by Jake Elwood
“Somebody's not getting his next promotion,” said O’Reilly.
The remains of the fighter tumbled away and the space station filled the screen. Instinct made Tom lean back in his seat. He wanted to check his navigational display and see what the range was, but he couldn't tear his eyes away.
“All hands, brace for impact!” It was O'Reilly's voice, and he sounded frightened, but when Tom looked at his friend O'Reilly was grinning. He cried, “Docking with the station in three, two, one-”
The impact knocked Tom out of his seat. He sprawled on the deck, wanting to clap his hands over his ears as metal screamed all around him. Alarms buzzed and howled, and someone let out a whoop.
The main screen went blank, the forward cameras destroyed. Then a starscape appeared, bizarrely serene. That must be an aft camera. There's nothing behind us. The stars tilted and drifted sideways as the battleship moved.
I can breathe. That means the bridge still has pressure. Tom shoved himself to his feet and returned to his chair. “What's our status?”
Someone said, “We’re smashed up real good.”
“Here comes the rest of the fleet. The jackals think it's safe to pick over our bones. Let's show them the error of their ways.”
It was O’Reilly speaking, Tom realized. He was snarling into a microphone, making sure the gun crews kept firing.
“We've got basic navigation,” said Ishida, his voice strangely nasal. There was blood on his console, and he tapped icons with one hand while curling the other hand protectively around his nose. “Looks like all the rocket boosters are gone.”
“We've got maybe half our guns,” said Smith.
“Turn us!” O'Reilly barked. “Put us nose down.” He looked at Tom. “We lost most of the armor on the nose. The lasers on the station are shooting the hell out of us.”
“Give me main engines,” said Tom. He'd hoped to cripple the station with one blow. If those super-powered laser turrets were still firing, the Icicle was in terrible danger. “Get us into the atmosphere.”
O'Reilly glanced at him, but didn't object. “What do you think, Captain? One last missile volley?”
Tom nodded. “Let's unload everything we've got.”
“We got the carrier,” someone said. A couple of people cheered. Tom just scowled. The station was our goal. As long as the station is operational, they're going to keep Novograd.
“Let me see if I can improve the view,” said O'Reilly. He scrolled through a long text menu, then pressed his thumb against the screen. “That's a little more interesting.”
The starfield vanished, replaced by the burning hulk of the enemy carrier. Beyond it the destroyer floated, dead in space.
“Look,” said Ishida, pointing at the screen. “The rest of them are pulling back.” It made sense, with the battleship heading for the planet. There was no point in facing the still formidable guns of a ship that was about to crash.
A new alarm bleated, Tom's ears popped, and he twisted in his seat, scrambling for his helmet. The bridge hatch slammed shut and the alarm went silent.
“Pressure is holding,” said O’Reilly. “Jesus, those lasers are powerful.”
We're four decks in, Tom thought. But once they burn through the armor plates, the rest of the ship might as well be so much tissue paper.
“Get us into the atmosphere,” he said.
As if in answer, the ship bucked beneath him. He grunted.
“Entering atmosphere,” Ishida said.
“Take us deep,” said Tom. Laser energy dissipated quickly in atmosphere. That, combined with increasing range, would make them a lot safer in a couple of minutes.
Of course, they didn't have much hope of getting back out of the atmosphere ….
O'Reilly worked his controls, finding a camera that showed a view of the station. The image shook madly, reflecting the vibration of the battleship as it forced its way through an ever-thickening atmosphere. Then the image stabilized and sharpened.
“I guess we're out of Benson Field range,” Tom said.
“Not quite,” said Smith. She leaned over her console. “We're still in range of the station, but the fleet just crossed the threshold.” Which meant the station had lost its Benson field generators. They couldn't do automatic targeting.
“Missiles!” said Tom, and looked at O’Reilly. “No dead reckoning. Give me aimed shots.” He looked at the main screen with its view of the underside of the station. “Target those repulsor pods. Hit them with everything we've got left.”
