Colonies Of Earth: Unity War Book 1

by C. G. Michaels

  “My god,” An was saying. “I can't believe he's gone.”

  “I should've given him a chance.”

  “You couldn't have known, Lanei,” Garner said.

  “None of us could have known,” Jaden said. “That's the point: you never know.”

  Pent-up frustration, loss, and loneliness all boiled over in Fault at once, homogenizing into one clear, overwhelming emotion: rage. With a primal war cry and his thumbs locked on his gun controls, he flew his Banshee straight at the motherfucker that had killed Adam. Most of his lasers went wild, vanishing into the black, but one shot clipped the Snapper's right wing, and the Copperhead spun off to collide with the other enemy fighter that was attacking the Takarabune. A silent but satisfying—if fleeting—fireball took the place of the two fighters, shards of glass and hunks of metal breaking apart and floating away, just a few more bits of space junk that would sail off into the nothingness.

  “Good job, Fault,” Jaden said.

  He should have felt happy about it, relieved, something . . . but all he felt was numb.

  Meanwhile, the Snapper warships had human warships and battleships firing at both their fore and aft, and every time one of the Turtles tried to escape the noose, the humans tightened it. And while both the Snapper warships and the Copperheads attacked the human warships, the human fighters were keeping the bulk of the Copperheads out of the equation.

  Still, it wasn't over yet, and the humans were taking casualties themselves, despite apparently having the upper hand for a change. The Queenstown eventually had to give up the fight or be obliterated, and she limped reluctantly away while the Takarabune and the Tugarin closed ranks behind her. The Takarabune had done some serious damage to one of the Snapper warships, Fault saw—a big hole yawned on the ship where a hole had no right to be—but now the Takarabune took a hit, and it was a bad one. A piece of her simply popped off and went wandering off into the void. Fault hoped it wasn't a vital part.

  The Banshees had their own troubles to deal with. Fault, however, considered himself more than capable of dealing with those troubles. One of the Copperheads spotted Fault on his own and turned about to give chase, but he spotted what it was doing and flew into its bubble, situating himself between the fighter and its “post.” The Copperhead was at its maximum load and therefore couldn't turn any tighter, so Fault was momentarily safe from attack.

  Now Fault maneuvered onto the enemy's flight path, effectively switching his role from defender to attacker and giving himself the opportunity for a lucky Snapshot hit. He reversed the closure rate and found the control zone, and then he knew he had the bastard. “Gonna be dancin' on your grave, fucker.”

  He blew the Snapper away, but just then another bandit took him by the tail; Garner, he saw, was in the same predicament, neither of them with anyone available to help. Not that Fault needed help—he'd always done just fine on his own. He banked, banked again. The fighter stuck to him, so he reversed into a vertical climb and went into a barrel roll, and the Snapper pursued, if a bit clumsily. He thought he was about to shake the bandit when another one joined it, and he was forced to jink to keep from getting blown out of the sky, arbitrarily changing his speed and employing yaws, slips, pitch-ups, rolls, and skids to evade fire. But they kept coming.

  “Hey, Fault,” Garner said. “How about we play a little Chicken?”

  “Make it quick—I'm outta moves here!”

  The two Banshees flew straight at each other at top speed, leading the Copperheads along behind them. Then, at the last possible second, “Bank left!”

  Garner and Fault parted ways, leaving the enemy craft on a headlong collision course. The three fighters ran into one another in a fantastic burst of light before extinguishing permanently.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Just outside the Freyr Asteroid Belt

  The battle's critical juncture had, it seemed, come and gone. Things had started to wind down, with heavy casualties on both sides, but heavier ones on the side of the enemy. In Garner's war-weary and grief stricken mind, no number of alien deaths could equal the losses incurred on the human side. Ilana was gone–where, he still did not know, and did not expect to find out–and now Adam, whose last act had been to courageously defend the Takarabune and those aboard her, whose last words had been to once more brazenly declare his feelings for a woman who would never love him. It had been stupid and brave and so very typical.

  The human fighters had either destroyed or disabled many of the Copperheads, so many, in fact, that they turned now to helping their warships effectuate damage to the alien warships. A few pilots went after the remaining Snapper fighters, but Garner got the sense that even the aliens knew now that for them, the battle was a lost cause.

  He joined the rest of the 15th Squadron in copying the Copperheads' tactic, strafing one of the alien warships where it would cause the most injury. Chatter continued, but Garner didn't usually respond. He went about his duties in a mechanical fashion, feeling dull and lifeless. Somewhere inside him, he knew he was hurting, but that part of him had temporarily shut off, leaving him desolate and lonely. He just wanted it all to be over.

  Suddenly the warship he had just passed over backed up, forcing the Takarabune and Queenstown to do the same or risk collision. The alien craft then bolted, pushing past other Colonial vessels to where it could fly free; and when it had the opportunity, it fled full speed away from the Freyr Asteroid Belt and the Colonial ships. The Kanaloa took up the chase, but left in her wake a gaping hole through which other alien warships now crammed, eager to get far from the Colonial trap.

  They're running. We skunked them, but good! Adam's voice, from within Garner's head. It awakened an unexpected, bitter pain in his heart. Adam would have loved to have seen this.

  He would have liked seeing the next thing even more: as soon as the alien vessels put enough distance between themselves and the human ships, they opened up a wormhole and dove into it.

