Threshold of Victory

by Stephen J. Orion

  The Maulers didn’t really give her a chance. Even with her sharp flying. They were back on her in moments, forcing her to dive, jink and dive again as she continued to pull in on the target ship. It reminded her a lot of her attack in Catchphrase, but oddly she didn’t find it at all frightening this time. She’d faced that demon, and now the vibrations in her craft as shells slung by inches away didn’t even register. She held a steely focus on where she wanted to get to and what she had to do to get there. Nothing else mattered.

  Suddenly a new alarm sounded, something so unfamiliar she had to glance at her screens to understand the problem. It was a pressure depth warning. She had bled so much altitude she was approaching the point where the planet’s gaseous atmosphere abruptly became less like a thin vapour and more of a viscous soup. It wasn’t ground per se, but the difference if she hit it would be purely academic.

  “Clumsy,” she muttered and redoubled her efforts to gain altitude.

  The speed with which the Maulers closed every avenue made her realise she hadn’t been as clever as she thought. She hadn’t led them down here, they had chased her, and now she was boxed in.

  “Eternity, can you help me out here?” Kelly asked.

  “Of… course…” his words were broken, laboured.

  Glancing at her screens, she found him on her five o’clock with a little more altitude and pulling a sustained turn that must have been a solid 12 G’s. The eight Maulers that were trailing him couldn’t follow the turn, hell Kelly doubted Colonel Cormento could have followed it.

  And that was telling.

  She spotted, instinctively, the exact moment where he passed out – the fighter’s turn slackened and then it began to tip down.

  A sound escaped her mouth, something feral and inhuman, and she pulled a hard wing break, feathering the very edge of a stall as the Maulers continued to pepper her position. Several shots found their mark as they closed in, a half dozen glancing hits and then a heavy round that shattered the starboard wing like crystal.

  As the Snowhawk stalled, she maxed the thrust and let the momentum of the impact carry the ship into a wing-over dive. She accelerated towards the max pressure depth as long as she dared before bringing the fighter back to a lopsided level that balanced lift across the fuselage and what remained her flight surfaces.

  The Maulers had overshot her during the dive, one pulverising itself on the pressure depth and one falling neatly into her sights. Growling she crushed the firing stud on her flight stick and delighted as the Bug came apart in a hail of cannon fire.

  Bringing her wounded ship around, she found Eternity’s fighter starting to level out as it approached the terminal floor. At first she thought he had recovered, but then she realised it was levelling out in the blithe fashion no human would use when engaging ten-to-one odds.

  The system that activated to prevent the comatose pilot from crashing had ironically sealed his fate. Kelly let loose her wrath against every Mauler fighter she could. Though she took down two and winged another, ultimately her broken bird could only do so much. The enemy scattered until she limped past the gently cruising fighter, and before she could come back around, they descended like vultures, each one pecking pieces mercilessly out of the placid Sabrecat.

  One of the pinnacles of Constellation engineering, the ship stubbornly held together, shaking and shuddering as great shreds of armour came away. Both wings were tattered but the autopilot just increased the thrust and kept it alight, pulling away at incredible speed as she tried desperately to catch up.

  Finally one of the engines gave out, the craft pitched, soaring straight upwards for a moment.

  “I… what?” Eternity’s voice came over the comms, not comprehending, like someone just waking up in a place they did not remember going to sleep.

  And then the broken Sabrecat teetered over and slammed nose first into the pressure floor, compressing like a can stomped under foot before its fragments disappeared into the murky depths.

  Kelly could hear her own voice shouting in her ears. She called him every name she had, and some she made up, but the only answer was the static of the grave.

  Then something heavy struck her aircraft in the tail branch, snapping away the entire assembly and severing the thrust nozzles as well. The sheer force of the impact threw the nose of her fighter up, and she saw the enemy command ship was no longer alone. It had conjured up a massive portal of inky darkness which spat out an entire cruiser as she watched.

  It wasn’t the first, another was looming directly above her and had perpetrated the shot that just crippled her craft.

  Thanks to Lieutenant Collins training, she knew exactly how to best attack it, but all that was sadly irrelevant as her fighter slid backwards into the pressure floor.

  ****

  Constellation Carrier CNS Arcadia

  Bryson IV Local Sector, Bryson System

  25 April 2315

  Tarek was gasping for breath as he pulled himself back from the vision, his eyes burning and his mouth dry like he’d been breathing the acrid fumes of a sulphur pit. It took him several minutes to force himself to accept that the vivid reality he had just experienced wasn’t real.

  Why? He struggled with the question.

  He could see the future, yes, but only his own. Experiencing Clumsy and Eternity’s final moments was a new and terrible capability he just didn’t want.

  But he would stop this, and as he focused on that thought, he found there were three cards.

  And he only needed one.

  Chapter VII

  Clumsy

  Constellation Carrier CNS Arcadia

  Bryson IV Local Sector, Bryson System

  26 April 2315

  “Another dud run, sir?” the flight technician asked as Phillips stepped down from his Sabrecat.

  “No such thing as a dud run, Chief,” he said, docking his helmet under his arm. “When you do what we do for a living, they’re all good days.”

