubes in the side wall of the hangar. Now their engines did ignite. There came a blinding flare of blue light, and she squinted against the glare. Her canopy darkened in response and she opened her eyes to watch as the first pair of novas disappeared inside the tubes with a brilliant flash and a soft, echoing crackle of dissipating energy.
Alara heard a th-thunk, and then: “Magnetic clamps disengaged. Grav lifts activated.” Her nova began to rise. Alara gasped and gripped her armrests. She wasn’t ready for this.
As the nova turned and her view changed from that of the fuzzy blue-black of the hangar’s shielded opening to that of the glowing red launch tubes, she felt a flutter of trepidation. The tubes looked impossibly small for her fighter. What if the autopilot missed?
“Thrusters engaged,” her AI interrupted, and that was her only warning.
Alara heard a roar start up behind her and felt herself pinned against the flight chair. She saw the launch tubes rushing toward her, and resisted the urge to scream as her fighter reached the opening. As soon as it did, the tube flashed brightly around her, and she felt herself pinned even more violently to her chair. Her nova raced past consecutive rings of red light, each one flashing in turn as she reached it and heightening the feeling of acceleration. Now she did scream. All around her was a loud, crackling hum of energy. Her face twisted into a terrified grimace.
And then it was over. She shot out the tube and into star-speckled space. It had felt like forever, but the launch had barely lasted a second. She was still screaming on the other side, but she abruptly stopped when she felt her gorge rising. Alara clamped her lips tight and her cheeks bulged. She forced herself to relax and think about something else. The feeling of intense acceleration was gone, replaced by a much milder sensation. She dialed up her IMS to 100% to remove even that. A quick look at her throttle display showed her acceleration at 145 KAPS and her speed at 645 m/s and rising fast.
Alara heard someone’s laughter filter into her helmet. “Bet you greenies liked that!” It was Guardian One again. She was beginning to hate him. “If any of you got to see your breakfast in reverse, you’re cleaning it. If not, good for you. Head to your first nav point at 46-52-12 and follow the sequence from there. We’re entering comms silence until we reach Taylon, so don’t use your comms unless it’s an emergency or you spot something on gravidar. If you need someone to talk to, I’m sure your ships’ AIs will be happy to break the silence. Guardian One out.”
Alara frowned and sat blinking at the stars. They were even more impressive without the blue fuzz of the hangar shields to dull their brilliance.
“Alara, please set course for the first nav point.”
When Alara didn’t do anything, the AI asked, “Would you like me to set course for you?”
Alara nodded, which the AI took for a yes. She watched with wide, staring eyes as her view of the stars began to shift. The mottled red and purple ball of Taylon swung into view, and she saw the glowing green diamond of her nav point overlaid upon it. She found herself admiring the view of Taylon, tracing the red areas with her finger where they intersected the purple and wondering if the colors were from vegetation, water, or just dust and rocks.
The waypoint grew rapidly larger as she approached, and then she sailed straight through the diamond-shaped opening, and the next waypoint appeared, small and distant against the planet. She noticed a pair of small numbers beside the HUD icon. The left one read 5,040 km, while the right one gave a time in minutes and seconds 16:20.
“Ethan, is that time beside my next waypoint the time to reach the target?”
“That is correct.”
“And the other number is distance.”
“Right again.”
“I guess I’m not so dumb after all.”
“Definitely not. Your identichip rates your intelligence as three standard deviations above the average.”
Alara frowned. “Have you been spying on me, Ethan?”
“No more than necessary. For example, I have no need to know your preference of beverage at a bar, but I am equipped to determine where you are in your cycle in order to establish a baseline for mood and volatility.”
“My cycle?”
“Menstruation.”
Alara gaped at her control consoles. “You mean you’re tracking whether or not I have my period.”
“No, I mean I’m tracking how far along you are in your cycle. You’re on day fourteen, and based on your temperature and hormonal secretions, you’re currently ovulating.”
“Okay, that’s enough. You’re creeping me out.”
“My apologies.”
“Just fly to the waypoints and wake me up when we get to Taylon.”
“We’ll be at Taylon in less than 40 minutes, and the mission parameters do not allow pilots to sleep in transit.”