With the ship's electronics functioning again, he saw the blazing thrusters of each missile as it launched, plus a hovering icon with statistics for velocity and payload. The missiles raced forward, jigging and dodging to avoid defensive fire. Several missiles vanished, but not as many as he would have expected. We hurt them. There's chaos on the station. There gun crews aren't doing their job.
Fourteen missiles raced out from the Icicle, and ten made it through. There were four repulsor pods visible on this side of the stabilizer vane, and each pod took at least two missile hits. One pod exploded in a spectacular eruption of energy, doing further damage to the pods on either side.
“We’re crashing,” said Ishida. “There’s no way I can get us back into orbit.”
“Aim for land, if you please,” said Tom. He ran through what he knew of Novograd. “Northern continent, if you can manage it. The lake country has the most active local resistance.”
“I’ll do my best,” Ishida said.
Someone adjusted the zoom on the display, so the ring of pods on the underside of the station filled the screen. They were a shattered mess. The station was already tilting and losing altitude. It wasn’t in a stable orbit, instead using the repulsor pods to hold itself in a fixed point over the planet’s surface. Without the repulsor pods it was doomed.
“I think we just accomplished our mission,” said O'Reilly. He grabbed the arms of his chair as the vibration of the ship increased. “Now all we have to do is live long enough to collect our medals.”
Chapter 9
Alice spent the crash in her bunk. The bunk rooms were designed for it, each with its own airtight hatch, bulkheads and decks reinforced so the room wouldn't crush during a collision. She stretched out in her vac suit and tightened safety straps across her chest and hips. Then she lay there, staring at the bunk above her, fighting down claustrophobia.
The ship bounced and rocked as it descended through atmosphere. Someone in a nearby bunk laughed, her voice a staccato hiccup as her bunk thumped against her back. The laugh had an edge of hysteria, and Alice grinned sympathetically.
The lights went out, returned, then went out again. Alice's helmet light came on. Other helmet lights glowed around her like fireflies, and she heard someone praying.
Then the impact came. The bunk slammed into Alice from below, driving the air from her lungs. Her arms and legs flew up, hitting the underside of the bunk above. Metal groaned, glass shattered, an alarm blared, and several people screamed. Alice wanted to scream as well, but she didn't have the breath.
Silence.
Alice groaned and fumbled at her straps. Her bunk was tilted, so she took a good grip on the chest strap before she unlatched it. When she undid the waist strap her body slid sideways. She hung onto the strap until her boots found the deck.
All around her, women climbed out of bunks. Someone was crying softly. Someone else said, “Oh my God.” She repeated it over and over in a low, dull voice. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.”
One woman didn't rise. She lay in a bottom bunk. The bulkhead beside her was gone, burned away by a laser strike. The woman's head was still intact, and her right shoulder and arm. The rest of her body was a burned ruin, almost completely obliterated.
Alice didn't know her name. She was an older woman with gray eyebrows and deep crow's feet around her eyes. Those eyes were open, staring upward toward the sky that had been her home.
Alice turned her head, redirecting her helmet light,
returning the woman to darkness.
The others filed out of the bunk room, murmuring quietly. The faceplates on their helmets were up, which meant this section of the ship still had pressure.
Alice shook her head. We’re on the ground. The ambient pressure is one atmosphere.
She drew in a deep breath through her nose. If the fresh air of Novograd was seeping into the ship, damned little of it had reached her bunk room so far. Mostly she smelled sweat and burning plastic. There was no smell of burned flesh from the corpse, for which she was profoundly grateful.
The last of her roommates paused in the hatchway, looking back. “Alice? You okay?”
“I'm right behind you,” Alice lied. The woman nodded and hurried away.
Once Alice was alone she took off her helmet and gloves. The room was quite dark, so she turned on her helmet light and set the helmet on a bunk, then began the long clumsy process of peeling off her vac suit. She dug out a jacket and boots, wincing as she forced her injured foot into the boot. She picked through her meager supply of possessions, put a toothbrush in her pocket, and abandoned the rest.