  “Even the ones spent trawling through soup for enemy activity?” Hanagan asked as he came over from his Snowhawk, looking every minute of their four-hour recon flight.

  Phillips didn’t reply right away. Taking a data slate from the tech, he ticked off several items for post-flight then signed it and passed it back.

  “Personally, I appreciate the peace and quiet,” he said, and then to the tech: “The view down there is spectacular, you should check the flight cam, Chief.”

  “Spectacular if you like clouds,” Hanagan said rubbing his brow. “Oh they’re nice clouds, splendid even, but I came here to fight Maulers, not admire the many different shades of tangerine and ochre.”

  “Tangerine and ochre,” Ucoo mused as she and Kelly ducked under the Sabrecat’s wing to join them.

  “Yeah, it means orange and brown,” Hanagan answered flatly.

  “I know,” Ucoo said. “I was just wondering when you became an interior decorator.”

  Hanagan blushed and looked away as the others guffawed.

  “Lieutenant Commander Phillips, can I borrow a moment of your time?”

  They glanced over to see Tarek approaching. Phillips waved the rest of his unit onwards and moved to meet the pilot halfway.

  “Good morning, Sergeant. What can I do for you?”

  “If I’m elaborate here, you’re going to assume I’m being duplicitous, so forgive me if I seem… direct.” Tarek began, he seemed uncertain which was new in a man who Phillips had found arrogant even for a pilot. “Tomorrow you’re going to find what you’re looking for, and it’s going to kill you unless you do as I ask.”

  A silence followed that sentence that widened into gulf as he processed the words. “Go on,” he said finally.

  “These are some changes to your patrol plan,” Tarek said, handing the commander a data slate.

  “Why are we changing patrol routes instead of telling the CAG? Or the Captain?” Phillips asked as he looked down at the patrol patterns and flicked through them.

  It was sim
ilar to what he’d already lodged, but the patterns were tighter which meant they were in a better position to give each other support. There were two deployment changes he couldn’t make sense of either; Clumsy had been swapped out of his own patrol and replaced with Fury.

  “Because no matter how certain we both are that I’m right, there’s no way to convince the command team. Trust me, I’ve looked into it.”

  “Indeed,” Phillips’ lip twisted as he considered it. “So you can’t convince them, but you can convince me?”

  “You know I know that.”

  “And you’ve just chosen the quickest way, which is apparently to point out the fact?”

  Tarek didn’t even bother answering.

  “And you’re not going to give me any more specifics about what we’ll run into, are you?”

  “If I did, it wouldn’t be the truth. It’d only be what you needed to hear to follow my instructions. I’d rather keep things a little more honest than that between us.”

  “So your visions are telling you that I can’t be trusted with the truth?”

  “My visions contain a critical path. It doesn’t do either of us any good to second guess it.”

  Phillips tapped his knuckles on the data slate. “That’s a terrifying power you wield, Flight Sergeant.”

  “I didn’t ask for it, but I’m trying to use it the way you suggested. I’m trying to save the people in front of me.” As he spoke he glanced towards Hanagan and Ucoo who had apparently found an excuse to wait for their squadron leader at the elevator.

  “Alright, I’ll see to this,” Phillips said, nodding at the slate. “Just help me keep our people safe.”

  ****

  Constellation Carrier CNS Arcadia

  Bryson IV Local Sector, Bryson System

  26 April 2315

  Phillips had been far from the only person Tarek spoke to in the days leading up to the ill-fated patrol. He built his influence subtly, knowing, as a seer would, exactly how dangerous it would be if the CAG got wind of him giving unofficial orders to the crew. The result was that there were plenty of people he couldn’t use because they could not, or would not, keep a secret.

  This was where he cashed in on the fortunes he’d been telling over the last few days. Without intention, he’d created quite a collection of hardcore believers – he refused to use the word cult – and they in turn helped him convince others. He couldn’t win over everyone, certainly not in the time he had, but with surprisingly little work, he had influence from the quarter deck to the laundry.

  Once he had people believing, he started to give out instructions. Conveniently, most people seemed to love the mystery of it all, and often it seemed the less detail he gave the better. The weapons controllers delighted in receiving timed targeting data without knowing who they’d shooting at or why. The nav assistant reverently accepted a flight plan to bring to the helm ‘when the time called for it’. Most surprising were the loadout officers, who willingly altered the weapons kit for some of the fighter craft despite it being a massive subversion of duty.

  As he pulled this web together, he generally let his chosen card drive his actions, but there were blank spots in the visions, points where all he had to do was sit and wait for events to play out. Tarek did not spend this time idly. Acting when the cards advised inaction was a risk, he knew, but living only to serve the cards was a kind of death that he felt an instinctive need to avoid.

  So his side project, his star to guide by, was the dashing Lieutenant Kyra Rease. It was complicated for him; he had not come out here to find a relationship, and indeed he was trying hard to avoid one. For all that he knew, he had become infatuated, and it galled him to know how many people he shared that feeling with. She was radiant and powerful in a way that demanded attention, and there was a long line of crew who wanted to bed her.

