Kyle waited. It was funny, he realized, watching his own death grow in the screen. He wasn’t afraid of dying. What bothered him was that if he died, he wouldn’t be able to take Michael up on his offer of support when he went back to talk to Lisa.
But that wasn’t quite it either, he realized.
It was simpler than that.
If he died, he would never be able to apologize to Lisa. And that, he realized, was even scarier to him than the thought of apologizing to her.
Of course, he was apparently less scared of ramming another ship than he was of talking to the mother of his child.
Kyle shook his head at his own foolishness, and checked the scanners.
The carrier hadn’t launched any missiles. If he’d had any of his own, his current suicide course would be unnecessary.
Again, and again, and again, the carrier shifted course. Five decoys fired into space, each mimicking the electronic and infrared signatures of the carrier.
Unfortunately for the Commonwealth, his drones were close enough to pick them up as they launched and keep his course on the right track.
Ten minutes to impact. The Commonwealth starfighters had broken off their pursuit of SFG-001, but they couldn’t possibly get back in time to prevent Kyle ramming Avalon into his enemy.
The question, he supposed, wasn’t what he could do.
It was what his enemy would do when he realized he was doomed.
At forty light seconds, five minutes to impact, he received the first message.
“This is Captain Maria Jung of the Commonwealth warship Majesty,” a crisply dressed woman with porcelain-white skin and jet-black hair in the Commonwealth Navy’s red and black uniform informed him.
“As an alternative to this madness, I am prepared to accept the honorable surrender of your ship and starfighters,” she continued. “I will personally guarantee your fair treatment and repatriation to your home nations.”
It was a step in the right direction, but not what Kyle needed. He adjusted his course slightly, adding enough of a random spiral to throw off positron lances. Four minutes to impact. Three.
Captain Jung’s skin was even paler when the second message arrived.
“Fine,” she snapped. “I am prepared to negotiate the withdrawal of my forces from this system! Break off your course and I will pick up my fighters and leave!”
Kyle considered it. The problem here wasn’t the offer – if the Commonwealth withdrew, he won.
The problem was that he couldn’t trust her. Once she had the chance to retrieve her fighters, there was nothing stopping Captain Jung from sending them straight at Avalon. Right now he posed the only threat he could ever pose.
Two minutes to impact. Transmission time was down to sixteen seconds, and he still hadn’t replied to any of Jung’s transmissions. It was an open question in Kyle’s mind whether or not the woman would crack – or if someone around her would crack.
Ninety seconds. Kyle could probably avoid impact with even seconds of notice, but he was starting to get nervous now. Eighty seconds. Seventy.
“This is Jung,” the transmission finally said, her voice suddenly very small and afraid. The bridge behind her was a chaotic mess. Jung was bleeding from what looked like a bullet graze on her shoulder and was leaning on her command chair. Kyle’s Q-com drones were now showing escape pods starting to fire off from her ship.
“To avoid further loss of life, I offer the unconditional surrender of all Commonwealth forces under my command. Please respond. Please.”
Kyle smiled coldly. If he’d been a betting man, he’d have just owed himself twenty bucks.
“Captain Jung, this is Captain Roberts,” he said calmly into the recorder. “You will stand down all zero point cells aboard your ship. Your starfighter crews will eject. If you do this, your surrender will be accepted.” He checked the clock. “You have thirty seconds from receipt of this message to comply.”
Captain Jung clearly still had a Q-com link to her starfighters. Less than ten seconds after she would have received his message, the one solitary drone with SFG-001 showed escape modules beginning to blast free of the Commonwealth fighters.
In the face of the potential destruction of their only way home, even starfighter pilots knew when the game was lost.
Kyle waited a few, painful, seconds to be sure the distinctive signature of the zero point cells had disappeared from Majesty, and then slammed an override into the computer.
With seventeen and a half seconds to spare, Avalon slewed aside from her suicide course.
Chapter 44
Castle System
14:00, October 10, 2735 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
Orbital Dry Dock Merlin Four
Doctor Lisa Kerensky, M.D. and a list of other letters that was shortly scheduled to include ‘Ph. D. Neural Cybernetics’, wasn’t entirely sure the school tour was supposed to going quite this deep into the repair yard sections of Merlin Four.
She had her suspicions about just how the head of Jacob’s expensive and prestigious private academy had wrangled getting the class of thirty eleven-year-olds the rarely granted privilege of a full tour of one of the Federation Navy’s massive space stations. She couldn’t really object, though. Jacob should, after all, get some benefit from having a famous war hero for a father.
More of a benefit than simply watching the man’s face show up in every news cast for the last three days, anyway. Navy Public Relations had apparently wasted no time in getting newly-promoted Captain Kyle Roberts in front of a camera for an interview when the badly damaged Avalon had finally limped into Castle.
Since no matter what she did, Lisa was pretty sure Jacob was going to see it and ask questions, she’d watched it. They’d interlaced Kyle’s matter of fact commentary with video of the battle – including Avalon flying through a Commonwealth warship in a blaze of fire.
