Fire Fight

by Chris Ward

  ‘Six arms left,’ Caladan said, patting the dashboard. ‘Soon, you’ll have less than me.’

  ‘My programming tells me that was a really stupid thing to do,’ Harlan5 said, as Caladan banked them sharply left, grinning like a madman as he unleashed another barrage of cannon fire on the attacking fighters. He had lost count of the number of enemy ships he had downed, something he hated to do, having kept a running total most of his life. If they survived this, he would find time to go back over the ship’s weapons log, which would have stored the number of hits and their approximate coordinates.

  ‘Fun though, wasn’t it?’ He leaned over his shoulder and grinned at the robot. ‘You know, if we’re caught, I’ll blame you. I’ll tell them you malfunctioned and forced me to do it.’

  ‘My programming suggests you’re joking.’

  ‘Your programming is a real party pooper sometimes.’ Caladan banked right again, then increased power to the rear thrusters, accelerating them quickly out of range. No doubt Raylan Climlee’s army would hunt them, but for now the warlord had greater problems to deal with.

  As soon as they were out of the flight range of the fighters, Caladan banked the Matilda back around, reduced power, and brought the stricken space station up on his monitors. It had listed badly as it lost power, dropping low toward the planet’s atmosphere, but already lights flickered back into life in certain areas as the auxiliary power kicked in.

  ‘Over to you now, Lia,’ Caladan said. ‘I hope we gave you a chance.’

  28

  LIA

  The first thing Lia noticed when she opened her eyes was the cold, as though the space station’s heating systems had abruptly shut off. The next was that she lay in total darkness, all the lights having gone out.

  But the most important thing was that the electrified bonds holding her against the wall had lost their power.

  Sitting up, she shook them off, hearing the clank as they landed on the floor.

  The world had disappeared. She stood up, feeling for the door to her cell, and found it unlocked, sliding open at her touch. Outside, she finally encountered life, hearing distant, panicked voices and catching sight of the occasional flicker of a battery-cell-powered flashlight.

  Clearly what had happened was unexpected.

  Unsure quite where she was or what to do, Lia headed in the direction of the last light she had seen, her step feeling springy beneath her feet, a sign that the station’s gravitational field was fading. From her own experience on the Matilda and other starships, the most commonly used form these days was through charged battery cells, so if the main power systems were down the gravitational field would stay online a while, but gradually fail over the following Earth-hour or two.

  If she was going to find a way out, she had to hurry before every corridor was clogged with floating junk and people.

  A short distance farther ahead, she reached a corridor junction. Doors opened onto a control hub for the detention block she was in, something made obvious by the pair of gaunt-faced, semi-naked prisoners strangling a guard by flashlight. Invisible in the dark, Lia crept around them, making for a stock room at their backs occasionally caught in the light’s flicker.

  She wasn’t lucky enough to find weapons, but she found spare guard uniforms and utility belts. She grabbed one of each and snuck away into a dark corridor, where she pulled on the uniform and slipped the belt around her waist.

  Connected to the belt was a small tracking device with a map of the station, but it wasn’t working due to the problems with the station’s electrical systems. A small flashlight, though, was enough to get her out through the unlocked doors of the detention block and into the main corridor system.

  Disguised as a guard, all she had to do was ask. No one queried her excuse that as a new guard she didn’t know her way around; they were too panicked by the failure of the station’s systems to care.

  A couple of levels above the detention block, she found an armory, and loaded herself up with a proton blaster and a handful of stun grenades.

  If she could catch him, she wanted Raylan Climlee to suffer, the same way her family had. She would stun him with a grenade, and then shoot bits off him, until nothing but his horrid little face remained.

  By the time she reached the bridge though a series of corridors strangely deserted, auxiliary systems were flickering into life, but Lia quickly realised from the absence of any personnel at the control desks, something was very wrong.

  She found a systems monitor that had been left running and checked over the station’s vital systems. The attack by an unnamed craft had temporarily disabled its electrical power, but during the blackout it had fallen into an irreversible descent toward Abalon 3’s atmosphere. Too late to correct, the order had been issued for all personnel to evacuate.

  No wonder the corridors near the bridge were deserted. She was likely the only person left in this part of the ship.

  Trying to suppress a growing panic, she stared into a visual monitor showing the planet’s surface. Directly below them was a growing plume of crimson, purple and yellow: a building firestorm. The station was set to plow straight into it.

  The station’s computer systems were not far different from those Lia remembered in the Galactic Military Police. She pulled up an inventory of docked ships in the hangar bays, but most were showing damage or inactivity. Electrical systems still hadn’t been fully restored. Several transports, including Raylan Climlee’s personal shuttle, had recently logged as departed, and several more were cleared to leave imminently. A warning infiltrating all systems said to head for the evacuation transports with all possible haste.

  Lia ran. In some corridors she found emergency lighting, while others were still dark. Her footing was becoming lighter and lighter, and some objects were rolling down the corridors in a way that suggested the gravitational field had not fully come back online.

  She saw no one. Aware of evacuation procedure, almost all the station’s workers had fled for the transports. Lia, running blindly, wasn’t even sure where she was going.

