The Revenants

by Jasper T. Scott

  Their shields dimmed with each hit, reducing their glow to a pale aura. Cygnus Prime was a minute and thirty seconds away. Darius checked their approach vector while juking wildly to evade enemy fire. At over eighty kilometers per second, the fighter’s velocity flashed urgently, reminding him to slow down before entering the planet’s atmosphere. But reversing thrust now or flipping around to decelerate faster, would make him an easier target. If anything, he needed to speed up, not slow down.

  Tanik was right. They could make a suicide run, but not a slow, measured approach.

  Another two lasers tagged them, and this time they drew simulated crunches from the simulated feedback system, indicating hull damage. Darius’s gaze fell on a damage report. They’d shredded an aileron. That didn’t matter in space, but it would definitely matter once they hit atmosphere.

  Maybe he could get by with one aileron and compensate with rudder.

  More impacts hissed against their shields, and they dimmed to a ghostly glow.

  “Darius! We need to get out of here!” Tanik warned. “I can’t hold this shield much longer.”

  “I’ve seen you shield the Deliverance from an antimatter missile!” Darius objected.

  “That was different! I was at full strength! I’m still exhausted from rescuing your daughter, and I haven’t slept more than a couple of hours.”

  “Neither have I!” Darius roared. He couldn’t believe they were going to die because of something as mundane as sleep deprivation.

  “We have to turn back!” Tanik insisted.

  Darius shook his head, and spoke through clenched teeth as he nudged the throttle up. “It’s too late! They’ll chase us out anyway.”

  “Not if you break off,” Tanik replied. “They’re here to defend their world, not to catch strays fleeing the battle! Why do you think they haven’t tried to engage Admiral Ventaris’s fleet? They’re using everything they’ve got to blockade their own planet and intercept the Revenants’ fighters.”

  Darius warred with himself for a second. The mottled red and brown orb of Cygnus Prime seemed to glare at him, mocking his feeble attempt to reach it. Another crunch sounded. This time they’d hit the Alckam drive, but thankfully not the antimatter containment.

  “We can’t run now,” Darius said. “The Alckam drive is offline.”

  “Yes, we can! Tanik insisted. “I can summon Dyara here to pick us up, but not if we’re dead!”

  Darius gave in with a scowl, and turned away from the planet. He pushed the throttle up to ten Gs. The thrusters gave a thunderous roar, and Darius’s arms were ripped away from the controls. Using his ESC to control the fighter with his thoughts, he engaged an automatic evasive routine, and focused all of his attention and strength on staying conscious and bolstering their shields.

  Despite his oxygen mask forcing air down his throat, it was almost impossible to keep breathing. Dark spots swam before his eyes. His ribs ached like they were about to break, and his cheeks were pulled into an involuntary grimace.

  The sensation went on for long seconds, and the dazzling blue streaks of Cygnian lasers kept flashing around them, defying Tanik’s argument that the Cygnians would break off if they did.

  Darius struggled to maintain a shield around their fighter against the repeated assaults of enemy lasers and the unbearable pressure from the Vulture’s thrusters. Something had to give.

  Darkness gathered at the edges of Darius’s vision, leaving nothing but a blurry circle of stars and flashing blue lasers. He fought back, trying to stay conscious, if only for just a little longer....

  But it was no use. The darkness swirled in and sucked him under.

  Chapter 47

  Darius came to, gasping for air. His eyes darted around the cockpit looking for obvious damage to his fighter, but saw none. He patted himself down, checking for physical injuries. Again, he was clean.

  He had the presence of mind to check his displays next, and saw that the Cygnians had broken off and returned to the main engagement, just as Tanik had said they would. There was plenty of damage to their fighter, but somehow the cockpit was pressurized, the antimatter containment cylinder was intact, and the thrusters were still burning.

  Darius noted that Cygnus Prime lay behind them at a range of fifty thousand klicks and counting. They were rocketing away at one hundred and five kilometers per second.

  “Tanik?” Darius croaked.

