Tyche's Crown

by Richard Parry

  The second thing was that him dying would probably happen one way or the other, which left him with a strange sense of peace. If he bested Grace, a hundred bugs would come out of that pit and eat him alive. Nope, that wasn’t a great solve. He was here for something different. A last, desperate hope.

  The third thing, and he’d admit most important, was that Grace had a sword that Hope had made, designed to cut through just about any old thing. As her blade swung towards him, he brought the black blade up to meet it. This here was the test. Would his sword of an Old Empire, long fallen, hold fast against a blade wielded by the finest fencer he’d ever known?

  The blades met, sparks dancing from where their edges hit. The black blade held. Grace’s eyes, her helmet close to his, showed surprise. They moved apart, circling. “Your sword,” she said.

  “Yep,” he said. “Kinda cool, right?”

  “I have surprising tricks too,” she said, stopping her circling. Grace reached a hand towards him, and for a crazy hot second, he wondered if she wanted him to come to her, like this was all some weird dream, but … no. He felt himself held by an invisible hand made of iron, lifted above the rocky floor. Not just no, but all the no. What the fuck? He squirmed in the air as she closed her eyes, hand out, then she closed her fingers. He felt the force of that grip closing around him, squeezing him like an industrial press. His ribs would collapse. His lungs would be crushed, his heart stopped.

  Not today. His metal had found his blaster, drawing it in a smooth motion, and he fired hot plasma. Not at Grace, because killing her wasn’t why he was here. It was never why he had come here. He fired it at the ground next to her, causing shards of rock to explode upward. She lost her focus, and he fell to the ground, landing in a crouch. He recovered, firing again, and she dived to the side, rolling away from the blasts. When she came to her feet, sword in her hand, he could see blood streaming from her nose. He hadn’t caused that. Using this … new power, like she’d used her old ones on the Tyche? That caused the blood. There were limits.

  “You can’t beat me,” she said. Her voice betrayed no strain.

  “No,” he agreed.

  “Then … why? Why are you here?”

  “Why do you think?” He hefted his sword. “Come on.”

  She came at him again, swords ringing in the cave again, and again, and again. Nate was being pushed back, and he still hadn’t done what he needed to do. They broke apart for a breather, circling again, eyeing for an advantage. She licked blood from her upper lip. “I … don’t understand. After so long, humans … make no sense.”

  “Here’s a thing,” said Nate. “The old Emperor was my brother. Half-brother, anyway.”

  Her circling slowed, but didn’t stop. “You are … Emperor?”

  “Not really,” said Nate. “I mean, sure. Technically I might be. But you need an Empire to be the Emperor.”

  “You have an Empire.”

  “No,” he said. “I don’t have an Empire without you. Without my Grace.”

  “She is not your Grace,” said Grace, and closed the distance in three quick steps, batting his sword aside. She pulled her sword back, and ran him through. He felt her blade pass through his chest, could see her face right next to his as she cut his heart in two.

  He slipped to the floor at her feet. “It’s okay, Grace. It’ll be okay.” He tried to reach for her, to touch her one more time, but he couldn’t. Nathan Chevell, the last Emperor of the human race, fell back on the rocky floor of an alien world, dead.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  EL LOOKED UP from the holo stage at Hope, who was leaning in through the door to the flight deck. “Hi,” she said. “Is there a particular reason you are here?” She frowned, replaying that in her mind, then said, “I mean, I was expecting you on the Ark. Everything okay with you and Kohl?”

  “Yes,” said Hope. “Kohl is killing bugs and I’m here.”

  El chewed that over for a bit. “There are bugs on the Ark Royal?”

  “No. There are bugs down there.” Hope jerked her chin at the planet below them.

  “Kohl went to the planet?” El tried to process this, and kept coming up blank. “That doesn’t make any sense. It’s a deathtrap.”

  “I don’t think Kohl sees it that way,” said Hope, slinging herself onto the acceleration couch beside El. “Or, he sees it as a deathtrap in his favor.”

  “Sounds like Kohl,” agreed El. “Still doesn’t explain why you’re here.”

