by Jay Allan
“And if they’re not that smart?” Ethan asked.
Gina shrugged. “Then we’re frekked.”
-o0o-
“The Defiant’s shields are at 24% and holding, but they won’t hold up when those novas get here!” Petty Officer Delayn said from the engineering station.
Overlord Dominic cast the man a dark look. “Get me more power to shields, then!”
By this point the enemy junkers had all but run out of missiles and torpedoes. Now they were just gnats buzzing around and ineffectually firing at the Defiant’s shields with their ripper cannons. More worrying, though, was the odd dozen enemy novas which were boosting out after them at a blinding 185 KAPS, and since the Defiant was only making 102 KAPS at full boost, those novas were sure to catch up before they reached the gate. Dominic grimaced. Nova Fighters were loaded with Silverstreak torpedoes and Hailfire missiles, and with the condition the Defiant’s shields were in, it would take just half a dozen of those torpedoes getting through and that would be the end.
“Where’s our fighter screen?” Dominic hissed, his eyes already searching the grid to answer his own question. There were only eight novas of the Defiant’s original 24 left to cover their retreat. They were doing a good job of keeping the pursuing junkers at bay, but in a matter of minutes they would come into range of the enemy novas, and then they would be quickly overwhelmed.
“Right behind us, sir,” gravidar answered.
“Have our gunnery crews figured out how to man the missile tubes yet?”
Deck Officer Gorvan at the weapons station looked up from his controls and shook his head. “We didn’t have enough officers to man all the guns, and you prioritized the point defenses and beam cannons.”
“Well, take the gunners out of the beam turrets and give them a quick course on the missile tubes.”
“Yes, sir.”
In the next instant, Overlord Dominic spotted something strange appear on the blue grid of captain’s table. An explosion ripped through the side of the Valiant, and hundreds of tumbling bodies vented out into space, followed by the corvette which had flown inside earlier. It was running away like a rictan on fire.
“Hail that vessel!” Dominic ordered. “I want to know who’s in there, and whether they’re friend or foe!”
-o0o-
Ethan heard the comm board sound at the control station directly in front of his, and Gina snapped at him to get it. He hurried over to the comm, even as the banging on the bridge doors grew louder. It sounded like now they’d found a makeshift battering ram and were using it on the doors.
Ethan punched the receive transmission button, and the voice of Supreme Overlord Dominic boomed over the bridge speakers. “This is the Defiant, please identify yourselves, Kavarath, or we will open fire. If friend, please reply with your most recent Imperial ID code and a full deck holo feed. You have ten seconds to comply.”
Ethan’s mouth opened to offer the appropriate code, but suddenly he realized he didn’t know what it was. He shook his head and turned to Gina. “Give me the code!”
“You know the frekking code, Adan!”
“If I knew the code, I wouldn’t be asking!” he shot back. “They put me in stasis before the outbreak, and since then my memory has been skriffy.”
“57-E7-43-QR-2S-QD,” Gina rattled off, and Ethan just barely managed to type it all into the comm before he lost track of what she’d said.
“Transmitting feed now, Defiant,” Ethan said back over the comm as he enabled a full deck holo feed. A moment later, the bridge of the Defiant appeared as a 3D holo popping out of the corvette’s slanting upper viewport. Ethan saw the overlord gazing down on him in larger-than-life size. His bushy white eyebrows were drawn together, and his lips were pursed in a grave frown. “Adan? Is that you?”
“Yes, sir,” he said. “Still alive somehow.”
The overlord looked immensely relieved, and for a moment Ethan was afraid that the old man might cry, but his blue eyes just grew moist and stopped there. “I don’t suppose you could help us out with a small problem we have? There’s a squadron of enemy novas on our tail, and they’ll be within torpedo range in a few minutes.”
“Let me see what we can do. No promises. Our fire control is limited from the bridge, and we have some company on board, so we can’t get to the gun turrets.” Ethan jerked a thumb over his shoulder to indicate the persistent banging noise which was coming from the doors behind them.