  “You’re awake. Good. I’ve contacted Dyara. She’s on her way to pick us up.”

  “You used the ZPF to contact her?” Darius wondered aloud.

  “Of course. FTL comms don’t exist, remember?”

  Darius nodded slowly and his gaze returned to the nav to glare at the Cygnians’ home world. The Revenants were struggling to get a fighter through to reach the planet. They’d been trying to do that for half a day with no success.

  The only way to break the Cygnians’ lines would be to jump in at a velocity even higher than the one Darius had chosen for his approach. A hundred kilometers per second was already a suicidal plunge, but it wasn’t fast enough. At two, or three hundred kilometers per second, however... it might be enough. Especially if that ship was a lone Vulture fighter with its reactor and thrusters off, and stealth mode engaged.

  The fighter would detonate almost instantly on contact with the planet’s atmosphere, but a ZPF warhead could be rigged to blow at the same time. The blast radius would be enough to reach all the way to the ground and do significant damage, if not utterly destroy the planet, as Tanik claimed.

  Darius ground his teeth. It might work, but it still required someone to sacrifice their life. Darius couldn’t make anyone do that. But he couldn’t do it himself, either. His Alckam drive was offline.

  “It’s a pity that we failed,” Tanik said, interrupting his thoughts. “If we could have destroyed their home world, it might have been enough to end the war here. We could have saved trillions of lives.”

  “Stop trying to guilt me into doing what you want!” Darius snapped. “I have a better idea, and it’s considerably less evil than what you suggested.”

  “Oh? And what idea is that?” Tanik asked. It sounded like he was smiling.

  “I’m going to find a pilot willing to make the sacrifice without being forced. I’ll send a message to the Revenants over the comms, asking for a volunteer.”

  “You’d have to find a particularly selfless person, but that could work, I suppose... Make sure you encrypt your message with Revenant codes, not Union ones. The Cygnians will know the Union encryptions already.”

  “How do I do that?”

  “Let me help you,” Tanik said. Darius watched as settings magically appeared on his comms panel. “Done. Go ahead and send your message.”

  Darius took a deep breath before recording his message. “This is Darius Drake, the Luminary in training, to all Revenant forces in the area. There is a way to reach Cygnus Prime and destroy it, but it will require a sacrifice. Someone needs to give up their own life in the attack. As a Luminary, I’m told that I could make one of you do it, but I refuse to do that. Instead, I’m asking for volunteers. If any of you is willing to strike a definitive blow against the enemy, contact me, and I’ll share my plan with you.”

  Darius sent the message and waited anxiously for a reply. It didn’t take long before the message light on his comms panel lit red and began to blink at him. Darius saw that the message was from the Harbinger. He hit play.

  “Darius, you’re back,” Admiral Ventaris said. “It seems you’ve developed some scruples since the last time we saw you. What’s the matter—you don’t mind taking control of me to bring us here, but you won’t do it to kill someone? Afraid to get your hands dirty? Let me assure you, we’ve already lost hundreds of people thanks to you sending my fleet in a headlong chase after the Nomad. And just so that you know, I’ve already asked for volunteers for what you’re suggesting. If no one took me up on it then, they’re not going to take you up on it now.”

  Darius keye
d the comms for reply. “You’re telling me no one was willing to sacrifice themselves for the greater good?”

  “Are you?” Admiral Ventaris challenged.

  Darius had nothing to say to that. Would he make that sacrifice? Even if his Alckam drive was still working, would he really give up his life to take out the Cygnians’ home world?

  Yes, he decided. The Cygnians had to pay for the millions they’d slaughtered like cattle. The Revenants had grown soft hiding behind the ZPF and their fleets. They’d spent the past few decades fighting with the Cygnians against the Keth, not against them to save their loved ones. Darius had been forced to grieve for his daughter time and again because of the Cygnians, and there were millions more grieving parents like him. Yes, he’d sacrifice himself if he could. But, he couldn’t.

  The admiral went on, speaking into his silence. “Look, Darius, if I were you, and I had the power to make someone do it, I would. I’ll let you think about that, and what it means to be a real leader, rather than an empty title. Meanwhile, I’m going to call a retreat before anyone else has to die.”

