by Nick Webb
The girl hesitated. “Yes. But … also …. Send a few ships to the inner solar system. They are needed inside Mercury’s orbit.”
Walker looked at her for a long moment. How fortunate that you have my strategy planned. The girl could feel the words lingering in the air.
Walker, the girl thought, would have been good at Telestine non-verbal communication.
“I see,” was all she said. She opened the channel. “Larsen, take the Arianna King and two smaller ships of your choosing, and go—”
“He knows where,” the girl interrupted. They could not risk Ka’sagra’s spies hearing this. The Daughters of Ascension had made contacts nearly everywhere.
Walker was past the point of betrayal. Her eyes burned like coals now. “And go,” she finished. “You know where.” She paused. “The rest of you … you know what to do. Close channels now.”
She sat a moment later, buckling her seatbelt with the precision of someone who couldn’t think what else to do.
“So it’s everyone,” she said finally. The ship swerved sideways so suddenly that everyone’s head jerked, and the woman hissed in pain. “Everyone knew.”
“Actually, just Larsen and Pike,” the girl said quietly. “And Larsen knew only … the one thing.” She chanced a look back over her shoulder. “I swear.”
To her surprise, Walker gave a loud, barking laugh. “Well, I’ll believe you then.”
The girl looked away again. She couldn’t tell if Walker was serious or not. She couldn’t tell if the admiral was going mad. It unsettled her.
The ship’s comm light lit up.
“Ma’am, it’s the Intrepid.” The pilot looked over his shoulder. “It’s broadcasting on a channel I can’t unencrypt.”
Walker sighed, and her eyes closed briefly. “The code is eight four five, whiskey alpha foxtrot.” As soon as the man obeyed, Walker was speaking again. “I told you to—”
“I know.” Delaney’s voice came through with the distortion of heavy encryption. “Get out of your flight path, swerve, anything. They think you’re on the Koh Rong, but I don’t know how long that will last. Come to the Intrepid instead.”
“What? Why do they—”
“Ma’am.” The pilot. “The Koh Rong undocked from New Vatican Station and is flying beside us. They’re about to peel off.”
The girl craned to look. Nhean’s ship was indeed preparing to accelerate, its engines glowing. It hung between them and the mutinied portion of the Exile Fleet, a visible and probable origin point for the transmission Walker had just sent. They were so close that unless the gunnery and communications liaisons thought to check their coordinates, no one would target any other ship.
Walker swallowed. “The Santa Maria is my ship. Its weaponry is better than the Intrepid’s.”
“They heard you,” Delaney’s voice said bluntly. “The Santa Maria now has a target on its side the size of Jupiter. When the Koh Rong turns for the Santa Maria, come to my ship. I’ll get you out, but we don’t have much time until they figure out which ship you’re actually on.”
Walker hesitated. “As he says,” she told the shuttle pilot.
She closed the channel and settled back in her chair. “We’re not going to make it, though,” she said, to no one in particular.
This is how I’m going to die: not in battle with the Telestines, but at the hands of my own kind, in a shuttle, for no reason. Again, her thoughts might have been shouted to the entire shuttle, so clearly did the girl feel them.
It was a reasonable fear. There were too many ships against them, and the Exile Fleet could not engage without leaving both the Koh Rong and the shuttle in the crossfire.
Nhean … what in God’s name did you do? The girl felt a sinking sense of disbelief, hollow and hopeless in her chest. Had this all been a desperate alternate plan, the best he could come up with at the time—or was he seizing another opportunity? He could easily want both her and the admiral dead, rather than her in enemy hands and the admiral in control of the fleet.
She couldn’t deny that. It made sense, in an awful way. To her own horror, she realized she was struggling to breathe.
A human reaction. A panic attack. That was what they were called. She was going to die here. They were all going to die here. She could see from a quick glance at the pilot’s face that he felt the same—and yet, his hands kept moving. He did not stop trying. Each new volley of missiles was outmaneuvered with preternatural calm. Something she wished she could summon for herself.
She was going to die here.
She was going to die here.
The knowledge made it more clear than ever: she had to become … something else. Something better. Stronger. Something … powerful.
But … how? Nhean had finished his alterations of her according to Tel’rabim’s old schematics they’d found, and her abilities had certainly grown as a result. What more could she become?
And then, so loud the voice clipped over the speakers, came a human yell of absolute exultation.
“Whoohooooooo!”
The screen exploded with proximity alerts, bursts of fire stuttered into the black outside, and the girl had the dizzying feeling that time must have slowed down—that she was seeing the first few milliseconds of her own death as the missiles took them.
And then, to her disbelief, she heard Walker laughing. She looked back and there was a grin on the woman’s face. The admiral’s hand was shaking where she held the comm unit. “Hello, Mr. Theo McAllister. Nice of you to show up.”
“Admiral.” The man’s voice was warm, and chuckling. “Fancy meeting you here, huh? Captain Delaney sends his regards. Sit tight, we’ll have you out of this mess in a jiffy.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Triton, Geosynchronous Orbit
New Vatican Station
Lieutenant McAllister’s Fighter
It wasn’t far to the rusted old hulk of the Intrepid, but it seemed like half the munitions of the Exile Fleet were flying crossways along that gauntlet. Triton and Neptune hung in the background, bathing everything in a blue glow. Their combined bulk made the battle feel small and insignificant. McAllister knew that feeling was a lie.