  “Okay, so don’t panic,” said Hope, “but we might need to fly soon. I’m not the expert on flying, but here’s what’s up.” The holo stage flickered, then pulled out from the expanse of Republic ships at the edge of the debris field, highlighting the Ark Royal and the tiny dot of the Tyche against it. Red lights bloomed on the stage, delta-v highlighting approach vectors. “Those things,” said Hope.

  “What are they?”

  “Not human,” said Hope, with air quotes. “They are coming in our direction. My best guess is that the Republic ships can’t find us, and the Ezeroc can’t find us. But the Ezeroc, right, they knew what happened last time there was a massive battle above their world. They came here to the Ark Royal, killed everyone, and stopped things cold.”

  “They’re coming back to the head of the snake, so to speak,” said El, feeling a little sick.

  “I don’t know. Is it what you’d do?”

  “Probably,” said El. “We can’t go yet. We don’t have the all-clear from the cap.”

  The holo shivered as an update from the battle net came through, and one of the red lights disappeared. “Ah hah,” said Hope.

  “What was that?” said El.

  “That would be,” and Hope paused, biting her lip, “the Calamity. It just opened up with kinetic rounds on an alien ship and turned it to shards.” The red dots stopped moving closer.

  “The Calamity?”

  “It’s what the transponder said it was. Destroyer, I think.”

  “Bad ass name.”

  “Pretty bad ass,” said Hope, sounding disinterested. “I think we’ve got a worse problem.” She highlighted some smaller dots, outlined in yellow, coming towards them. “These are human ships. They are coming our way.”

  “We won't shoot them down,” said El, half a statement, half wanting it to be a question, and then hating herself for it.

  “Captain’s orders,” said Hope.

  “They will see us,” said El. “They will blow the Tyche to pieces.”

  “That is why I’m here,” said Hope. “I figure we need to get gone while the going is good.”

  “You don’t need to tell me twice,” said El. “Are we go for launch?”

  “Everything’s ready,” said Hope. She patted the console in front of her. “I’ve got the battle net hooked up here. We need to not die, which I’ve told everyone else to do today, and it sounds like good advice.”

  “Pretty good,” agreed El.

  “So, Helm, how do we not die in a starship?” Hope looked at her.

  “We fly,” said El. “We fly like the dogs of war are at our heels.”

  “Looks like they are,” said Hope, pointing at the holo stage.

  “Bringing the ship online,” said El. She worked the console, initiating the startup sequence for the Tyche’s reactor. There was a rumble as it came online, then lights on her console bloomed, systems coming to life. Her good girl, ready to fly one more time. El just hoped it wasn’t one last time. Things were … not in their favor out there. “Brace yourself.”

  Hope clipped herself into the acceleration couch. “Go.”

  El reached for the controls. She keyed the controls for the airlock, the Ark Royal letting them go with a gentle release, the Tyche adrift for a second. Then she jammed the throttle forward, the twin fusion drives of the Tyche burning blue-white into the hard black. They ran, as if their lives depended on it.

  Their lives, and all other human lives too. No pressure, thought El as the Gs pressed her into her seat.

&
nbsp; • • •

  The part of a good ship battle was where you were never in one in the first place. The last time El had been in one, it had been Republic fighters on her ass over Earth. Before that, the damn bugs had been tossing rocks at her as they scrambled over the deck on Absalom Delta. Here, she had bugs on one side of a debris cloud, and a bunch of not-the-Republic-anymore assholes on the other. The trick here, as near as she could tell, was to have a three-step plan.

  Step one: get through the debris field (not getting hit by any floating hulks, human or otherwise) while moving at a significant enough velocity to not be targeted by human weapons. Use the other ships as cover. If they follow, pretend it’s a dogfight. Pretend you’re not flying an old heavy lifter, but instead a nimble, agile, modern fighter.

  Step two: avoid the Ezeroc waiting at the edge of the debris cloud, while somehow going right through them and to the planet below.

  Step three: get to the planet below, save everyone, and get the hell out.

  How hard could it be?

