“I’m sorry,” Dodds said. Sometimes he forgot what a near-perfect family he had, his parents still together, running a successful business and being well-respected within the community. It was largely at odds with the family lives of team-mates’, and now Natalia’s.
“Don’t be,” Natalia said. “It’s part of the reason why I threw on a backpack and went to see the galaxy.” She smiled again. Those must’ve been good memories.
“But you don’t know where your mum and dad are now?”
“No.”
“Don’t you get on with them any more?”
“My mum, whenever she’s not with Callum,” Natalia said, with a small sigh. “But I always felt as though they were just people that I knew, rather than my parents, if that makes sense? It’s hard to describe, unless you’ve experienced it. I’m not really sure if my mum and dad were ever in love with each other, to be honest. They never married or even bought a place together, so I guess they weren’t all that committed to one another at the end of the day.” Natalia finished her chocolate and sat watching the clouds for a time, before continuing. “My mum and Callum went on a ship somewhere. I think they threw their life savings into securing passage on a converted cargo vessel of some sort. Probably decided to chance things in a stasis module and see if anything has changed in five years’ time.”
Dodds picked up in the somewhat condescending and sceptical tone in Natalia’s voice, the woman clearly thinking that such an idea was ludicrous. He wondered how many people had done the same, jumping off into far flung, unexplored regions of the galaxy, with ideas of returning to populated space many years later, hoping for the best. Just how they intended to get back, Dodds wasn’t sure. Navigation information would be well out of date by then.
“Your dad?” Dodds asked.
“Haven’t actually spoken to him for nearly twenty years now,” Natalia said bitterly, without even turning to look at Dodds.
They returned to their vigil of watching the clouds of the subspace conduit streaming by. Dodds had lost track of time since being up here. They could nearly be at Sol, or they could only be a quarter of the way there.
“So, can’t sleep, either?” Dodds said eventually.
“No,” Natalia said. “Too much to think about.”
“I know how that feels.”
“Remember the last time we spent a night chatting, when we really should’ve been sleeping?”
“In that ruined restaurant in New Malaga,” Dodds recalled. “We had a little picnic on the floor at the back.” His eyes wandered over Natalia’s dim reflection, remembering how she had cuddled him in the middle of the night, to stay warm and help feel safe and content. Maybe something like that would help now …
“We got through a bottle of red wine,” she said.
Ah, that was the other thing they’d done.
Natalia looked in the direction of the bar. “Could sure do with a glass right now, actually.”
“Well, unfortunately we’ll both have to do without,” Dodds said.
“All gone?”
“No. Griffin is a dry ship,” Dodds said. “Been that way ever since Parks split the team. I’ve not had a beer in nearly three years.” Oh, and he could really use one right now. A couple of bottles would definitely help him relax and get some sleep.
“No harm in taking a look,” Natalia said, her mood suddenly lifting, a mischievous smile on her face. “Maybe someone has a secret stash hidden there that we can raid.” She bounded over to the bar, slinking behind the counter and started to examine the shelves.
Dodds noticed a few of the other occupants of the bar watching her for a time, before they returned to doing other things. Maybe they had already looked themselves and knew it was a fruitless endeavour. He couldn’t see Weathers or the surgeon anywhere about. They must’ve left while he was talking with Natalia. Natalia ducked down behind the counter itself, there never having been any doubt as to the emptiness of the high shelves immediately on show. Dodds listened to the woman clinking around for a bit, before getting up and moving over to the bar himself.
“Any joy?” he asked.
“Sadly not,” Natalia responded, from somewhere below. “Thought I’d struck gold just a moment ago, but the bottle was empty. Teases.” She rummaged around a little longer, and Dodds, certain that he already knew the outcome of this search, started back to his place. “Ah Ha!”
“Beer?” Dodds asked, turning about and feeling a tingle of anticipation. He didn’t care that it might be warm or even that it might be flat.
“Better,” Natalia said, standing and presenting her find. “Chocolate.”
Dodds recognised the brand. It was plain milk chocolate, the type that was divided into a number of smaller segments for easier consumption and sharing. Natalia looked extremely pleased with her find, though Dodds still would’ve preferred alcohol.
She came back around the counter and prodded and pushed him back towards his seat as she unwrapped the treat. “Open,” she said, after prompting him to sit and breaking off a square. Dodds opened his mouth and allowed Natalia to feed him the piece she had separated. He tried not to close his mouth over her fingers, but they lingered in his mouth for a moment, and, feeling the chocolate beginning to melt and spread over his tongue, he was forced to do so as she removed them. Natalia gave a little chuckle in response, broke off a piece of her own and settled back down on the stool next to him.
“This will be my second visit to Sol,” Natalia said, swallowing the chocolate happily.
“The first time being as part of your secret service duties?” Dodds asked, accepting half of the chocolate bar Natalia had found, as she divided the remains down the middle.
“No,” she shook her head. “I was only ever posted to Mitikas and a few Independent worlds; never to Helios. No, the first time I went to Sol was during my backpacking. I was only there for a few months, so it was something of a rush job.”