  Garner had never seen anything like it, and although he viewed it from several miles away, he thought it spectacular. It began as a pinpoint of purple light that became a circle. The circle grew about a mile in diameter within seconds. It now had other colors in it: blue, red, green–the whole rainbow. There came a second circle ringing the first, and this was a brilliant, glittering white, as white as a star. Inside the circles, no light lived; there lived only blackness.

  The first alien ship passed through this set of circles, into the inky depths. Light washed over it, first white, and then many colors. And then the ship disappeared.

  Its fellows followed, winking out of sight as if they had never existed. Then the portal shrank in on itself, became once more a pinpoint of purple light; and then it, too, vanished.

  The Colonists cheered. The sound, deafening over the comlink, was not something Garner participated in.

  He had to wonder if the aliens would return. And if they did, could the humans defeat them again? And again? How many times could they fight an enemy that had the capability to leave and regroup whenever they wished, an enemy that knew far more about them than they did of it? An enemy able to outrun and overpower them? Craftiness had won the humans this battle, and Garner believed it a triumph well earned. But how far would craft get them?

  How long before the aliens won the final fight?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Just outside the Freyr Asteroid Belt

  The 15th Squadron climbed out of their cockpits onto the Takarabune's docking bay to the sounds of cheers, applause, catcalls, and general hellraising. Evidently a massive celebration had already begun and was taking place right here in the docking bay, much to the head mechanic's chagrin—although Nuria could be seen lifting a glass of bubbly in the general direction of the 15th before swallowing a huge mouthful. She gave Fault her typical frown, though, so he guessed some things never changed.

  Everybody who could be there was, including Colonel Lange and even the captain herself, and Fault had a feeling the festivities
would go on long enough for everyone to participate who currently had essential ship function or medical duties to perform, or who wasn't either dead or so injured they couldn't walk.

  Lange strode over with Captain Stephenson to congratulate the squadron, a rare smile on his lips. Someone came by with a tray of drinks, and Lange snatched a couple and handed them to the nearest of his pilots, Garner and Fault.

  “Not everybody made it back,” Captain Stephenson said somberly. “But you did. That's reason enough to celebrate.” She toasted them all, and drank.

  Fault drank, too; he'd never had champagne before, and he thought it tasted slightly like soda pop. The captain was right, he thought—you had to get past losing people in war, or you'd make a mistake and be the next to go, and he wasn't about to let that happen to him. Garner hesitated, though, looking thoughtful and morose.

  “To the fallen,” he said, and drank. More sparkling wine arrived, and they all raised their glasses, their thoughts on Adam and all the others the war had lost for them.

  The faces at the party changed throughout the hours as personnel took turns on shift, but everyone laughed and had a good time—the DMP had been brought back out, the head cook had outdone herself fixing an array of tasty snacks, and more alcohol was scrounged than Fault would have suspected was even on board. Even Garner loosened up and cracked a smile, and for a few moments, Fault almost forgot all the tragedy they'd suffered recently.

  He was on his third glass of champagne when the exhaustion started to kick in. Beside him, Garner's good mood had begun to falter, and An was weaving even while standing still.

  “Think you've had enough, buddy,” Garner said, and liberated An's glass from his hand.

  “Me, too,” Fault said. “I'm beaten.”

  “Time to turn in.” Garner looped An's arm over his shoulders and led him out of the docking bay, Fault in tow. They stumbled their way to their bunk, taking their time because for once they didn't have anywhere they needed to go, and because they simply weren't capable of moving much faster.

  When they got to their quarters, they found Adam's rack emptied out: all his photos of home, family, his dog—all that had been taken off the walls and jammed into a box, along with his electronic game player, his camera, and his clothes, and sat at the foot of his bed, awaiting being sent to his family. Garner stopped in the doorway, still holding An up, Fault behind them and peering over Garner's shoulder.

  “It looks so empty,” An said, sobering somewhat. He pulled free of Garner's grip and fell onto his own rack without bothering to remove his uniform, or even his boots.

  “Yeah.” Garner crouched next to the box of Adam's things and fished out a picture. “Remember this? The party where we had the hooch.” He sat on the edge of An's rack, and Fault came over to squat beside them. Garner held up a photo of Lanei making a face after tasting the turpentine/white rum.

  “He sure liked her,” An said.

  Fault thought about Lanei's remark that she should have given Adam a chance. “Think he ever had a shot with her?”

  “No!” Garner and An said at once, laughing. Fault's mouth twitched a little in response; he wasn't used to having friends, and he wasn't sure whether they meant to include him or not.

  “Maybe in another life,” Garner said.

  “Excuse me.”

  They all looked up. A tall, lanky guy with curly black hair and a sort of bewildered expression on his champagne-pink face stood in the doorway, a pack over one shoulder. “My name is Temple Bosch?” He said it like a question. “Lieutenant Junior Grade Temple Bosch. I'm here to—I mean . . . ” He cleared his throat nervously and glanced up at Adam's old bed.

  “Oh,” Garner said. “Sure.” He walked over and presented his hand to Bosch, who took it.

  “I put in a special request to be transferred here, but I didn't think I'd be—I mean, I'm sorry. Sorry about your friend.”

  “So are we,” An said.

  “You think we'll have to get up on time tomorrow?” Bosch asked. “I mean, the war's over, and the party's still going on.”

  “Oh, we'll have to get up,” An said. “Everything always stays the same.”

  Garner watched as Bosch put his things on Adam's rack. “No,” he said. “Nothing stays the same.”