The jaws of the fleet were closing, and McAllister had to keep shaking his head at the sheer stupidity of what he was seeing: humans firing on humans, the fleet dashing itself against the rocks for no purpose at all.
He hoped Walker strung every one of those bastards up to hang for what they’d done.
That was, if he managed to get her back alive.
“All right. Twister, you and Vengeance wing need to cover the Koh Rong—give it all the flash you got, draw the eye and make a real production out of it. We want everyone and their mamas lookin’ at you. Princess, you take Fury wing and interrupt fire from port to the shuttle. Tocks, you take Wrath wing and interrupt the fire from starboard, and for heaven’s sake, don’t send anything back at our fleet.”
“All right, bitches, let’s do some corkscrews.” Twister sounded like she was grinning. “Make those ships dance.”
“Why does everyone else get the fun jobs?” Princess’s voice was plaintive. His voice, like the others’, crackled eerily over the old-style shortwave radios. It turned out those radios were now a godsend—a way to communicate when all the other network-connected broadcast channels were unsafe.
McAllister grinned and swerved under one of the missiles that shot overhead. “Because you complain too much, Princess. Keep it up and I’ll have you scrubbing floors.”
“He’s lying to you, Princess,” Tocks called. Her lights flashed and, on cue, her team banked to face the missiles flying out from the loyal ships. “It’s just that your aim’s not so good and Walker’ll skin us all alive if you shoot anyone she cares about. Plus, no one’s got style like Twister.”
There was a burst of nervous laughter.
“Now, everyone keep a count,” McAllister reminded them. “Lowest count eats the slop from the mess. Highest count … also eats the slop
from the mess.”
Another burst of laughter.
They didn’t mean any of it, not really—Princess was just trying to keep his group from panicking about facing the line of fire from the mutinied ships, and Tocks was trying to keep hers from panicking about shooting the loyal ones. The three veterans had drilled the newbies until they could maneuver the ships in their sleep, and Twister was making a surprisingly capable replacement for Fisheye. All the battle needed now was for them all to stay calm long enough to execute on that.
McAllister gave a quick glance over to where Twister was, true to orders, making one of the biggest shows he’d ever seen. Her ship glittered as it spiraled out of the way of countless shots, and her team was following her lead.
He needed to trust that she could pull this off. He looked back to his own work. Putting a relative newbie in charge of the mutineers’ main target wouldn’t be his first choice, but flying subtly was the more difficult task. They needed their best and most experienced pilots to guard the shuttle without seeming to do so. Every circle he made, lazy and disinterested-looking, caught the shape of the Funders Circle ships against the backdrop of Neptune, and the Exile Fleet silhouetted against the black.
The pilot of the shuttle was doing his best to make their job as short as possible. He was pushing his craft to the limits. The fighters danced around it, bursts of light showing each intercepted missile, but no matter how fast they moved, the remaining distance seemed interminable. It looked like the shuttle was crawling between the Funders’ station and the Intrepid.
Still, it was even going well, until his gaze caught the too-big shape of something hurtling toward them.
McAllister’s head jerked around to look … and he knew. From the too-straight flight to the rapid acceleration, this could only be a kamikaze ship. Those bastards really were crazy.
He knew the other pilot’s eyes were wide and staring, their fingers were locked, white, on the controls. McAllister didn’t need to see his opponent to know that. He’d seen his own pilots look the same way. Hell, even he had looked the same way a time or two. The craft was still accelerating as it approached, and he knew the pilot would be blocking out everything else, fixing his eyes on his target.
And he was flying a large shuttle, a well-armored ship.
Aw shit. It was one of their own. One of the assault teams that was supposed to have liberated a stolen ship. And now it was aimed straight at Admiral Walker.
Those marines inside weren’t suicide runners. They were hostages.
“Tocks!” His voice was hoarse. “Princess, get in formation with me!” He swung alongside the shuttle. “You see that?” McAllister called to the shuttle pilot.
“I do.” The man’s voice was expressionless, drained from watching death come from him countless times in the last few minutes. “I think the only way is to swerve at the last minute. I will go up.”
“Go down,” McAllister advised him. “Less visible, the way their ships are arranged right now.” The last thing he wanted was for anyone to notice that the fighters were escorting a shuttlecraft not to the Santa Maria, but to the Intrepid.
“All right.” The man still seemed almost eerily calm. He was doing a good job, though, and McAllister knew better than to interrupt someone who was being effective. His voice fuzzed into static.
“What did you say?”
“—virus?” was all that came back.
“What?”
But all their comms were out now. In horror, McAllister watched the kamikaze ship grow closer and closer, utterly determined. He would have to face it without coordinating any sort of attack, and at these speeds, that was an accident waiting to happen.
Tocks and Princess had been with him a long time. They stuck by him, at the shoulders of his craft, and where he shot, they shot.