  Darius sat in silence, gaping at his comms panel for long seconds after the admiral’s message ended. It seemed that Ventaris and Tanik were cut from the same cloth. To them, the ends justified the means. “One life to save a thousand...” Darius muttered.

  “Or trillions, if the Cygnians back down after this,” Tanik said.

  Darius sucked in a deep breath and let it out slowly. He shut his eyes and cast his mind out, far into space...

  It didn’t take long to find the Revenant pilots in their fighters, embroiled in a deadly struggle against a hundred times as many of their Cygnian counterparts. Darius probed individual minds at random, trying to find one whose thoughts were conflicted, teetering between self-sacrifice and self-preservation.

  He found two, pilot and co-pilot—a couple, if he was reading the emotions between them correctly. They were debating the subject of volunteering even as Darius found them. He thrust his mind into the cockpit with them and listened to their debate.

  “There’s no other way, Korvin!” the woman in the pilot’s seat said.

  “There has to be! We’ll come back and conduct a surprise attack some other time. Or we’ll lure their fleets away first!”

  “They’ve got hundreds more fleets where this one came from!” the pilot said as her hands flew over the controls.

  “It’s not worth our lives, Kara!” her copilot snapped. “The Augur forced us to fight the Keth. Then his favorite Luminary took over. And now, some other Luminary is asking us to die for his cause, in a new war. He has no right! We deserve a chance to be free, to live our lives for once.”

  Darius fumed at Korvin’s argument. Cass deserves a life of her own, no one deserves it more. But she didn’t get that chance, and no one ever will as long as the Cygnians are around. Darius had thought this wasn’t his war, but he’d been wrong, just as Korvin was wrong.

  “We could end the war right here, Korry,” Kara said.

  “You don’t know that. You don’t even know that we’ll make it to the planet. We could get shot down long before we reach it, and then what? We’ll both have died for nothing!”

  “I can’t do this without you, Korry,” the pilot replied. “I can’t volunteer on my own and make you die with me.”

  “You’re right, you can’t,” Korvin replied.

  “So that’s a no?”

  Darius inwardly frowned, hating himself for what he was about to do, but knowing that he had no other choice. He zipped into the man’s head, and took over like a ghost, possessing him.

  “Fine, let’s do it,” Darius said, but the voice that came out was Korvin’s—not his.

  Kara said nothing for a long moment. “The galaxy will remember our sacrifice,” she whispered; then her voice rose into a jubilant shout as she added, “They’re gonna make fekkin’ statues of us!”

  “Yeah sure, something for future generations to piss on,” Darius said dryly, thinking that’s probably how the real Korvin would respond.

  “We’re going to have to jump out and back in again,” Kara said, ignoring that comment. She went on quickly, “We can’t accelerate up to attack speed here with them watching us.... They’ll see it coming. But if we accelerate before we jump back into the system, our momentum will be preserved and we can use it to make our run on the planet. We’ll have to keep the power off and stealth mode on until the last second, but it should work. I’ll plot our exit coords as close to the planet as I can. We’re going to need some luck not to run into ships or debris along the way, but their fleet is pretty spaced out, so it shouldn’t be a problem.”

  Darius nodded along with that. Kara had obviously given this a lot of thought. She’d come up with the same plan he had. But there was one difficulty he hadn’t solved, and he suspected neither had she. Making Korvin speak again, he asked, “What about the radiation signature as we drop out of warp? Won’t that reveal us?”

  “We could mask it...” Kara suggested. “If we could get someone to fly next to us and sync their jump with ours... no, they’d draw too much attention to us when they fire up their thrusters to peel away.”

  An idea occurred to Darius with that suggestion, and he made Korvin speak again. “What if someone synced a jump out with our jump in? Let’s say they jump out just a split second before we jump in. The radiation bursts would overlap and mask each other.”

  “That’s brilliant, Korry! I could kiss you!”

