Ethan double-checked his nav. The star map appeared as an overlay on his HUD, and he saw the route the computer had plotted for him—from Forliss to the Etaris System, from Etaris back to the Chorlis System, then on through the Firebelt Nebula to the Chorlis-Firean gate, and from there to Firea, the ice ball where the Valiant lay in high orbit to guard the entrance of Dark Space.
Estimated travel time was just over an hour. The space gates were mostly all close together, so he didn’t have to spend a lot of time in real space unless he wanted to go sightseeing.
An hour wasn’t much time, but hopefully it would be enough for him to review his identity and familiarize himself with the nova’s controls. Ethan sat back in his flight chair and ran a hand through his recently cropped salt and pepper hair. A holoskin could fake your appearance by projecting a holo field around you, but it couldn’t fake tactile sensations, and if anybody had happened to run a hand through his previously long hair, they’d have figured him out pretty fast. He wasn’t planning to mingle or get close enough for anyone to pick holes in the finer details of his cover, but they couldn’t rule out the possibility.
Ethan’s new name was Lieutenant Adan “Skidmark” Reese, Guardian Five. He was 21 years old, characterized as arrogant, rude, and reckless. His parents worked in the agri-domes on the surface of Forliss, and he had no close relationships among the crew of the Valiant, except for his wingman, Lieutenant Tedris “Blaze” Ashtov, Guardian Six.
The last woman he’d dated was a member of his squadron. She was Marksman Gina Giord, Guardian Four. His squadron commander was Lieutenant Commander Vance “Scorcher” Rangel. Most of Guardian Squadron was out on patrols across Dark Space, but just in case, everything about everyone was detailed in a 59 page document which had been hastily put together from interrogating the poor, unsuspecting nova pilot that Ethan had run into aboard Chorlis Orbital. It had taken just one night for Verlin to find out everything they needed to know about the officer’s life in order to steal it from him. Ethan mused that the young man must’ve been easy to crack, either that, or Verlin’s interrogation methods were particularly effective.
Ethan set the document aside to watch the stars. He wasn’t the type to read manuals and instruction booklets. He preferred just to dive in and figure things out. He figured the best thing for his cover would be to keep his mouth shut and listen. If you gave people enough chances, they would happily tell you everything you needed to know about them. His role would be to quietly observe and stick to himself as much as possible until he could find an opportunity to sabotage the Valiant—that wasn’t going to be easy, and escaping afterward would be even harder.
Ethan frowned. He wasn’t sure he would be doing humanity a favor. In a time when the human population was already struggling, he was going to kill off 50,000 men and women. Surely there was a better way.
Maybe he could force them to become productive members of society. If he could simply doom their ship to a slow death in some way that would give them enough time to evacuate, but not enough time to fix it, then they could always find other jobs and eventually become less of a drain on society—win-win. He didn’t see how Brondi could object. The mission was to take out the Valiant, which he would do. Killing the crew was implied, but not necessarily a required part of that objective.
Now the Forliss-Etaris gate was all Ethan could see in any direction, and he was racing toward the translucent blue portal at a frightening speed. “Good luck,” he wished himself. “You’re going to need it.” And then time dilated with an actinic flash and a ripple of shimmering light.
* * *
As Ethan flew through the last and most dangerous part of the Firebelt Nebula, his eyes skipped between the nova’s gravidar and his HUD, which was supposed to bracket any asteroids as soon as they appeared in range. The nebula had claimed more than a few unwary ships in the past decade because its roiling red clouds swirled with fast-moving asteroids which were often the size of planetoids. Due to the nebula, it would take him almost half an hour in real space to cross from the Etaris-Chorlis gate to the Chorlis-Firean gate—that gate was actually still inside the nebula, but it provided a safe route thanks to the string of interrupter buoys which had been seeded along its jump path. The buoys would drop Ethan out of SLS at the first sign of an asteroid coming too close. At that point, he’d have to use his own SLS drive to reinitiate the jump, which would be more fuel expensive than using a gate, but still infinitely better than being dead. In real space, the nebula’s asteroids were far enough apart that they were a rare sight, and that lulled most pilots into a false sense of security while they were flying, but Ethan wasn’t about to let that happen to him. He was flying his nova hands-on and eyes open.
