by Jay Allan
“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 the 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 gates 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 the man have to pick on him every time he wandered a few meters out of line?
Ethan clicked his comms 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.
Ethan watched the hangar deck below milling with ground crew as the carrier’s autopilot guided his fighter to an empty berth. Ground crews were bustling around the landed fighters, performing routine maintenance, and in some cases major repairs. Ethan frowned, confused by what he saw below. He’d been under the impression that the fleet was running out of fighters, but here, in just one of the carrier’s six hangars, there was at least a full wing—six squadrons—which was considerably more than the reported two squadrons that were supposedly on active duty at the Dark Space gate. Either they were being lied to, or these were all of the grounded fighters that weren’t fit for use anymore.
Ethan considered that he should probably take it for granted that they were being lied to. After all, the overlord was ordering excursions beyond Dark Space into occupied Sythian territory, while telling everyone that the gate was safely sealed.
Ethan’s nova fighter settled down with a thud-unk on the deck beside a heavily-carbon-scored interceptor which had deep furrows gouged out of its sides and a black, ragged hole where the canopy should have been. Ethan wasn’t sure what had happened to that fighter, but it was a fair bet that the pilot hadn’t survived.
Ethan pressed the canopy release and the transpiranium bubble rose slowly with a hiss of equalizing air pressure and pneumatic pistons. A cool breeze swept in from the hangar, bringing with it the acrid smell of reactor coolant, thruster grease, and laser gas. Ethan crawled out of the cramped cockpit and hopped over the side of his fighter. He heard magnetic clamps locking around the landing struts of his nova. Those clamps would keep his ship from sliding around in the event that artificial gravity should fail.
Ethan stood on deck looking around dumbly for a moment, listening to the sounds of multiple thrusters spinning up or cooling down, of ground crew hollering at one another over great distances, and of the hangar’s PA system blaring with a message for a Lieutenant Briggs to report to the quartermaster’s office.
While Ethan took all of that in, someone came up behind him and slapped him on the back. He turned around to find himself staring down at a medium-height woman with dark blonde hair and angry amber eyes. Her face was hard, but not unappealing.
“I guess I owe yo
u a drink for saving my ass back there.”
This had to be Gina, Ethan decided. “Don’t mention it. Where is Firestarter?” Ethan asked, trying to make Guardian Three’s call sign sound natural to his ears, but nothing he said sounded natural to his ears. His vocal synthesizer was faithfully mimicking the voice of the dead nova pilot whose identity he had stolen.
“He’s arguing with a flight mechanic about a jammed-up laser cannon. We’d better go. We’re due for debriefing in the Lieutenant Commander’s office.”
Ethan nodded absently. “Lead the way.”
Gina turned and wordlessly began winding a path through the endless rows of scorched and battered fighters. Ethan eyed each fighter with a frown as they walked past. “Guess we’ve been running into more opposition than I thought. Either that or someone’s been playing with the Valiant’s beam cannons again.”
Gina turned and gave him a funny look. “These are salvage from the war, Adan; you know that.”
Ethan nodded and tried not to meet her gaze. “Right, just trying to crack a joke, Gina.”
She snorted. “Well, stick to your real forte. Jokes never were a part of your repertoire.”
“So what’s my real forte, then?”
Gina shot him a dry look. “Shooting and frekking everything that moves.”
Ethan grinned wryly. “I’m not sure if that was meant to be a compliment, but thanks.”
“Right, well since making conversation isn’t a part of your aforementioned skill set, let’s leave it at that.”
“What did I ever do to you, Gina?” He asked. Ethan was curious about how things had ended between Adan and Gina.
Gina turned to him with patiently raised eyebrows. “Really? You’re going to ask me that? You know damn well what happened.”
Ethan shrugged. “We don’t have to be enemies.”
“We don’t have to be friends either.”
With that, Ethan decided to drop it. She was right. He wasn’t here to make friends—quite the opposite.
They reached the far wall of the hangar bay and Gina preceded him into a waiting rail car. A handful of ground crew and pilots piled in with them, including Guardian Three, who walked up to Ethan with a smirk and said, “Looks like you’re losing your touch, Adan.”
The rail car started forward with a subtle jolt and quickly accelerated up to a blinding speed. The walls of the rail tunnel blurred by them with bright streaks of light from passing glow panels, and Adan watched as Gina keyed a destination into the holoscreen mounted beside the doors of the rail car. Passengers were busily taking seats along the sides of the car, and Ethan followed suit, sitting down beside Guardian Three. He strapped in and then spared his squad mate a quick grin—just as he imagined the cocky Adan Reese might do.
Ithicus Adari glared back at him. He was large and well-built like Ethan; he had short, thinning black hair that lay flat against his head and a slowly pulsing blue tattoo peeked out from under the left sleeve of his flight suit. Ithicus also had a haggard, well-lined face which Ethan estimated made the man about five years his junior—though Ethan had to remember that his holoskin was actually projecting the image of a twenty-one-year-old. Ithicus had a square jaw, a crooked nose, and an angry gleam in his honey brown eyes. The man was obviously mean-tempered and he’d had his nose broken at least once, which couldn’t have been an easy feat for a man his size.
“Losing my touch?” Ethan repeated with an accompanying snort. “Not likely.”
“You almost got nailed by friendly fire, and you kept drifting out of formation. You forget how to fly or something?”