“Maybe this time you’ll get more of a chance to explore it,” Dodds answered, tracking a distant cloud that was drifting by in the background of the suspension field. It looked like the head of an elephant, tusks and all. “Where did you get to?”
“West coast of America, Japan and New Zealand,” Natalia answered. “New Zealand was beautiful. I’m definitely going to go back, if I get the chance. I’d like to go to France as well, to see the Louvre. Maybe stop by Ireland at some point and see the little orchard that one of the ATAF pilots grew up on,” she added, with a grin.
“Working holiday, that’d be,” Dodds smiled back. “And none of this, one for the basket, one for me stuff, either.”
Natalia giggled and returned her focus to the clouds. “I’ll need a new home if we ever get out of this alive,” she said, a touch of sadness re-entering her voice. “So much has been lost since the war started. So many are going to have to start over. Damn the Senate’s Mistake; damn the Enemy; damn those blasted Pandorans.”
“Hmm,” Dodds said, swallowing.
“Oh well,” Natalia said. “As much as everything’s changed, at least we have chocolate.”
“Yes,” Dodds agreed, popping the last of it into his mouth. “At least we have chocolate.”
They spoke a little longer, small talk mostly, but Dodds soon ran out of topics and ways to avoid the conversation moving towards the subject that both he and Natalia were clearly trying to avoid.
“So,” Dodds eventually said, “where were you during Black Widow?”
“Where most people were,” Natalia answered. “There.”
XII
— The Spider and the Fly —
An excerpt from A GIFT FROM THE GODS by Kelly Taylor
5th November 2621
Remember, remember the 5th of November, the saying goes. I don’t have problems doing so, and neither, I suspect, do many others. The survivors, at any rate.
Black Widow was the given name of an operation devised by Commodore Elliott Parks, Fleet Admiral Amanda Jenkins, Admiral Joyle Lynch, Rear A
dmiral Tracy Storm, and a host of others. After the Pandoran forces had overrun the Independent nations, routing their citizens and bombing their worlds into oblivion with no apparent intention of stopping, it was decided that the only way to permanently halt the war machine was to employ the tactic that had originally been intended by Operation Sudarberg – a single, massive strike that would obliterate as many of the Pandorans as possible, if not all of them.
But without the TSBs, the weapons having been lost in late 2617, engineering such a strike was clearly going to prove very difficult. The original purpose of the TSBs had been to harness the energy released by the collapse of a star and scatter it throughout the neighbouring space, somewhat like a cluster bomb. It is said that the occurrence of a supernova within one hundred light years of an inhabited planet could cause serious harm to the atmosphere, exposing the world to harmful radiation. The effect of the TSBs would’ve been far greater than that, the transmitted energy heating up a planet, boiling the oceans and killing off all life within a matter of days. Had they been successfully utilized, the former Mitikas Empire would’ve been cleansed of the Pandoran threat within around two weeks.
Instead, the allied forces were forced to draw on another source of highly destructive power – nuclear armaments. At the time, these were the most powerful weapons available to us, and in large enough numbers they could do an adequate job of taking out an entire fleet of starships. There was one caveat to the plan. To combat a fleet of the size Zackaria was estimated to be commanding would require a significant number of warheads. Hundreds of thousands is not an exaggeration. Not only was spread, power and yield a consideration, but also the defences of the target vessels. The resilience of shielding was something many had learned not to underestimate long before. Yes, we would need a lot of warheads. But after what had become of so many Independent nations, it wasn’t difficult to attain such numbers – many handed them over without fuss or objection.
Torelli, in the Alba system, was the first planet to fall to Dragon’s antimatter weapon. Prior to that, the Pandorans had seemingly exhausted their own supply of nuclear weapons, and had turned to ground assaults and atmospheric bombardments for some of the lesser populated worlds. At one stage, they even resorted to hurling an asteroid at a planet, using a mass driver liberated from one of the rogue states. Mass drivers were, and still are, outlawed, due to their highly destructive nature. Where a nuclear missile can destroy a single city, the impact of an asteroid measuring just one mile across is enough to be considered a planet killer. The Enemy’s mass driver was destroyed in a frantic response before it could be used again, but not before the Pandoran forces discovered the truly devastating potential of Dragon’s main armament. To this day I am still unsure as to whether the attack was intentional, had been a misfire, or if the intended target had somehow evaded the assault. Either way, the consequences were far more devastating than the enemy could have ever hoped for.
Missing the entire defending fleet at Alba, the antimatter ball had travelled unhindered straight towards Torelli. Upon connecting with the planet’s atmosphere, it triggered a chain reaction and initiated a firestorm that wrapped its way around the planet. Once started, it couldn’t be stopped. Torelli was completely wiped out in a matter of twelve hours. It was the fastest the Pandorans had ever sacked a planet.
After this, they proceeded to turn the antimatter cannon against every planet they came too, sterilizing them of the infection of those opposed to the Mission. With the Independent worlds in disarray and their nations falling faster than ever before, the allied forces fell back to Confederation space, where they planned to hold off the Pandoran army. In the weeks that followed the retreat, the operation that would become Black Widow was proposed, drawn-up and finally implemented.