Light dazzled in the corner of her eye, and a voice said, “Are you all right, Ma'am?”
A man stood in the hatchway with a data pad in his hand. “We're abandoning ship,” he said. “You need to get moving.”
“I'm going.”
He nodded and glanced through the room. “Anyone else here?” He squatted to peer into the destroyed bunk. “Sweet Jesus.”
“There's just me and her.”
“Don't dawdle,” the man said, and moved on. She listened to his steps as he went from room to room. More footsteps echoed above her as people hurried down the corridor. Other sounds reached her, metallic clatters and thumps. Before long, though, the sounds faded and the ship grew quiet.
Time to get to work.
She stepped to the hatchway, letting out an involuntary squeak when she almost crashed into a tall figure who had approached silently.
“There you are! Are you hurt?”
“Bridger! Jesus, don't do that.”
Bridger snickered. “Come on. We're abandoning ship.”
Another figure appeared behind Bridger, a slender man in his thirties who poked his head into the bunk room. “It looks just like the men's bunk rooms. I thought yours would be nicer.”
“Hello, Garth.”
Garth Ham smiled at her. “Hi, Alice.” He jerked his head. “The closest exit is this way.”
He Alice felt a brief rush of gratitude for her old shipmates who had come looking for her. She didn't say anything, of course. “You two go ahead. I'll be along in a bit.”
Bridger planted his feet and folded his arms. “What are we doing?”
“We aren't doing anything. I'm doing something.”
Ham looked from Bridger to Alice, then shrugged and copied Bridger's posture.
Alice sighed. “Fine. We're staying behind to see if the saboteur does something.”
Bridger's eyebrows rose. “Like what? Trying to destroy the ship?” He waved a hand at the shambles around them. “The ship crashed, Alice.”
“See, this is why I don't tell you when I do things like this.” She scowled at him. “No, I'm not worried that he's going to destroy the ship. I'm worried that he's going to do something else.”
“Like what?” Bridger's hands rose in a frustrated shrug.
“I don't know. I haven't figured it out yet. But maybe he has.” She looked up at the ceiling, as if she could see through the deck plates above her and spot the saboteur. “I've been busy. He hasn't. He’s had nothing to do but skulk and scheme and figure out what to do next to cause some real grief.”
“Well,” said Bridger, “how are we going to find him?”
“My plan was to keep quiet and listen. I didn't know I was going to have my own private peanut gallery chattering away at me.”
Bridger gave her a hurt look, but he didn't speak. He and Ham retreated, and she followed, all three of them moving softly down the corridor outside. Her foot ached, but not too badly. She no longer needed the cane.
Safety lights glowed along the edge of the corridor, providing enough light to navigate. They worked their way aft, crept up a staircase, and reached the main cafeteria. The long, wide room felt downright spooky in the gloom. Bridger walked to the far side of the cafeteria, threading his way among the tables until he reached wide entrance doors and a stairwell just beyond. Then he stood there without moving.
Ham went to the starboard wall where he found a service elevator. The shaft would carry sound from the other decks. Alice stood in another doorway, one that opened onto a long corridor. And they waited, and listened.
Ships were noisy. She hadn't properly realized it until now, when the countless sources of racket went quiet one by one. The absence of human activity was strange enough. There were no voices, no footsteps, no distant music and no clatter from a dropped fork. The air circulation machinery was silent, a background hum she had long since lost the ability to hear. It was weirdly prominent now by its absence.
She thought the ship was truly silent until a faint hiss at the edge of hearing went silent. Metal creaked somewhere as the ship settled. Something popped, so loud that Alice jumped. The sound didn't repeat, and she finally had to shrug to herself and admit she would never know what it was.
Long minutes stretched out. Alice began to fidget in spite of herself. The survivors would be moving away from the ship. How long before they became impossible to track, impossible to catch up to? She had a bad foot, after all. She didn’t much want to run.