  “Hope,” hissed El under the strain of the hard burn, “I’m taking us toward the Ezeroc.”

  “You’re what?” she said. “I think it’s the burn. I can’t hear right. I thought you said you were taking us toward the Ezeroc.” Truth be told, the Tyche was shaking around them, the decking rattling, spars groaning as El pushed them towards the debris field.

  El cut the drives, turning the Tyche in space, then kicked them off again, two torpedoes sailing past their six and impacting against a ship below them. She twisted the Tyche around again, drives facing the planet, and initiated a hard burn of braking thrust, before swinging inside the relative safety of the debris cloud. Debris was such a misleading word, because it made the human mind think of small stones, bolts, and other pieces of junk floating around. Harmless. Tiny. In fact, much of the debris was moving at a significant velocity, and a great deal of it was spaceship-sized, because it comprised spaceships or parts of spaceships.

  “Sorry, flying, got distracted,” said El. “Yeah. We’re going down there and getting their attention.”

  “That’s crazy,” said Hope.

  “We’re out of sane options,” said El.

  “Remember when I said we have to not die?”

  El flashed home a quick grin. “I said crazy, not dead. Trust me.”

  “Oh God,” said Hope, as El kicked the thrust in again. A little nudge to get them moving.

  A piece of something rang against the Tyche’s hull as she brought them through, the holo stage flickering, the RADAR and LIDAR struggling to keep up with the number of objects in the immediate vicinity. The battle net helped a great deal, but it could only tell the Tyche where the pieces of ship holding transponders were, not necessarily where the bits of broken-off ship were. “Easy, now,” said El, patting the Tyche’s console with a hand. “Slow and steady. Slow and steady.”

  The voyage through the debris was accompanied by occasional ringing of hard metal rain against the Tyche’s hull as they passed through smaller clouds of objects. El was saving the PDCs for later, if there was a later; this just took a delicate hand. They’d need the guns for when this gentle jog turned into a run or a sprint.

  “I don’t think I’m up with the … details of the plan,” said Hope.

  “Okay, so here’s the deal,” said El. “In about,” and she checked the holo stage, “thirty seconds we’ll emerge from this cloud of metal and rust. We will wave to the Ezeroc by way of a laser, and then we will go back into the cloud of debris.”

  “So they follow us.”

  “Yes,” said El. “Then we will practice not dying very hard.”

  “Okay,” said Hope. “I think I can give us a bit of extra action.”

  The Tyche cleared the debris, a last few ships floating below them. El fired up the forward weapons, bringing a laser online. She painted a small attack-craft-sized floating rock, one of Hope’s red dots, with the laser, then said, “From Earth, with much love,” and fired. The laser reached out across the void, superheating the outside of the Ezeroc asteroid, boring a hole through it, and punching out the other side. There wasn’t a great gout of fire or escaping atmosphere. The Ezeroc didn’t need to breathe. But it had an instant reaction as the rocks spread out along the underside of the debris field came at them.

  “Well, that worked. Here goes to not dying,” said El, spun the Tyche, and fired the drives again. This time, she didn’t cut thrust as they hit the edge of the field, one eye on the holo stage, one eye out the front of the ship, piloting by sight. The distances between ships were vast — space was big — but they were also moving at a hard burn, five Gs of thrust at their backs as a constant.

  As they entered the shadow of larger ships, El brought them in close to a larger one. An alien vessel, made of glass or something like it. No time for sightseeing; she brought them in nice and tight next to it, using it for shelter against other floating material. The PDCs were armed, and as they burned along the length of the glass craft, the PDCs chattered at smaller pieces of metal floating too close.

  El could see one of the human vessels ahead — corvette, no time to take in the transponder codes, no time to see the name of that brave vessel — fire drives as Hope brought the ship back to life. Ah, I see. El turned the Tyche away from the glass ship and towards the bright glow of the human ship’s drives. She checked the holo, and sure enough, the Ezeroc were still behind them. No care to avoid impacts because they didn’t care about losing air, and they didn’t care about losing a couple of drones. El brought the Tyche nice and close to the corvette’s drives, and smiled a hard, tight smile as she saw the holo show the friendly ship initiate a hard burn.