“I see, well do your best—and one more thing: if you can make it, we’re retreating to the other side of the Dark Space gate. We’ll be dropping detlor mines behind us when we leave to keep Brondi from following, so you need to catch up to us and fast.”
“Roger that. We don’t seem to be attracting any attention for the moment, so I think we can pour a little extra energy into the thrusters.”
The overlord nodded. “Good. We can’t afford to wait for you. If you don’t make it in time, you’ll have to make a blind jump.”
Ethan grimaced. “Understood, sir.”
“Defiant out.”
Ethan watched the viewport become transparent once more, and he took a quick look around to find the engineering control station. Locating it just to the right of the comm where he was standing, Ethan headed over there. “I’m going to try to give us a little boost,” he said to Gina.
“Just don’t sacrifice the shields. I’m not confident that our ruse is going to last much longer.”
Even as Gina said that, a missile lock alarm sounded across the bridge.
“Go evasive!” Ethan said.
“What do you think I’m doing?”
The alarm became suddenly shrill and then an explosion rocked the deck. The inertial management system flickered, and Ethan felt a sudden, sickening lurch in his stomach before his feet left the deck. He went flying at high speed toward the ceiling as the forces of Gina’s maneuvers at the helm were suddenly fully felt. Ethan had a moment of déjà vu where he remembered dying exactly like this during the Rokan Defense simulator run, and he watched his life flash before his eyes.
But then he felt something strong grab hold of him and arrest his momentum. The emergency grav guns had fired at the last second, and when his back hit the ceiling, he felt only a mild spike of pain. The IMS flickered back on, and the grav guns slowly lowered him back to the deck. “Frek!” Ethan said, recovering gradually from his shock. “What was that?”
Gina shook her head as she settled back into the helm. This time she remembered to strap herself in. “We’re in trouble.”
Ethan hurried to equalize shields at the engineering station—the port shields had taken a nasty hit and they were in the red at 21%. After equalizing, shields on all sides were back in the green at 73%. Ethan set the shields to auto-equalize in future, so he wouldn’t have to stay at the engineering station to manage them, and then he changed the balance of energy so that it was in favor of shields and engines, bleeding energy from the guns and secondary systems in order to do so. That done, he hurried back to the gunnery control station and switched to the missile launchers to see what he could do about those enemy novas. Scopes showed a few dozen junk fighters off their port side, taking ineffectual potshots at them with ripper cannons as they flew past. Ethan guessed that one of those junkers must have launched the missile that had shaken them so badly. Hoping they didn’t have any more warheads, Ethan ignored them and bracketed the closest of the rough dozen nova fighters flying in the distance ahead of them. That fighter immediately broke formation and began jinking.
“Frek!” Ethan said. “The novas have missile lock warning systems!”
“You know that, Adan. You really are skriffy! You’ll have to dumb-fire with a proximity fuse and pray they don’t change their heading before it reaches them, or you’ll miss. Torpedoes are your best bet for that.”
Ethan followed Gina’s advice and switched back to torpedoes—Brondi’s corvette was loaded with “Cardinal” torpedoes, a far cry from Silverstreaks, but still be
tter than nothing. With that, he disengaged the targeting computer and set the proximity fuse for 100 meters. At that range, the explosion should still be lethal to the novas. Ethan fired off six torpedoes in quick succession in a rough circle around the enemy novas. The torpedoes disappeared into the distance on bright gold contrails, and then Ethan ran back to the comm station and hailed the Defiant. “Don’t change your flight path for the next few minutes, Defiant. I have a ring of dumb-fired torpedoes closing in on your pursuit.”
“Roger that,” the Defiant replied. “We’ll hold our course.”
Ethan watched his torpedoes zeroing in on the enemy fighters. They reached 700 meters, and then Ethan’s attention was drawn by an incredibly bright flash of red light lancing past them. Ethan looked up to see an unimaginably wide red dymium beam go shooting by them and slam into the Defiant’s thrusters. A second later, the cruiser’s starboard thruster exploded in a raging fireball.