  Exhausted, she paused at an interim control panel and pulled up a map of the station. She was three levels from a minor hangar, where a malfunctioning shuttle was still logged as present.

  Lia didn’t hesitate. Malfunctioning was better than nothing. With elevators still out of operation, she climbed down ladders in maintenance shafts to reach the hangar, where she found a small planetary shuttle sitting on a launch pad.

  Triangular, one protruding wing had been badly damaged by a collision of some kind, most likely with a small asteroid or space debris. It looked in no way capable of flying, but if its thrusters worked, perhaps she could find a way to avoid the storm and crash-land on the planet’s surface.

  She stepped out of the shadows, only to hear a sinister voice behind her.

  ‘Not so fast. This one’s ours.’

  She turned. The two prisoners she had seen strangling the guard stepped out of a passageway. One carried a large photon cannon, while the other had a blaster in each hand. Both were thin, wore little more than rags, and had a desperate look on their faces.

  ‘Look, I was a prisoner too,’ Lia said, lifting her hands. ‘We can share it.’

  The one with the cannon shook his head. ‘You expect us to believe that? Move aside or you’re dead.’

  ‘No, I stole this uniform.’

  ‘And all I stole was a handful of trioxyglobin crystals,’ the first said. ‘Just enough to sell to feed my family. Poor you, poor me.’

  The second nodded his agreement and waved his blasters at her. Neither fired, and a quick glance behind her told Lia why.

  She was standing in front of the shuttle. If they fired at her, they risked damaging it further.

  Its entrance hatchway was closed. Lia saw the control panel embedded into the metal beside the door, but in the seconds it took for the shuttle’s door to decompress and open, they would be on her.

  ‘Come on,’ Lia said, instead walking
toward them, her hands spread wide. ‘How about we share it? I have contacts on the surface that can get you to anywhere in the Trill System, under an assumed name.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘She’s lying.’

  ‘Why would I lie?’

  ‘Because you’re one of them.’

  ‘Look, I told you before—’

  The station listed, throwing them all off their feet. Lia landed hard on her side, dropping her weapon, but her wits were alert, and as she rolled, she came up running and plowed into both men as they came to their feet. One got off a shot, and a burning pain rushed up Lia’s side, but the other cried out as he took a stray blow in the chest.

  The man who had fired rounded on her. Lia dived as fire streaked out, crashing into the wall behind. The man fired once more, but at the same time the station shuddered, knocking him off his feet. Lia pulled herself up behind a support pillar as another massive shudder sent debris raining down from overhead. A steel pipe struck the man across the back, knocking him down.

  Lia, her wound badly restricting her movement, crawled to him and checked for a pulse, but he was already dead. She closed his eyes, then moved to the other and did the same, wondering what crime they had committed, if any, to end up in Raylan Climlee’s detention cells.

  The shuttle seemed an Earth-mile away, as Lia crawled to it, the burning in her side so painful it was hard to think. She activated the hatchway control, then dragged herself up and along a short corridor to a cockpit, with the space station trembling around her as it made its slow descent into Abalon 3’s atmosphere.

  A thump on the dashboard brought the ship’s systems to life. Lia had flown similar during her days in the Galactic Military Police, where her training had required a familiarity with various kinds of spacecraft. While she couldn’t rival Caladan’s skill—even with one arm missing he outclassed most pilots she had ever met—she knew enough to get the launch systems online and establish where the problems lay.

  The shuttle’s left thruster was broken and the damage to its wing meant she was simply going to give herself a better view of the firestorm that would kill her. With her hand shaking and sweat soaking her body, she closed and sealed the shuttle’s doors, then activated its photon cannons and blasted open the hangar.

  Space, beautiful space, appeared through a flickering of broken steel, but only for a moment as the station begun another revolution and the angry atmosphere of Abalon 3 presented itself.

  It looked so very close. Lia engaged the rear thruster and the shuttle slid out of the station, breaking through the half-destroyed doors, leaving beneath the deep sense of claustrophobia that had been pressing down on her. Activating the monitor screens all around her head, she leaned back in the pilot’s chair, smiling weakly as space, Abalon 3, and the slowly departing space station made a slow circuit of the shuttle’s ceiling.

  The firestorm was raging, an angry whirlpool of crimson, orange, yellow, and purple hundreds of Earth-miles across, with occasional plumes reaching high into the outer atmosphere. Some miles behind her now, the space station began to break up as it tipped into the storm. Lia’s shuttle was lighter, and with one thruster still operating, would resist its impending fate for a short while longer, so she could at least witness the destruction of Raylan Climlee’s greatest space vessel. It was some reward, even though she knew she had failed in her real task, and that she would die with her family left unavenged.

  The fresh wound in her side was taking her toward unconsciousness. She fought to stay awake, to bravely witness her death, but she had no strength left. A light was blinking on the dashboard, and she poked it, hoping it might be a coolant system or something that might blast her with cold air and keep her alive, but all it did was start a word ringing in her head that was comforting and familiar:

  Matilda, Matilda, Matilda.

  She remembered the little dog her mother had given her for her seventh birthday. She had loved the way it had yapped at her and jumped up at her knees.