It wasn’t long before he was rewarded for his vigilance and half a dozen yellow bracket pairs of unknown gravidar contacts appeared against the distant red clouds of the nebula. An instant later, however, those contacts were identified as ships rather than asteroids. Ethan frowned at the SID codes which appeared beneath the bracket pairs. Abruptly, two of the yellow bracket pairs turned to green, indicating that they were friendly ships, and then the nebula flashed with yellow ripper fire and the other four bracket pairs turned red. The friendly targets were identified as nova fighters, while the enemy targets were listed as an “unknown type.”
The comm crackled with static, and then roared with chatter.
“He’s getting a missile lock on me!” The pilot’s voice was female, and Ethan’s targeting computer automatically identified the speaker as Guardian Four—Gina.
“Try to shake him. I’m going to drop a hailfire on his tail.” That one was identified as Guardian Three, one of the many pilots whose names Ethan hadn’t bothered to memorize from his file.
Great, Ethan thought dryly. He’d already run into a pair of pilots from his squadron, and one of them was none other than his cover identity’s ex-girlfriend. Ethan keyed his comm cautiously, hoping the vocal synthesizer Brondi had found for him would do its job. “This is Guardian Five, you two need a hand?”
“Frek . . .” Guardian Four muttered. “I thought you were out on assignment, Five?”
“I’m back now.”
“Well get over here,” Guardian Three put in. “We stumbled on a pirate base out here, and they’ve got teeth.” As if to emphasize that point, a stream of ripper fire roared over the comm, and Three began swearing viciously.
“Acknowledged,” Ethan said, and fired up his nova’s dymium lasers. He barely had an hour in the cockpit of a nova and he was already flying into combat. Looks like I’m going to have to prove my 5A rating after all. Ethan lined up the first enemy under his targeting reticle and watched as the reticle flickered green and emitted a soft tone. He pulled the trigger and three fire-linked red lasers flashed out toward his target with a high-pitched squeal that actually made his fighter shake from the force of the abruptly-released energy. The sound was synthesized, not real, and coming from his dash speakers. Ethan saw his lasers make a direct hit and tear off a flaming chunk of the blocky twin-hulled fighter he was tracking. The enemy immediately went evasive and broke out of its attack pattern.
“Thanks for the save, Skidmark,” Guardian Four said. It took Ethan a moment to realize she was talking to him. “Guess you’re not such a dumb kakard after all.”
Ethan smiled and stomped on the port rudder to bring the next enemy into line under his targeting reticle, but it turned to face him before he could get a laser lock. A second later it spat a stream of bright golden ripper fire at him. The first few shells splashed off his canopy shields with a sound like water hissing off a hot plate, jumping his aim and shaking his fighter. Ethan tried to reacquire his target, but before he’d lined up again, a warning siren sounded in his cockpit, and he noticed that his front shields were dangerously depleted.
Ethan stomped on the rudder and pushed his flight stick down, going evasive. He heard a few thunks as ripper shells glanced off his armor, and a computerized voice sounded with, “
Front shields depleted.”
Ethan gritted his teeth as he pulled through a high-G turn.
The gauge which showed him the state of his shields began flashing on his HUD, drawing his attention. What looked like four colored parentheses were arrayed around a 2D representation of his ship and flanked by glowing percentages. Aft shields were blue—100%; front were red—slowly recovering at 2%; and both sides were in the green at just over 90%. A word flashed beneath the shield display—equalize—Ethan tried speaking the command aloud. “Equalize shields.”
Gradually, he saw all four parentheses turn green. Another burst of ripper fire slammed into him, and his ship shuddered beneath the barrage. His aft shields immediately dropped into the red at 35%, and Ethan began jinking his fighter in earnest, rolling to starboard, side-slipping to port, pulling up hard . . . but the enemy pilot stayed on his tail through all the maneuvers, still appearing dead center behind him on the gravidar.
“I could use some help over here . . .” Ethan said.