Ethan gritted his teeth. He’d only had a couple hours in the cockpit of a nova, and he was still getting used to the controls—the sensitivity, the idiosyncrasies of his particular fighter, and the raw, barely-contained power of a high-performance fighter versus his old sluggish Atton. The difference with his transport was that every maneuver had had to be exaggerated, but with a nova, just the slightest twitch of the controls could send him into an end over end spin. It was definitely an adjustment. Of course, he couldn’t say any of that.
Ethan shrugged. “Guess I’m just tired, brua.” Brondi’s dossier on Adan had contained a list of more juvenile vocabulary for Ethan to work into his regular speech. He hoped it didn’t sound as strange to those who knew Adan as it sounded to him.
Guardian Three smirked and looked away.
An automated voice sounded inside the rail car. “Coming up on, Pilots’ Center.”
Gina rose from her seat to grab hold of one of the vertical bars which ran down the center of the rail car. Ithicus rose, too, and Ethan groaned as he levered himself out of his chair. His muscles were cramping from having been cooped up in a nova cockpit for so long.
Gina looked him up and down and smiled. “You all right there, old timer?”
“Just fine, thanks.”
The rail car slowed to a stop, and Ithicus nodded to the doors. “Let’s go.”
They spilled out into a broad corridor with subdued blue and white glow panels and shiny gray and black walls. Broad silver and gray pipes were tucked up against the ceiling and running down the center of the corridor. These were electrical conduits, water, sewage, and air ducts. Aboard fleet ships no one bothered to hide things away for aesthetics’ sake.
The corridor was for the most part deserted, except for a janitor bot up ahead, polishing the floors with a monotonous whirring sound. They passed countless bulkheads and doors, all of which were labeled with black plates that glowed with bright blue descriptions: numbered simulator rooms, the officers’ mess, a rec hall called “The Basement,” which was roaring with a muffled ruckus from the men and women inside, and then came training rooms and lecture halls, followed by offices labeled with the names and ranks of various commanders to whom they belonged. The transpiranium panels in the doors of those offices and training rooms were all dark, all but one, whose golden light spilled weakly into the corridor. It was here that Guardian Three led them. The glowing door sign read, Lieutenant Commander Rangel. Guardian Three stopped to rap smartly on the door, and it opened automatically to let them in.
They piled into the small office beyond the door and stepped up to a shiny white desk as the door swished shut behind them. Sitting behind that desk was a small man with an angular face and an intense blue gaze. Absent from that gaze was the usual spark of warmth which betrayed a person’s humanity. He was clothed in the typical black with white trim uniform of the fleet. The rank insignia on the upper left sleeve of his uniform was the characteristic gold chevron of a lieutenant commander with a silver nova fighter in the middle. Behind the commander was a broad viewport which showed a dawning blue-white slice of the planet Firea far below.
Guardian Three, Ithicus Adari, stopped in front of the commander’s desk and saluted. Ethan and Gina gave their own salutes, to which the commander nodded and said, “At ease. Report.”
Ithicus spoke first: “Four pirates jumped us at the Chorlis-Firean gate while we were waiting for repair crews to check out the gate’s comm relay. The array was riddled with holes from ripper cannons. The pirates were armed with the same. It’s a fair bet they took out the array. The pirates had established a temporary base on one of the asteroids in the Firebelt Nebula, no doubt to stand by and wait for one of our convoys. They must have taken out the comm array so we’d be deaf to hear any distress calls. Adan joined us at the start of the fight, and we managed to destroy two of the enemy fighters and clip another one before they ran. The pirates’ base was rudimentary, but sentinels recovered a small amount of useful equipment and supplies before demolishing it.”
The commander frowned and began rubbing his chin thoughtfully. “Good. Any signs of the pirates’ affiliation?”
Ithicus shook his head. “They covered their tracks well.”
“Hmmm. We’ll have investigators look over the confiscated material for clues. Dismissed,” the commander said with a wave of his hand. They began turning to leave, but Vance shook h
is head and pointed at Ethan. “Not you.” Ethan stopped and turned back to the commander’s desk.
Once the others had left, the commander raised his eyebrows and leaned forward. Taking that as his cue, Ethan spoke up. “I was on my way back to the Valiant when I stumbled on Guardians Three and Four. They were already under attack, so I joined the fight. The rest is as Three already said.”
The commander shook his head. “I’m not interested in any of that. I want to know what happened to your mission and why you’re back here without your wingman.”
“My mission was a fair success, sir.”
The commander’s ice blue eyes narrowed. “So you tracked down Lieutenant Gerbrand’s killer?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And he’s dead?”
“Not exactly. The killer is a bounty hunter named Verlin.”
The commander waved his hand impatiently. “One of many aliases. I already know that; we sent you on this mission with that information. What else did you find out?”
“He’s working for Brondi.” That wasn’t actually a part of Ethan’s cover story, but it was true, and it would help maintain his cover better than the lame excuse he’d been given. Moreover, he gained some small personal satisfaction from selling Brondi down the river.
“Brondi, hmmm? Not too surprising. Well, then what are you doing back so soon? Your mission isn’t over.”
“I was unable to pursue the bounty hunter further. He retreated aboard Alec Brondi’s corvette, and I felt it would be better not to follow him without backup. I tried to comm the Valiant for further orders, but the comms weren’t getting through.” Ethan went on, “When I realized the commnet must be down, I went back to the rendezvous with Six, but his fuel lines were jammed, so I left him on Forliss Station to make repairs while I came back here to refuel and report.” In reality, Six was also dead, also killed by Verlin.