  29

  RAYLAN

  His empire could survive any catastrophe barring the loss of his own precious life, so when news of the attack and its crippling result came in—only moments before the communications systems failed—Raylan wasted no time getting to his private shuttle hangar. There he found a crew on permanent standby as always—warlords tended to have enemies willing to break intergalactic protocol without much warning—and within minutes his damaged space station was slipping away behind him.

  He instructed the shuttle’s crew to stay in orbit while the Prosperity fell into Abalon 3’s atmosphere. As the ship that had been his pride and joy for more than a hundred Earth-years broke to pieces and slowly burned up in the great firestorm—the largest since records began, so his computer told him to little comfort—he jumped up and down, shot a couple of advisors with his blaster, and then began blasting the monitor screens, until one brave advisor came forward and told him how to switch them off.

  Regrettably, most of the crew had escaped in the transports, which meant he was stuck with a massive wage bill for people with no work to do, but the real cost was to his pride. The Prosperity had brought the awe of warlords everywhere, its multitude of extended wings far exceeding official non-governmental sizes like a middle finger into the face of the Galactic Military Police, and containing weaponry that could have taken on most planets’ standing navies. Losing it was like losing a leg, and all because of one tiny, stricken ship.

  They would be hunted, and they would be destroyed.

  As he instructed the surviving crew to take the shuttle down to the moon, he reflected on the one success of such a colossal failure.

  At least Lianetta Jansen was dead.

  30

  LIA

  ‘Are you still with us, or should I start advertising for a new captain?’

  Lia opened her eyes. Caladan stood over her, his beard shimmering, seemingly restored. At his shoulder was Harlan5, the robot’s silver eyes blinking. Then, behind the droid stood someone Lia was sure had to be a mirage.

  ‘We took a chance,’ Caladan said. ‘We figured you’d get out of there somehow, and what better way than to fly a broken shuttle straight into a firestorm? That was the kind of moved only Lianetta Jansen could pull off with any style.’

  Her throat was dry. ‘You found me?’

  ‘We pulled you in a couple of Earth-miles away from a very hot morning. You’re a lucky girl, but when you have such an awesome crew as us, it’s not really surprising, is it?’

  ‘My programming says I’m happy to see you again,’ Harlan5 said.

  ‘Um, thanks.’

  Lia sat up.

  ‘And we thought you might like to meet our guest.’ Caladan stepped aside to wave the third person forward.

  ‘Mother…?’

  Trina smiled as she pulled Lia into a firm hug. ‘Lianetta, you silly girl. When your boyfriend here told me what a stupid thing you had done, I figured it was only appropriate to help bring you back.’

  Caladan and Harlan5 had moved away to give them a little space, and were busying themselves around a mainframe computer terminal. Alone with her mother, Lia felt layers of skin shedding away until only the softest of underbellies remained.

  ‘I fired on them,’ she gasped through sobs she hadn’t known she could cry. ‘I cut them down like trees. I couldn’t let a single one escape, and I didn’t. I destroyed every last one.’

  ‘Lia, Lia, in time you’ll come to understand that you only did you what you had to do.’

  ‘I didn’t want to kill them, Mother, but it was them or risk that virus spreading across the whole planet. They weren’t my enemies, not all of them. What I did, it destroys me.’

  Trina wrapped her arm around Lia’s shoulders. ‘Sometimes we all have to make difficult choices.’ She smiled, trying to lighten the mood. ‘Mine was plucking up the nerve to get back on to a starship after so many years. I really do enjoy the quiet life these days.’
r />   ‘I’m glad you came.’

  Trina smiled. ‘Plus, I had to see if our little weapon worked.’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘Something Bennett lent me. He suggested that fighting a virus with a virus might be the best answer. It was a viral system so old their computers couldn’t fix it in time to prevent Raylan Climlee’s space station from dropping into Abalon 3’s gravitational field.’

  ‘Did he escape?’ Lia whispered.

  ‘We don’t know. Only time will tell. If he did, you’ll know from the assassins you’ll soon have tailing the Matilda, likely jostling for a slice of your hide with the Galactic Military Police—Caladan broke practically every protocol rule going, plus an unprovoked attack on a space station is officially an act of intergalactic war.’

  ‘And there’ll be a bounty on my head for the murder of those traders on Abalon 3.’

  Trina gave a reluctant nod. ‘You’re going to be a busy girl over the next few years, I should think.’

  Lia shrugged. ‘I’ll get used to it.’

  Trina led her over to where Caladan and Harlan5 were still perusing a computer screen. Both looked up at her approach.

  ‘You’re not my boyfriend,’ Lia said, scowling at Caladan, ‘but I do appreciate what you did for me. If there’s anything I can do for you in return—within reason—just ask.’

  Caladan grinned. ‘I’ll settle for a decent hug.’

  ‘Done.’

  As they embraced, Caladan sighed. ‘But I swear it’s growing back. The stump definitely looks a little big bigger than usual. Honestly, those recoup tanks work wonders.’

  Trina laughed. ‘I must have lost ten years during the journey,’ she said. ‘I must admit, they work. So, the big question is, how are we going to celebrate surviving for another Earth-day?’