“Roger that, I’ve got him, Skidmark.” Three said. “Hang in there. . . .”
Ethan’s ship shuddered again and his shields hissed with dissipating energy. An audible warning sounded: “Aft shields critical,” and Ethan gritted his teeth, waiting for an explosion to rip into his back as his fighter was torn apart from behind.
Then his comm sounded with, “Missiles away! Fire your afterburners and get clear, Five!” That was from Guardian Three. Ethan struggled to find the switch for his afterburners. There were dozens of buttons whose functions were still a mystery to him. He’d only had time to figure out the basics of piloting a nova. It was a miracle he could even manage to target and shoot.
“Five, he’s lining up above you to pull a switch over! I said get clear!”
“My afterburners are tapped out, Three!” Ethan lied in between decreasing his throttle and firing his starboard maneuvering jets in an attempt to slide out from under his opponent, but the pilot flying above him copied his maneuver exactly. Ethan felt panic seize his chest. The enemy pilot was going to bait and switch the missiles at the last minute, either by accelerating suddenly or pulling sharply away. Ethan grimaced. “I can’t shake him!”
“Frek it!” Three said, and Ethan heard dymium lasers screeching out over the comm. A second later, a vicious explosion rocked his fighter. Bits of flaming wreckage rained down all around him. One hit his canopy with a sizzling thunk that knocked his forward shields down to 10% and elicited another critical shields alert from his ship’s computer. Ethan quickly jammed his throttles to the max, jetting out from under the expanding debris cloud before something else could hit him. “Problem solved, Skidmark. I just shot down the hailfires before they reached the target. Lucky his shields were already weakened. The other two are making a break for it. Let them go. They’re not worth the fuel and munitions. We’ll hold ground here until the sentinels arrive to capture their base.”
“I can’t believe they were hiding this close to us, right under our noses!” Gina, Guardian Four, said. “They must have taken down the comm relay as a prelude to an attack on one of our convoys.”
“Most likely,” Three replied.
According to Ethan’s file, Brondi’s gang had knocked out the relay in order to give him an excuse to return to the Valiant and make his mission report in person.
“Form up, Guardians,” Three said. “Staggered V formation.”
“Roger that,” Ethan replied. He wasn’t sure what a staggered V should look like, but he assumed the shape of the formation was more or less what was implied. He brought his fighter into line behind Gina’s nova and accelerated until he was flying parallel to her, and then the pair of them pulled up on Three’s tail.
“Adan, weren’t you supposed to meet up with Guardian Six before heading back to the Valiant?” A quick look at the comm display told Ethan it was Guardian Three who’d asked.
“He got delayed on Forliss Station,” Ethan said. The truth was he was dead, just like Adan. The two of them had been out investigating a nova pilot’s murder and they had quickly becomes victims of the killer themselves. “He had a problem with his fuel lines,” Ethan went on. “He said he’d catch up with me once it was fixed.”
“Damn fighters are always seizing up on us,” Three said. “Well, let’s hope nobody picks him off while he’s on his own out there. Nova pilots are becoming common targets these days. Seems like we’re everybody’s enemy and nobody’s friend.”
“Guess they don’t appreciate that we’re out there every day risking our lives for them,” Gina snorted.
“Guess not, but who’s there to see it?” Three said.
Ethan frowned. He wasn’t sure what they were talking about. The fleet hardly ever saw any action. Why were they talking about risking their lives? “There been much action while I was gone?”
“Not much aside from these pirates. It’s a nice break from the real action, but no one stays here long before old Dominic sends us out on another scavenger hunt.
Ethan felt like he was missing something important. Scavenger hunt? “The last hunt find anything special?”
“Well, we won’t know until they come back through the gate, but I’m sure it’ll just be more of the same—survivors, equipment, ships.”
The pieces of the puzzle began to gel in Ethan’s brain—survivors, equipment, and ships coming back through the gate? Realization dawned, and suddenly Ethan’s eyes lost focus on the roiling red nebula around them.
“Five, tighten up, you’re drifting!”