The missiles laid black streaks along the hull of the ship, but it kept coming. Somehow, it was being piloted remotely, the soldiers inside just along for the ride. It killed him inside to order their deaths, but there was no other choice.
“Keep shooting!” McAllister roared uselessly. There wasn’t any point to the yelling, and they were doing it anyway, but the sheer helplessness of the enforced silence was making him want to pound at the controls in frustration. “Keep shooting, keep shooting, keep—”
It wasn’t doing any good. They banked up and the shuttlecraft banked down at the same moment, the other ship shooting uselessly between them as Tocks’s group scattered out of the way.
“Good job,” he called, over the radios.
The moment was fleeting. The shuttlecraft pulled back into formation and put on a burst of speed, toward the slow-opening shuttle bays of the Intrepid. The fighters, having scattered, raced to keep up.
“Form up!” McAllister called desperately. “Shuttle, bank!”
The pilot’s course wasn’t wavering. He was intent on his landing site, not responding to the transmissions, and Tocks’s wing, trying to chase the kamikaze ship back, now couldn’t fire on it for fear of hitting Walker’s ship.
Shit, shit, shit… He was too far away, and if he fired on the shuttle, he fired on his own wing mates.
Them versus the admiral. Them versus the admiral. He knew what the right choice was. Shaking, McAllister wrapped his hands around the control stick—
A single ship put on a crazy burst of speed and whipped around in an arc that must have put the pilot half-unconscious with the force. Almost before McAllister’s eyes adjusted to its new heading, it was rocketing up toward the underbelly of the kamikaze’s ship.
“I got this, boss.” Tocks’s voice broke through the static. There were no jokes in her tone now.
There was no regret, either—just acceptance.
“Tocks? Tocks!”
Whether she’d switched off her radios or not, he wasn’t sure, but she didn’t respond.
“TOCKS!” But it was too late for her to pull away, and in a flash, McAllister was back at Mercury, watching King’s carrier hurtle toward the Telestine flagship. Each second seemed to stretch out, and still he knew there was no time for the ship to turn away. The die was cast, the collision couldn’t be stopped now.
Tocks’s fighter cut cleanly into the belly of the remote-controlled kamikaze ship, every gun firing full bore, and the impact carried the two ships up and over Walker’s shuttle, spiraling with the escaping air, metal twisting.
McAllister felt himself moving on autopilot. His mouth was open, his throat was hoarse. He was sure he was screaming, but he couldn’t hear it. He banked back into formation without any conscious thought. His eyes tracked the wreckage, praying for his friend’s ship to burst free and rejoin them. He wanted to hear that delighted laugh crackle over the radios.
And none of that was going to happen. In a daze, he turned his head to watch Walker’s shuttle slide into the Intrepid’s shuttle bay. The other large ships were already moving into formation ahead of it, blocking the view of its turn away from the battle.
“Boss?” Princess’s voice. The man sounded like he could hardly talk around the lump in his throat. “…Theo?”
McAllister squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. How the hell are the comms working again? he thought, trying to distract himself from the visceral shock spreading throughout his body at Tocks’s death.
They knew this sort of thing happened. They’d all known it when they signed up.
He’d just never thought he would lose one of his fighters to another human ship. Bitterness rose up to choke him and he pounded one closed fist on his leg until he could swallow down the lump in his throat.
Tocks hadn’t made that choice so the rest of them could get killed stupidly.
“All wings form up.” He could do this. “Scorpio, you take over Wrath wing.”
“Aye, sir.” Scorpio sounded dazed, like she was responding on instinct and nothing more.
“All right, gang. We’re the fleet’s eyes now.” McAllister turned his ship to face the mutineers’ ships. “We watch, we
make sure that no one, and I mean no one notices the Intrepid until it’s away. Fire only—” It was hard to talk. “Only when you need to. You want revenge, and so do I. But right now the people we’re staring at are people we need back with us when we fight the Telestines. We spare as many as we can, we take the bastards down, and later we beat the shit out of every one of these motherfuckers that took Tocks down. You understand?”
There was a silence, but he could feel their acceptance.
A deep breath.
“All right. Vengeance, head top. Wrath, to port from where we sit now. Fury, I’m coming with you to guard the Santa Maria.” He cast a look over his shoulder, where the Intrepid was starting to bank. “Let’s get this over with.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Triton, Geosynchronous Orbit
New Vatican Station
Shuttle
The shuttle had barely come to a halt in the landing bay before Walker had the door open and was sprinting for the exit. She vaguely noticed the girl at her heels, and made a mental note to have her escorted off the bridge once she got there.
Right now, she wasn’t going to spare the breath.
It had been hell in the close confines of the shuttle, entirely helpless watching death come for them in the form of the munitions she had so carefully stockpiled.
And the other shuttle, commandeered by the Funder’s Seed virus and hurled at her own, in spite of the ten innocent marines inside…. She shook her head tightly, even as she ran. She did not want to believe that was where they were coming to as a species now.
It had begun. They were truly killing their own instead of their enslavers.
Delaney greeted her with a nod and a salute as she came in. The bridge was unnaturally silent with all the ships in radio darkness. All they had were the flickering images produced by old-style sonar, and the bridge crew huddled in their seats with their eyes fixed on the display.