The plan was simple, yet was one that worked very, very well. In order to jump from one system to another, the travelling vessels must know where to disengage their engines, otherwise they risked becoming stranded in random parts of the galaxy without any points of reference to make subsequent jumps. Jumpgates automatically solve this problem by talking to one another and trading positional data, via subspace channels every few hours. For vessels with inbuilt technology, however, it is important to re-sync with gates, buoys and topographical data on a regular basis. More than six days is barely acceptable, weeks advised against, months extremely risky, and years absolutely suicidal.
The Pandoran army had never been anywhere near Confederation space, and therefore had very out-of-date data concerning jump destinations. The fact that all gates had also been destroyed or deactivated, effectively walled them out of Helios.
In theory, anyway.
With the Pandorans’ penchant for acquiring vessels to bulk up their forces as they moved along, it wasn’t inconceivable that the army had valid star chart data in their possession, data that could allow them to invade any time they wanted. The allied senior command therefore decided to let them.
Ensuring that all other gates were disabled or destroyed, we activated a single, out-of-the-way buoy in the Temper system, broadcasting a randomly corrupted – yet determinable – sync signal towards Independent space, once every seven hours. It was meant to look as though it had been missed, presumed broken and non-working. Lying, too, so close to an asteroid field, it wasn’t one that would be in regular use.
The Pandorans took the bait, dispatching, as was expected, a scouting team to investigate the area. The scouts found nothing, just the buoy, a lot of debris and space junk, and a cluster of enormous space rocks. Satisfied, the party returned to Independent space. A day later, the Pandoran army arrived en masse and phase one of Black Widow was set in motion.
Hidden around the asteroid family and within the drifting space junk, were the hundreds of thousands of nuclear warheads that had been offered up to the allied forces, connected to one another by a huge latticework of proximity sensors. The moment one sensor was triggered, it would broadcast a signal to all the others, causing them to detonate; a single vibration that would send a shudder along all the paths and bringing forth the victim’s doom.
Not unlike a spider’s web.
It was believed that close to one hundred percent of the Pandoran fleet jumped into the Temper system, from where it intended to push on into Confederation space. The effects on the vessels that arrived was astronomical. There were approximately three hundred and forty-six asteroids in the Stephanie family in 2621, all of which were affected by the nukes going off. They ejected material in every direction, at speeds exceeding missiles and even energy weapon fire.
I watched the result as it happened, as well as several more times afterwards, the chaos of the scene such that no single viewing could allow one to appreciate the true extent of the devastation. Starfighters were obliterated by the explosions of the nukes, those on the fringes being crushed by the chunks of asteroids that smashed into them. Cruisers, frigates and battleships had huge holes punched through them by the speeding rocks, their shields already eliminated by the huge blasts of energy. Carriers were snapped in two, dreadnoughts’ armour was peeled away. Crew and passengers were spaced, vaporising as they were caught by the heat and radiation. It was a massacre.
The survivors – of which there were very few – turned around and limped all the way back to Imperial space, chased by the cheers of triumph from the allied forces, all certain that victory was assured, that the Pandoran army had been defeated, that we had won.
If only it had been true.
*
Dodds had never seen so much debris, never so much that belonged to the Enemy, at any rate. Most of the debris and wreckage that he saw these days were remnants of the allied forces. This was different. Black Widow had succeeded at every level, made good on every promise.
He changed his heading, pulling his ATAF up and around to pass closer to the remains of one of the warships. He couldn’t tell what it had been before, or whether it had at one time belonged to the Imperial Naval Forces, the United Naval Forces,
or one of the other Independent worlds. All that now remained was the split hull, allowing him to see inside the vessel. In some places he could see right through, the space on the other side clearly visible. The vessel was in a very sorry state indeed, any extremities that had at one time existed having been stripped away, either by the multitude of nuclear explosions, or by the chunks of asteroids that had smashed into them and torn them apart. He briefly recalled replaying parts of the sequence over and over again with other members of Griffin’s crew, enthusing over a scene in which a frigate had been smashed by three different rocks one after another, like punches being landed on an unfortunate individual by a number of attackers. The frigate had ruptured and been blown to smithereens. Horn of Jericho, it had been called. He didn’t expect to see any sign of it here.
He turned again, gazing back over the scene. Something was floating very slowly towards him, and looking closely he saw that it was an arm. It had been ripped off its owner rather neatly at the shoulder. It was clear that it had once belonged to one of the Pandoran soldiers, the trademark black cladding still present. It was burned away in places, but still very readily identifiable.
“Sector clear, moving to next,” he communicated to his team-mates, before starting off towards the next largest piece he could spot. He looked again to his radar. No red or yellow markers. A great number of white ones, though, identifying the large obstacles that were the remaining chunks of warships, the ones that would be most deadly in a collision and should be avoided. Other than that the radar was mostly empty, four green markers being the only other things present. Labels floated above them – FIREBAT-01, FIREBAT-03, FIREBAT-04 and FIREBAT-05. The other ATAFs. He couldn’t see them around him, though. They were cloaked.
The Battle for the Solar System (Complete Trilogy) Page 109