Shaking her head to clear her vagaries, Lisa made sure that the collection of chaos makers she was helping chaperone were still mostly together. She concluded after a moment that they were doing better than expected, though the quartet of grim-faced Marines playing nursemaid as they walked through the semi-classified areas probably had something to do with it.
They came to a halt by a massive transparent window, and a voluptuous blond woman in a Navy uniform and three gold circles on her neck seemed to appear out of nowhere.
“That’s Avalon, kids,” she said cheerfully. “Most of us didn’t think she was going to make it home, but Fleet Commander Wong did us proud.”
A wheelchair-bound man in the same uniform and insignia, but with blue piping, rolled his chair up to join her.
“She was painted black,” he pointed out to the kids, gesturing to the gray and black-charred hull. “The paint all burnt off though. The gray you see? That’s neutronium. Still intact, despite everything the Captain did to her.”
Lisa found herself off to the side as the two officers and Marines skilfully directed the children’s attention to the unclassified parts of the ship and the repair yard around her. She couldn’t help studying the ship.
At least one of the blackened holes in the surprisingly unmarked gray hull had to be fifty meters deep. The old ship looked like she’d been through hell.
“I’d say you should see the other guy,” a familiar voice said from behind her, “but the truth is that none of them were intact enough to drag home.”
Lisa turned around. The voice was familiar. The face was older, carrying lines she was sure hadn’t been in the last images her landlady – Jacob’s grandmother – had shown her a few months ago. The uniform was different too – gold-piped instead of blue, and with a single gold planet on the collar instead of two gold circles.
“So they didn’t just conjure with the name of a hero to get us aboard then?” she asked.
“Honestly? I had nothing to do with Jacob’s class getting the trip,” Kyle told her. “I did, however, get them this deep into the repair yard.” He shrugged. “Nothing clas
sified about Avalon anymore. She’s due to be decommissioned in two days.”
She’d forgotten how fast Kyle moved for being so large a man. Suddenly he was next to her, just out of reach and looking down at her.
“I wanted to see you,” he said quietly. “And Jacob too, if you’re okay with that.”
“If I’m okay with that?” she asked. “This is your territory, Kyle.”
“And you are his mother,” her old lover replied, his voice still soft. “I… wronged you. Deeply. You owe me nothing, Lisa – and if you want me to walk away from Jacob and never bother either of you again, I will do so. Child support will keep coming. Nothing will change.”
He paused and swallowed.
“I am sorry,” he said continued. “I’m not here to ask for forgiveness. I am simply here to tell you that it was always me. I was afraid, and I wronged you, and I was too afraid for too long to make it right.”
Somehow, Lisa’s occasional dreams – and, honestly, fantasies – about this moment had never included her stomach being full of butterflies or her hands being sweaty. She was so angry with him – almost twelve years of anger – but she’d never really considered the possibility he would truly show up and apologize.
“I won’t pretend I didn’t know where the money that pays for Jacob’s school came from,” she said quietly. “Or that you were paying more child support than you had to. I wouldn’t be where I am without the support you gave, even if you did leave us in the lurch. It helped, no matter how angry I was, to remind that somewhere inside, you cared.”
“It’s not right. Not yet,” Lisa told him. “But…”
“Mommy!” came a twelve year old yell, and both of them turned around to see Jacob round the corner at maximum speed. He came careening up to Lisa – he was already up to her shoulder, looking to rival his father’s height eventually – and stopped dead about four feet away.
He looked Kyle up and down, his face suddenly very mature.
“Mom,” he said slowly, “is that…?”
“I know you’ve watched that interview, Jacob,” Lisa told him with a smile and a laugh. Suddenly, her heart was at ease for the first time in years.
“Yes, Jacob, this is your father.”
Kyle was suddenly on his knees, and Lisa noted, absently, that her son was as tall as his father like that. It seemed… right.
“Hi Jacob,” he said quietly. “I’m sorry it took so long.”
The boy glanced from his father, to his mother, then to the battered spaceship outside the window.
“You were on that,” he whispered.
“I was,” Kyle said gravely.
“Did you… almost not come back?” Jacob asked, and Lisa’s heart dropped out of her chest. Angry as she’d been at Kyle, when she’d heard about the Battle of Tranquility and Avalon’s losses, she’d been terrified for days.
She’d never even thought that Jacob might be just as scared for the father he’d never met.
“I did,” the boy’s father replied, his voice heavy. “I did come back – I had to. I owed you and Lisa that much.”
Lisa found herself blinking back tears as Jacob suddenly threw himself into Kyle’s embrace. The big officer held his son gently, carefully.
Behind him, the wheelchair bound officer corralling the rest of her school tour smiled brightly, and threw Lisa a perfect salute.
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Other Books by Glynn Stewart
Stand-Alone Novels
Children of Prophecy
City in the Sky
Starship’s Mage
Starship’s Mage: Omnibus
Mage-King’s Hand (coming fall 2015)
Turn the page for a sample of First Strike, by bestselling military science fiction author Christopher Nuttall:
First Strike
The best defense…
Starting a war with an enemy a hundred times stronger is insane. It’s desperate. And it’s Earth’s only hope.