Alara smirked. “They might not allow it, b
ut who’s going to know?”
“I’m required to report any potentially dangerous breaches of protocol.”
“We’re in comm silence right now, Ethan, so I think it’ll be too late by the time you tattle on me.” With that, Alara settled back against her flight chair and allowed her eyelids to drift slowly shut.
A moment later she felt a sharp prick and her eyes shot open—her heart pounding, her head buzzing. Her breathing was quick and shallow, reverberating in her helmet. What the frek?
“Welcome back, Alara. You must be feeling more alert now.”
Her eyes narrowed. “What did you do to me?”
“You appeared to be sleepy, so I administered a small dose of adrenaline via your suit’s stim pack to help keep you awake for the duration of your mission.”
“You what?”
“Standard protocol when a pilot accidentally falls asleep is to administer a—”
“Just shut up and fly, Ethan!”
“As you wish.”
Chapter 13
—THE YEAR 0 AE—
Destra picked her way through the shattered colonnade at the entrance of Covena. A cloud of dust and smoke hung thick in the air, dimming the soft morning light and turning it a bloody red. They could see their breath in the cool morning air—steady white puffs of condensing moisture which blended perfectly with the smoke. Digger’s stim lab was on the outskirts of the city, so it had been easy to get to Covena. They’d hiked back to the road and found the hover transport Destra had left there during their frantic escape of a few nights past. The transport still worked perfectly, so they’d driven back onto the road and quickly covered the last five kilometers to the city.
They’d left the stim lab just a few hours after dawn. Digger had stayed behind, of course, and so had Lessie’s son, Dean. That was the only concession Digger had been willing to make when it came to the scavenger hunts. Destra and Lessie would be doing all the hunting and gathering, but Dean could stay behind with Digger where he would be safe. Destra suspected Digger had allowed the boy to stay more to keep them from running off and leaving him to fend for himself than out of any real concern for Dean’s safety.
“What happened here?” Lessie asked, covering a cough as she climbed over a crumbling archway. The clouds of smoke from the fires which must have raged through the city choked their every breath. Adding to that was the fine coating of alabaster-white dust which tickled maddeningly in the backs of their throats every time it was disturbed by the wind or their footsteps. The dust covered everything in sight. It looked like snow, but it was actually white castcrete, pulverized in the attacks.
Destra turned to look over her shoulder. Seeing the pale look of shock on Lessie’s face, she offered the only reassurance she could: “I’m sure they didn’t suffer.”
Lessie shook her head. “I remember Covena. We used to come here all the time. My parents had a cabin by the lake not far from town. . . .”
“Did your family manage to evacuate?” Destra asked as she climbed over a giant boulder and down onto what had once been a cobblestone street. Now the street was a shattered ruin, covered in a thick layer of castcrete dust with scattered clumps of black ash that tumbled and drifted in the breeze. The usual sounds of hover cars and buses, of construction and people—signs of life which typified any city in the galaxy—were now silenced in death. The ruins of apartments and office buildings rose high into the sky. Twisted rebar, empty window frames, and jagged edges were all blurred a hazy white by the clouds of particulates which hung low over the city, making the ruins look like the skeletons of primordial monsters.
“I don’t know,” Lessie replied. “They weren’t rich.”
“I’m sorry.” It sounded trite, but there wasn’t much else she could say. If one weren’t rich, famous, or powerful, there was no way they’d gotten aboard one of the evacuation ships. In the case of the last one to make it off-world, that turned out not to be such a bad thing. That transport had been blown to scrap before it had even made orbit.
“Did you have anyone on Roka?” Lessie asked.
Destra hesitated. “No, just my son.” Destra felt a pang in her chest, and she nodded to the horizon. “Let’s take a look over there. That pile of rubble looks like it used to be a supermarket.”
Lessie accepted the change of topic with only a brief pause. “How can you tell?”
Destra pointed to a blackened cage lying in the street. “That’s one of the shopping carts.”
They walked down the rubble-strewn street in silence, bits of castcrete crunching underfoot, the occasional bird flitting by overhead and tweeting out a cheery tune. Destra held her ripper rifle at the ready, trying to look everywhere at once. There wasn’t much point in looking for an enemy that no one could see, but she couldn’t help it. Her mind wouldn’t stop painting monsters in all the missing windows along the street.