“Sorry . . . got distracted,” Ethan replied. He couldn’t believe it! The overlord had reopened the gate, and he was sending hunting parties to go scouring the ruins of the ISS on the other side of the galaxy—the Sythian-infested side. It would only be a matter of time before someone got careless and was followed back to Dark Space. The overlord was putting them all at risk! Suddenly, Brondi’s scheme to wipe out the fleet looked like a necessary evil.
Chapter 8
The sentinels came, landed on the asteroid where the pirates had made their base, and spent an hour clearing it to retrieve all the useful equipment before setting charges and blowing it to space dust. After that, they all jetted through the Chorlis-Firean gate and left the Firebelt Nebula behind.
Now, Ethan watched as the timer to real space counted down on his nav. As soon as it hit zero, the bright streaks and star lines of SLS faded to black, and Ethan saw the mottled white and blue ice world of Firea in the distance. Orbiting high above that, lying directly in front of the gate, was the Valiant—a massive, five-kilometer-long gladiator-class carrier. It was the largest surviving warship of the fleet, and the sole guardian of the Dark Space gate, since the other smaller cruisers and destroyers of the ISSF were scattered around Dark Space on patrol. The Valiant also carried a pair of 280-meter-long venture-class cruisers which had at the start of the Sythian War been the mainstay of the Imperial Fleet. There had once been more than five thousand of them, but now there were only five.
The Valiant glittered darkly against icy night side of Firea. The carrier’s reinforced, high-refraction index duranium hull caught and reflected the first rays of the system’s red sun as it peeked feebly over the dawning edge of Firea. The planet’s rocky moon lay as a dark silhouette behind the Valiant, and to one side of that, was the Dark Space gate, supposedly deactivated and sealed.
Ethan pressed his lips into a thin, determined line as he stared at the Valiant. This was his target. Somehow, he had to destroy that carrier. If not to serve Brondi’s ends, then to keep the rest of Dark Space safe from Overlord Dominic’s reaching. The overlord was sending ships through the gate! Surely he had to know the danger of that. They wouldn’t even know if they were followed. Sythians had used cloaking devices to sneak their warships through the space lanes before, and they would do it again.
“Tighten up, Five. . . .” Guardian Three said. He was beginning to get on Ethan’s nerves. Ethan wasn’t used to flying in formations, true, but did t
he man have to pick on him every time he wandered a few meters out of line?
Ethan clicked his comm as a trite way of acknowledging the order, and then he adjusted his nova’s heading by a few degrees in order to appease his flight leader. A quick look at the interrogation file Brondi had given him revealed that Guardian Three was First Lieutenant Ithicus “Firestarter” Adari. The man was characterized as a rigid, by the book pilot with a wicked temper and a habit for picking fights that had earned him his call sign.
They drew near the amidships hangar of the Valiant, and soon the carrier began to loom over them, blocking out Ethan’s view of everything else. He picked out a small speck flying alongside the carrier, near one of its yawning ventral hangar bays, and a second later Ethan realized that the speck was actually one of the carrier’s two, 280-meter-long venture-class cruisers. The Valiant utterly dwarfed the cruiser.
Ethan shook his head in awe. Finer details began to emerge all over the carrier’s hull. The Valiant bristled with beam cannons and pulse lasers, as well as a few small and medium-caliber ripper turrets which functioned as the ship’s AMS (Anti Missile System).
As they approached the carrier’s hangar, Ethan was given a sense of the hangar’s size by the seemingly endless fields of nova fighters and interceptors landed inside. They throttled back and passed through the static shields with a soft sizzle of exchanging energy. The static shields were weak atmospheric shields which created a pressure barrier strong enough to keep air locked inside, while still allowing ships to pass through without taking damage. During a battle those shields could be bolstered with the heavier beam and pulse shields to prevent enemy ships and missiles from flying into the hangar. Under those circumstances the novas were rather loaded into the rail launchers and then fired out at high speed to give them an evasive edge when flying into hot zones. Recovering the novas while under fire was a more complicated maneuver, however, which required precise timing on the part of both fighter pilots and hangar shield operators.
Dark Space Page 5