  “Don’t give a dead man hope,” Darius grumbled, feeling like a monster even as he said it.

  “Hey, let’s not discount the afterlife yet!”

  Kara sent a message to the Harbinger explaining their plan and asking for a ship in the fleet to coordinate a jump with theirs.

  The Admiral was quick to jump on Kara’s plan, but he pointed out that they’d need hours to accelerate up to the necessary approach velocity, and there was no way just one ship could stick around here to wait for them. Her plan would take a coordinated effort from the entire fleet.

  “I’ll get a destroyer to wait for you at the exit coordinates,” Ventaris went on. “But you’d better time it perfectly, or you’re going to collide with them at several hundred kilometers per second.”

  “Yes, sir,” Kara said. “That’s what nav computers are for, right?”

  “Indeed,” Admiral Ventaris replied. “I’ll plot and time the jumps just to be sure. You can start spinning up your drive while you wait. Stand by to receive a nav transfer.”

  “Yes, sir.” Kara replied. “That is it, Korry!” she added, as she began spinning up the Alckam drive. “Time for us to make history.”

  “I’ve never met someone so enthusiastic to die for a cause,” Darius said through Korvin. He was genuinely impressed.

  “Yeah, well...” Kara trailed off, sounding more sober now. “I guess you can only watch so many of your friends die before you start to wonder where they went.”

  Darius snorted at that, but decided not to press any further down that line of conversation in case she had a change of heart. Instead he directed his attention to keeping his mental hold on Korvin. That buzzing pressure he’d felt when he’d taken control of the Admiral had returned, but thankfully, it was weaker than before. Korvin was a weaker Revenant than Admiral Ventaris. When Korvin’s mental pressure failed to oust Darius, a pleading voice took its place.

  Don’t do this. I’m begging you, let me go.

  Darius grimaced, but said nothing

  We’re in love! We were going to get married and have kids!

  Darius pretended not to hear him.

  Haven’t you ever had a dream? Something you wanted more than anything? Well, my dream is to live, and to make a life with Kara.

  She wants to do this, Darius thought back.

  But I don’t! Korvin snapped. And she doesn’t know what she’s giving up. She hasn’t been free to live since she was twelve! Now that she’s got her life back, she doesn’t know what to do wit
h it, that’s all.

  This is bigger than the two of you, Darius thought. Someone has to do it. The Cygnians are going to kill a lot of people if we don’t.

  Yeah, someone has to... so how about you? You’re that Luminary, right? So set an example. Lead from the front.

  I can’t. My fighter is damaged, Darius replied.

  How convenient.

  “Five seconds to jump,” Kara announced.

  Tell her you’ve changed your mind, Korvin demanded.

  No.

  Tell her, you miserable vagon!

  Darius just shook his head. The fighter jumped and the stars disappeared with a bright flash. They reappeared a minute later, and Darius checked Korvin’s nav panel to find that they were well outside of the solar system, drifting in deep space.

  “This is it!” Kara said. “I’d use a sedative if I were you, Korvin. It’s going to take... nine hours at five Gs to reach our exit velocity. Grak! Ventaris must be goffity! Can we even survive that? Can they? Nine hours is a long time to hold off their fleet.”

  Darius and Tanik had endured eight hours at three and a half Gs while leaving Cratus in order to reach their cruising speed, but five Gs for nine hours?

  “What’s our velocity going to be after that?” he asked.

  “A hundred and sixty klicks per second!” Kara whistled. “At that speed a stray speck of dust could wipe us out! You ready with your sedatives?”

  “One second.” Darius opened a compartment beside Korvin’s leg and removed a blue-coded silver injector pen. He screwed the tip into the thigh of his flight suit and depressed the button with a pneumatic hiss. The effect was instant. Exhaustion hit him like a wave. “All set,” he mumbled sleepily.

  “Good,” Kara replied. The Vulture whipped back around to line up with the blinking blue arrow of their jump vector, and Darius heard another pen firing. “I’ve set an alarm to wake us five minutes before we jump back,” she said. “That should give us enough time to inject a stim.”