They reached the ruins Destra had indicated, and found that they were exactly that. There were cans and boxes of food scattered everywhere, all of them perfectly blending into their surroundings with a fine coating of white dust.
Destra turned to Lessie. “Get that cart back there and start stacking it with as many things as you can find. I’m going to go back and get the hover.”
“You’re not leaving me here! I’m going with you.”
“We’ll work faster if you stay, and besides, being together is no guarantee that we’ll be safe. There are no guarantees of that. Period.”
“You should have brought the hover to begin with. That was your mistake. Don’t punish me for it,” Lessie insisted. She tucked a greasy strand of blond hair behind her ear to keep it out of her face. Thanks to the fact that Digger’s stim lab had been built off all the grids to begin with, they still had plenty of running water, but showering had been the last thing on their minds this morning.
Suddenly, a loud crunch came from the rubble, followed by shattering glass. They spun toward the sounds. Destra covered the area with her rifle, her heart pounding. An instant sweat began to tickle between her shoulder blades.
“What was that?” Lessie whispered.
“Shhh!”
Then they heard a man groan. It took a moment for them to pick his form out of the rubble because he was covered in white dust like everything else. He was also covered with a glittering sheen of broken glass. Between the sound and the fact that the glass lay on top of the dust layer, Destra deduced that it had been recently broken. Couldn’t be a window, she thought. Those were usually made of transpiranium, not glass. It had likely been some drinking vessel or ornament. Had that man broken it to get their attention?
Then she saw a stream of dust pouring from the pile of rubble over the man’s head. A quick look at the way the rubble rested on the only wall still left standing, bending and cracking the castcrete even as they watched, Destra realized that the structure was unstable and what was left of it was about to collapse on top of what might have been Covena’s sole survivor.
They just stood there blinking at him.
Destra was the first to snap out of it. “Help me!” she said, rushing forward. She unslung her heavy rifle and set it down so it wouldn’t get in the way as she crawled through the open window to reach the man. She heard Lessie crunching through the gravel behind her. As soon as she was by the man’s side, Destra grabbed his hand. He squeezed her hand incredibly tight, grinding her bones together, and looked up at her with wild, bloodshot eyes. As soon as he saw her, he began to kick and scream in the dust. His foot hit a fallen timber and the ceiling dropped another handful of white dust on them.
“Stop it!” Destra spluttered, spitting the dust out of her mouth. “We’re trying to help you!”
The man shook his head from side to side, his eyes rolling. He was delirious. A quick look at the redness seeping into the dust at his side told her why.
“Frek!” she whispered.
“What’s wrong with him?” Lessie whispered back, but then she saw the red color spreading through the du
st and she gasped. “He’s hurt!”
Bending down to eye level with the ground, Destra tried to see what the man had landed on. She saw that he was suspended partway off the ground with a twisted piece of rebar stabbing into his back, and she grimaced.
“Help me roll him over.”
Lessie got down beside her, but her hands were trembling and her eyes were wide. She began shaking her head. “What do you want me to do?”
“Just reach under him and lift when I tell you to. Ready? One, two, three—now!”
They both heaved at the same time and the man popped free of the rebar with a wet sucking noise. They rolled him onto his stomach, and then his eyes shot open and he screamed. He twisted around and sat up with blood boiling from his side, his head turning quickly from side to side like a frightened bird. He was trying to push himself to his feet, but his sudden burst of energy had already faded.
“Oh no, oh no!” Lessie said as she saw all of the blood. She stumbled away from the man as though his mortal wounds were contagious.
Destra grimaced again and drew the pistol at her side.
“What are you going to do?” she shrieked. “You’re not going to shoot him!”
“That’s exactly what I’m going to do.” She set her pistol for stun and shot the man at point blank range. He jittered uncontrollably, and then slumped back toward the bloody metal bar which had impaled him.
Destra caught him with a grunt before he could impale himself for a second time. “Help me get him to his feet!” she gritted out through the strain. The rubble shifted again and more dust trickled over them. “Quickly!”