A massive alien power looms over humanity, claiming Earth as its territory and humanity as its slaves. The Hegemony has already taken over one colony, yoking hundreds of thousands under their brutal rule. Every tactical exercise, every wargame and every simulation gives humanity zero chance in a defensive campaign.
Earth’s only chance to win the coming war - is by striking first.
Chapter Seven
Terra Nova had everything a spacefaring society could want, except a gas giant that could be mined for fuel. The Association had surveyed it while humanity was still mastering basic metalworking and deemed the system largely useless, not even bothering to plant a small colony on Terra Nova’s surface. They hadn't even established a quantum gate in the system; the gate that served Terra Nova had been built by the Federation, the third quantum gate produced by human engineers. Gates were, by long convention, open to all, but the galactic powers that felt confident in their strength charged access fees. The Hegemony, with a major battle fleet in the system, were quite willing to tax human shipping heading to Terra Nova.
Pelican lumbered though the quantum gate and emerged into the Terra Nova system. Like most commercial shipping, the massive HE3 tanker possessed no quantum drive of her own and was completely dependent upon the quantum gates for FTL travel. Producing commercial ships was surprisingly cheap once someone had built the ship yards; after all, they really needed little more than life support and hull volume. Pelican looked crude, like a set of oil drums bolted together, but Captain William Zeller loved her. She was his ticket to see the universe.
Earth had established a cloudscoop over Jupiter shortly after Mentor had contacted the human race, providing vast quantities of HE3 to power the switch to fusion power and fuel Earth’s growing fleet of starships. The Hegemony had demanded that Earth continue to supply Terra Nova with HE3, even though Earth no longer controlled the planet and there were gas giants nearer to the system than Sol. The Federation had made nothing more than a muted protest, after ONI pointed out that sending the freighters into the system would allow them to take a careful look at the Hegemony’s fleet dispositions. One day, Earth would have the firepower to teach the Hegemony a lesson. Good intelligence would be needed on that day. Pelican’s sensor suite was military-grade, far more sophisticated than any commercial ship would need for its routine activities. William would have expected the Hegemony to insist on searching his ship and demanding explanations for the advanced sensors, but they’d never bothered. He was unable to tell if that was arrogance or simple carelessness. What could tiny Earth’s puny fleet do against five superdreadnoughts and their support ships?
“I’m picking up a challenge now,” his pilot said. No separate disciplines on Pelican, even if she was a Federation Navy ship in all, but name. The crew officially worked for the Jupiter Consortium; unofficially, they were Federation Intelligence and ONI. “They’re demanding that we pay our access fees or get back into quantum space.”
“Charming,” William said. A quick glance at the sensor take showed that the Hegemony’s fleet was already coming into view, surrounding Orbit Station. Humans had built the station, back when Terra Nova had first been colonised, only to lose it to the Hegemony. These days, a tiny human staff maintained the station for their masters. They were one of the best sources of intelligence that humanity had. “Ship them some credits and request an orbital slot.”
He waited patiently for the reply. The Association’s currency was still in widespread use across the galaxy. Some of the younger races had their own currencies as well, but the Association credit was interchangeable throughout the entire known galaxy. Some economists had predicted that that would change rapidly once the Association collapsed completely, perhaps reducing interstellar economics to barter unless a successor power with the same clout as the Association arose rapidly. William hadn't bothered to try to follow their arguments. It was enough that Earth’s
small stockpile of credits was still good.
“They’re telling us to dock at the fuel dump and start the transfer,” the pilot said, after a moment. “Should I take us in?”
“The alternative is hanging around here,” William pointed out, dryly. “Take us in.”
Terra Nova grew rapidly on the viewscreen as they approached the planet. Like Earth, Terra Nova was a blue-green world, although there were only two main continents. No one was quite sure why some worlds evolved intelligent life and others didn't produce anything more interesting than versions of sheep and wolves; Terra Nova had produced few creatures larger than lizards or rodents. Crops and animals brought by humans from Earth had swiftly spread across the first continent, competing with the local fauna. Unlike Clarke, which was dominated by savage plant and animal life, Terra Nova’s local wildlife hadn't been able to cope. Humanity had effectively terraformed the planet far quicker than either Mars or Venus.
The Hegemony battle squadron was orbiting the planet, sensors and weapons stepped down to prevent wear and tear. Each of the five superdreadnoughts possessed enough firepower to blast a planet into atoms, or dominate the skies so thoroughly that resistance would be impossible. They were hulking brutes, their hulls designed so that all who saw them would know just what they’d been designed to do. There was little of the elegance the Association had built into its explorer or cruise starships, none of the fancifulness that they worked into pleasure craft that didn't have to obey Newton’s laws. The ships were intimidating, even from a distance. All of Earth had seen footage of similar ships in action, in the brushfire wars that had started to appear along the edge of Association space. Everyone knew that they were the most powerful and capable warships in existence. Nothing could stand up to them.
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