  The Tyche sailed through where the drive’s wash would be a moment before they ignited, and El hoped she’d timed it right, or that Hope had, the open cores of the drives above her glowing from red to orange to white, then they were past as bright nuclear fire roared into space behind them. It turned an Ezeroc asteroid to molten magma in an instant, the corvette lurching forward to impact against another vessel that looked like a corkscrew; nothing human hands had made, and that caused a bright explosion as the corvette died, its reactor critical, the explosion smashing out around it.

  But the Tyche, she wanted to run, and El gave the ship her head. She sprinted ahead of the explosion’s blast wave, soaring up and around — a groan from Hope beside her under the strain, or the flip-flopping of her stomach — another craft, this another one of the glass vessels. The alien ship took the brunt of the explosion, and the Tyche went free.

  The PDCs hammered the hard black again, chewing through the side of a drifting human fighter, shards of metal and glass and — don’t look — human remains as they soared through. They were coming up to the vast bulk of a human carrier, a big, dark shape that clouded the heavens. Please be awake. Please be awake. The Tyche ran for her sibling, into the shadow of that huge embrace, as the carrier’s running lights came on, bright swaths of light touching the dark. El had a moment to take in building-high writing identifying this ship as the Heracles, a twist of her lips the only acknowledgment of the irony of their Greek goddess cozying up to a familiar hero of legend.

  A huge explosion shook the Heracles as nuclear reactors too old, no maintenance over years and years, gave up. El twisted the sticks around, the Tyche screaming away with a shudder of her superstructure, the expanding firmament of fire ahead blazing out. Faster. Faster, girl, faster, or we’re all dead. Hope groaned again as the Gs clutched them like the fist of an angry god, harder and harder, wanting them dead, wanting them to just stop. But the Tyche wouldn’t stop, not yet.

  She was a goddess in her prime, and her luck wasn’t spent yet.

  El put distance behind them and the expanding fireball of the Heracles, her vision blurring from the Gs, unable to make out the markers on the holo stage. Enough of this. She cut thrust, spun the Tyche, and hit burn again, pointing them back at the Ezeroc pursuers. She started the ships’ lasers again, coring an
enemy asteroid, fragments of molten rock flowing out the back. That asteroid stopped making course corrections — she must have hit the pilot, whatever that looked like. El wanted to cheer, but the pressure of Gs on her chest would have kept that at a bare croak.

  Two Ezeroc ships left. Two fuckers to go. One of them launched mass at them, just tossing rocks in their direction, and the PDCs solved that problem. El pointed the Tyche towards the heart of the debris cloud and hit burn again. An alert blinked on the holo, but she ignored it. It would just be something saying she was overloading the ship, or maybe they were holed, but as El saw it they were still flying. Still flying meant still alive, and anything else was secondary.

  There. A destroyer. The Valhalla. As it should be called. El let up thrust for a second, just long enough to croak out, “The Valhalla.”

  “I see it. I’m on it.” Hope’s voice sounded hollow, flat, strained through the pressure of space battle.

  It would get more strained. El burned again, the Tyche singing in response, leaping forward on a trail of fusion fire. El was thinking a hundred things, things like please let that ship still be alive and I hope it still has PDCs online and I hope the battle net is working and we don’t get shot and if it pops like the Heracles we’re fucked.

  They closed with the Valhalla, El watching as the old ship came to life, ancient PDCs emerging from their housings, not enough for her liking, but more than none. The Tyche ran down the length of the Valhalla, the other ship skimming past underneath them almost too fast to comprehend, and then they were past. The Valhalla reached out into the hard black with her PDCs, chewing up one of the remaining Ezeroc ships before her guns ran quiet.

  One left. There was a slam of a huge hand against the hull of the Tyche as a tossed rock hit them, alarms blooming like fire over the holo. The sticks felt sluggish in El’s hands, something in the drive controls not working the way they should. She looked over at Hope as thrust left the ship, and said, “I’m sorry.”