  But Tarek’s fixation vectored differently from the others, perhaps because of how they’d met. It wasn’t her physique or force of personality that had struck him, but the knowledge of what it had cost her. In those brief moments when he’d seen past her mask, he’d realised she’d subsumed all personal development – everything she was – to become this. A near mythic figure that people would love and follow and be inspired by.

  So his star was not the chance to love, or be loved, by Rease; but the chance to free her. To help her back to the world before she burned herself down to nothing in cold vacuum.

  The first step was trying to understand who she’d been before, or even who she wanted to be after the war – but that proved to be impossibly difficult. She was free with answers to personal questions, but they were always the answers you expected from a hard-ass soldier. Always blithe, always confident, and if you knew what to look for, always completely hollow. When people asked about her family, she said she’d been kicked out for being a hell raiser; when they asked about what she did for fun it was ‘screwing and eating steak’; when they asked what she was going to do after the war, she said she was going to open an auto-shop for hot-rods.

  In the end, he resorted to his power. It was useless against her directly, but he’d discovered there was a kind of omniscience he could use on anyone. He could learn what response people would give him to questions without having to ask them in the real world. He could learn the response to a question that he could only get by going AWOL or hacking into a secure military database or any number of other things that, were he to actually do them, would occasion serious ramifications.

  For all that, he only learned one fact about her, and the materials to make something of it were next to unattainable. Indeed, he was all but certain he was the only person in the fleet who could have done it.

  ****

  Collins caught the ring with his outstretched arm and let its momentum carry him around a pirouette before releasing it at Phillips’ back. In this zero-G environment, just as in true orbital mechanics, he was able to transfer some the momentum he’d already been carrying into the ring as he sent it on at even greater speed.

  Unfortunately, his attack on Phillips was intercepted by Ucoo who caught it overhead and carried it with her out to the wall. She should have taken a shot herself, but as always, the Undying were playing a defensive game. So far it was making for a riveting nil-all score in a match Collins had expected to win easily.

  The game was ring-ball, named because the ‘ball’ was actually a padded ring of dense ceramic. The ring was heavy enough that you had to respect it, even a good catch could destabilise an inexperienced player beyond recovery. It was a sport about tactics and momentum, popular with marines and adopted by pilots because, if the marines were doing it, then you basically had to as well.

  More importantly right now, it provided a break from the endless security and recon patrols the squadrons were flying. They needed somewhere to put the nervous energy of flight after flight where you expected – but never encountered – enemy activity. The ring-ball league had always served that purpose, but the frequency of the games had certainly picked up since arriving at Bryson IV.

  As with most sports, the goal was to get the ‘ball’ into the ‘net’ defended by the opposing team. This was complicated by the fact you could only touch the ring with your hands, and if the ring made contact with any other body part, you were removed from play for five minutes. Under Collins’ coaching, the Cold Sabres had made an art form of striking out three of the opposing team before scoring some easy goals.

  But the Undying were using a two-man supporting formation that was completely negating Collins’ strategy of using a ‘behind lines’ player to deliver an orbit shot as he had just done. Of course, the Sabres had taken down defensive teams before, the game had five players, so the flaw in the wingman model was the fifth man.

  Except today that wasn’t working, and it wasn’t working because of Phillips. The guy was everywhere, covering two, sometimes three, of his players at once. For the last four rounds, Collins’ switched tracks to focus on eliminating the squadron leader alone, b
ut that hadn’t worked either. Ucoo protected him like a mother bear, and whenever she slipped up he didn’t.

  Silently, Collins’ signalled another strategy change for his team, namely, recover the ring and go for a goal shoot.

  Everyone launched off the walls again. Ucoo passed to Phillips who threw for a deflection shot at the goal. It was exactly the move Collins’ had been waiting for. The ring bounced off the ceiling, but as it swept in on the Sabre’s goal, he intercepted it, tucked into a somersault, and then launched the ring back towards the Undying’s goal.

  He’d pushed off the wall late. It was a calculated risk based on the probability that Ucoo wouldn’t shoot for herself and that Phillips would go for a goal score instead of a player knockout. His gambit had put him in the best possible place, at the best possible time. Not only had he intercepted the attack, but as the ring glided all the way across the field, no one was in a position to stop it. The Undying were all riding out their momentum towards the wall and could only watch as the ring moved unerringly on towards their net.

  Except Phillips broke the rules, not of the game, but of physics. He began to accelerate. At first Collins thought he might have misjudged the man’s momentum, but as he watched he could see the other picking up speed. The ring had just passed the halfway point when the damned immortal hit the wall and kicked off again. He caught the ring well short of his goal, and used an orbit shot to send it back once more.

  The Sabres began scrambling the defend their goal, or at least most of them did. Collins was just about to launch himself for a desperate intercept when he noticed one his players, a man named Sevil, had gone in the opposite direction. Not at the ring, but at Phillips himself.

  Whatever means Phillips used to accelerate in freefall, Collins didn’t have it. Sevil had left first and that meant whatever Collins did, Sevil would arrive first. Instead the team coach kicked off towards the much closer doorway, all thoughts of the ring lost. He arrived at his goal just before Sevil reached his, and slapped the gravity controls by the hatch.