An entire crashed battleship wouldn't be hard to find. The Dawn Alliance had to be on its way. We can't stay here. This ship is a trap. We need to-
Somewhere directly above her, machinery rumbled into life.
She looked at Bridger and Ham. They'd both heard it too. She pointed straight up, and Ham pointed up and at an angle. Bridger started across the cafeteria at a jog.
Alice shifted, and a muscle in her hip twinged. How long was I standing there without moving? She put a hand on her pistol, reassuring herself that it was there. Then, as the men reached her, she led them down the corridor toward the nearest ladder.
Jogging down the corridor hurt her foot. It was also a strangely surreal experience. The eerie silence and dim lighting combined with the tilt of the deck plates gave her the strangest sensation that she was dreaming. She tried to dismiss the thought. You're awake, and the danger you're in is real.
They climbed the ladder, pausing on every landing to listen. The noise was always above them. They kept climbing until they reached the top deck, then turned in a slow circle. Bridger pointed aft, and Alice nodded. They drew their guns and set out.
Alice's instincts told her to advance at a slow creep. Bridger moved out ahead of her, walking briskly. She hissed, “Bridger!”
“That sounds like a gun turret,” he said softly. “I think we should hurry.”
She cocked her head, thinking about the sound. There was a metallic rattle that could have been an ammo chain, and the low hum of an electric motor. Maybe it is a turret.
She looked at Ham, and the two of them broke into a jog.
They caught up with Bridger, who slowed as they came to a corner. “Shouldn't be long now,” said Bridger, and stepped around the corridor.
A gunshot rang out, and Bridger fell to the deck.
The survivors straggled out of the battleship in a long, ragged column. Scouts ranged ahead, choosing a route that wouldn't be too rough on the wounded.
There were six stretcher cases, a mercifully small number under the circumstances. Or a brutally small number, Tom thought, thinking of all the crew who hadn't made it out of the ship. There were another dozen or so walking wounded. He wasn't sure yet what the full butcher's bill came to, but they'd left more than a few bodies on the ship.
No one carried much. The key to survival was to stay ahead of the Dawn Alliance troops who were no doubt already on their wa
y. They had to stay light and move quickly, and put as much distance as possible between themselves and the wrecked ship.
“I still say we should have shot them.”
Tom gave Captain McDougall a sour look. “Noted,” he said, wishing he was sure the man was wrong.
The former crew of the battleship made a long burgundy line as they headed toward the rising suns. There was no way to keep them contained, and the thought of having them all executed turned Tom’s stomach. So he’d ordered them out of the ship, told them to head east, and sent them on their way.
He had a best guess about where the ship had crashed and what lay around them. Just a guess; no one was certain. But there was forest and open plains to the south and east. To the west, at a distance of twenty or thirty kilometers, his spotters were almost certain they'd seen a settlement. That was where the prisoners were headed.
Directly to the north was a road, at a range of somewhere between two and five kilometers. Tom figured a road was their best bet for covering a lot of territory quickly, if they could steal some vehicles. There was a scouting party on the way there now. The rest of them would follow, at as fast a pace as the stretcher parties could maintain.
It was mid-morning, and the sunlight felt warm on his head and shoulders. That was good, because most of the crew had fled wearing their vac suits over their uniforms. A great pile of abandoned suits lay by the main cargo hatch, which they’d used to escape the ship. Most of them were in their shirtsleeves.
Tom turned to look back at the ship, half a kilometer distant. It had the look of a dilapidated building, something assembled in a hurry and then abandoned to the elements. The deadly grace of the Icicle when she was in space was stripped away now that she lay on the ground.
The tail of the ship had obliterated a stand of spruce trees. The surviving trees pressed close against the battered and melted remains of the ship's engines. The rest of the ship lay on open grassland.
The terrain was a mix of grassy plains and small clumps of trees, with knobs of selenite crystals jutting up from the grass. The line of spacers meandered, going around clumps of brush and patches of crystal. Tom scanned the line, looking from face to face.