Ethan was back on the comm in an instant. “Defiant? Are you there?”
CHAPTER 21
Emergency klaxons sounded all across the bridge; red lights flashed; acrid smoke hissed into the room; flames crackled at one of the control stations, and an officer was slumped there—motionless, possibly dead. Dominic picked himself off the floor and turned to see that the officer who was out of commission was none other than the comm officer, Petty Officer Ashril Grames. The overlord resisted the urge to punch the captain’s table. Grames had been the only semi-friendly face that Dominic had been able to find among all the strangers on his bridge.
“Helm, go evasive! Don’t let them target us again with that beam. Engineering, what’s the damage?”
The helm began maneuvering and suddenly Dominic was wrenched off his feet again. A second too late Petty Officer Delayn at the engineering station said, “The IMS is functioning at 90% efficiency, sir.”
That explained why every little twitch at the helm threatened to send everyone flying.
“And?” Dominic insisted as his XO helped him off the deck for the second time in as many seconds. If the other officers were smart, they’d be strapping in to their control stations right about now.
“We’ve lost our starboard thruster and maneuvering jets. Our reactor is damaged, but holding steady at 92% integrity. Aft shields are damaged and offline. The last twenty meters of decks four through eight are open to space, and the starboard engine room bled out a quarter of our fuel before we could shut it down.”
“Is that all?” Dominic asked, feeling strangely fatalistic about the damage. Is that the best you’ve got? he thought. Come on, finish us!
Engineering responded to the rhetorical question: “No, the starboard nova launch tube is inoperable.”
“And the hangar?”
“Still fine.”
“That’s something, at least. Helm, how far are we from the gate?”
“If we head straight there, one minute.”
“Do so at all possible speed. Sacrifice shields and weapons to get there faster. Instruct the novas to get aboard if they can, if not they’ll have to meet us separately on the other side.”
“It’s an eight-hour trip through the gate,” Petty Sergeant Damen Corr at the helm remarked. “The novas will run out of fuel and fall short by several million kilometers.”
“Then we’ll send probes back to locate them! But we can’t stand another hit like that!”
“And the corvette? Should we wait for them to catch up?”
Dominic’s eyes turned glassy and distant. “Yes … I had forgotten about them … What’s their ETA?” Dominic asked absently, his gaze locked on a distant star.
His XO replied, “Looks like they’re three minutes from the gate, sir.”
“Too long. That corona beam will be recharged before then and we’ll be hulled.” He turned from the viewports to the gunnery chief. “Set the fuse on our space mines for five minutes. That should give the corvette enough time to get through. We can’t afford to leave the gate intact longer than that.”
“Roger that, sir,” Deck Officer Gorvan said.
-o0o-
“Oh, for frek’s sake!” Gina said. “They’ve got the Valiant’s main beam online!”
Ethan tried the comm again. “Defiant? Please respond!”
Looking out the forward viewports with his naked eyes, Ethan could see the Defiant ahead of them, cutting an evasive pattern toward the Dark Space gate. That much at least suggested that they were still alive. Unfortunately, they hadn’t stayed still, so the enemy novas had changed course and four out of the six torpedoes Ethan had fired were way off target. The other two, however, were still racing toward the unsuspecting novas within an acceptable blast radius.
Ethan held his breath and watched.
In the next instant one of the novas let loose a torpedo of its own, firing at the unprotected and now flaming thruster banks of the Defiant. The rest of the enemy novas were quick to let their own torpedoes fly, and Ethan’s heart sank. There was no way the Defiant would be able to either outrun or shoot down all of those warheads. He was too late.
Then Ethan’s torpedoes reached 100 meters and they exploded. One of the enemy novas was caught in the blast wave and sent spinning into his wingman. Both of them exploded, and for a miracle, the shrapnel from that explosion hit the nearest enemy torpedo. It detonated with a sudden starburst of light, and that explosion fully engulfed the enemy fighter wave, setting off a chain reaction which wiped them and their torpedoes out in one fell swoop.
“Kavaar!” Ethan whooped. He gaped at all the wreckage which they were now flying through. It pelted their shields and plinked off their hull. A full minute later the supreme commander came on the comm, and Ethan could hear wild cheering in the background.
“You did it, you old frekker!” The overlord said in an unexpected breach of his usually clean language. “We’re clear to the gate! Our mine goes off in five, so be sure you make it in time. See you on the other side, Ethan. Defiant out!”
Ethan’s heart froze. Ethan. The overlord just called me Ethan. He knows who I am! Ethan spun around to see if Gina had noticed the slip, but her eyes were intent upon her control station.
“We’re still a few minutes out,” she said, sounding tense. “We’ll make it before that detlor mine goes off, but the Valiant’s main beam cannon should be almost charged. If it even grazes us, we’re dead.”
“Fly an evasive pattern, then,” Ethan suggested cautiously. Did he even want to make it to the other side? If the supreme overlord knew his real identity, did he also know about Ethan’s role in the epidemic which had swept the Valiant? There were surely some fates worse than death, and if the surviving crew from the Valiant found out what he’d done, even though he’d done it unwittingly, he was sure they would contemplate all of those fates for him and more.
Abruptly, a blinding red flash suffused the entire deck, and Ethan’s contemplation was cut short. He could actually feel the heat of the beam radiating through the transpiranium and threatening to give him a sunburn. The air seemed to hum and vibrate all around him, and a computerized voice sounded across the deck with, “Shields critical.”
And then the beam was gone, and Ethan gasped for air, feeling like someone had just tried to suffocate him with a sun.
“We’re alive!”
“Barely,” Gina said through gritted teeth.
Ethan watched the Dark Space gate swelling before them, growing larger and larger—the shimmering portal looked like a dark pool which they were about to plunge into, and then—
Space disappeared in a bright flash and was replaced by the streaking star lines of superluminal space.
Ethan couldn’t believe it.
Gina breathed a sigh. “Now maybe I can die in peace,” she said, but she wasn’t actually in any danger of dying—probably just in a lot of pain from her broken ribs.
Ethan shook his head. They’d escaped! They were alive! He wasn’t sure whether to be overjoyed or apprehensive. What would the overlord do to him
on the other end?
Suddenly, they heard a crackling hiss start up behind them, and Ethan turned to see a hot, molten red line appearing on the duranium bridge doors.
“Frek!” Gina said.
“I think our guests are getting restless,” Ethan said.
Maybe he wouldn’t have to worry about the overlord after all.
CHAPTER 22
Dominic strode onto the bridge of the Defiant with a scowl. He stopped in front of the captain’s table and gave a quick nod to his XO who was already standing there, waiting for him. He’d had a very rocky night’s sleep while they were travelling through SLS. In the subsequent hours after the ship had dropped out of superluminal, and while they were waiting on the other side of the gate for emergency repair crews to finish crawling over the outside of the hull, he’d awoken briefly to give his bridge crew orders, sending out search and rescue shuttles to find their missing nova pilots. Now, just a few minutes ago, his comm officer had roused him once more with the news that all of their fighters had been found—just six of them. According to the pilots, the other two had been taken out by junkers just before they could make the jump to Sythian Space.
Dominic turned from the captain’s table to Deck Officer Grimsby, the replacement comm officer. “Have we seen any sign of the corvette which was following us to the gate?”
Grimsby shook his head. “No, sir, but our sensors are significantly impeded by the nebula. Perhaps they were damaged or short of fuel and they didn’t make it as far as the exit gate.”
Dominic turned to stare out at the gray Stormcloud Nebula which had hidden the entrance to Dark Space for the past decade. As he watched, there came a bright flicker of static discharging deep within the clouds.
“If they haven’t arrived by now,” the overlord began, “then we have to assume that they’re gone. Helm—” Dominic turned to find Petty Sergeant Damen Corr staring at him expectantly. “Set course for the Stormcloud Transfer Station. We’ll lie low there until repairs are completed.”
“Yes, sir.”