by Nick Webb
“Yeah,” Jake nodded. “I sure hope Pritchard’s got something else up his sleeve.”
“Watch our right flank,” she said, pointing out an enemy bird racing towards them. He stopped the ship in midair and plunged straight down, re-engaging forward motion while flipping the ship to point up. Po’s deadly-accurate fingers took care of the rest.
“How we doing down here? What’s left?” he said, as he pushed the controls to dive towards another fighter.
“Over half-done here. We’ve lost Vipers three and eight. And the frigates are starting to pull away,” she glanced at her console. “Looks like the bastards hit our ion beam cannon towers down here. That’s probably the first thing they hit so they could have free run of the place. Railgun installations are down too. They were thorough. Just a handful of gigawatt laser cannons left for regional defense. Let’s hope none of those heavy cruisers comes and parks over Dallas.”
Indeed.
“Ok, last few bogeys. They’re not falling back—looks like they knew it was a one-way trip. Crash, you got that piecer on your port?” he said.
“Yeah, I see it.”
“Let me know if you need—”
Po’s shouting caught him by surprise. She hadn’t yet raised her voice the entire time. “Nuclear contact!”
“Where?” He scanned his console, but couldn’t make out where it was coming from.
“Multiple targets, six hundred klicks up and falling fast.”
“How many?”
The blood drained from her face.
“How many, Po?”
“Thirty-six,” she said. “Looks like one of our battlegroups is moving to intercept and neutralize. They’re laying down a defensive screen.”
Jake thumbed the comm. “All Viper squad. Move immediately to intercept incoming nuclear signals.” He pulled the nose up and rammed hard on the accelerator.
The comm crackled back an answer. “This is Commander Roberts in NA South Command. Belay that order, Viper squad. Concentrate all defense capabilities on the remaining laser cannons and railguns. Let ground defense take them out.”
Jake yelled into his headset. “But sir, there’s thirty-six warheads headed straight for Dallas! We can each take out at least five or six—”
“Negative. Reinforce ground defense, Viper squad. Those are your orders.”
An explosion rocked the cabin as the strafing fire from an enemy fighter connected with them. Jake breathed a sigh of relief as he saw the other bird explode in a shower of debris, and Viper two plunge through the dissipating fireball.
“Thanks, Crash. What’s that, two beers I owe you now?”
“Three. Meet you at the laser cannons.”
“Jake,” Po began. “Thirteen warheads made it past the battlegroup. They’re targeting downtown Dallas.”
“We’re going up there,” he said, and without waiting to ask her, they shot upward, accelerating until the hard edges of the craft glowed red again.
“But Shotgun, that last hit took out our weapons. We’ve got no teeth.”
“All weapons? Torpedoes too?”
“We’ve still got the torpedoes, but our launching mechanism is shot.”
He pressed on the accelerator.
“Mercer?”
He didn’t reply, but kept the nose pointed straight up.
“Mercer, what exactly are you planning to do?”
“I don’t like to lose, Grizzly.”
She pursed her lips, and glanced down at the console. “NA South command is ordering us back. Looks like they’ve taken out two more of them with the laser cannons. Make that three more.”
“But they’re coming in fast. Look, there’s one now.” He decelerated, and as the warhead approached he pressed down hard on the nose, rocketing the ship back towards the ground, keeping pace with the falling missile. A sense of surreal wonder overcame him as he looked up through the top viewport and saw the markings on the narrow shaft of the warhead.
“What the hell do you think you’re—”
“Hey, it worked up at the shipyards,” he said, as he swiveled the ship so the rear thrusters pointed straight at the thing. Pressing two buttons and hitting the override, he fired both forward and aft thrusters simultaneously, baking the missile until it glowed red.
“It’s breaking apart. There. Firing mechanism and electronics are both destroyed,” Po announced.
“Excellent. Then on to the next one, shall we?”
She grinned, the first time she’d smiled since Jake had grabbed her wrist not half an hour ago. “Onward it is. Ground defense has taken out four more. There’s another one a few klicks straight up.”
“On it,” he said, and slowed their descent until the second warhead pulled even with them. Blasting it with their thrusters, Jake let out a war-whoop, and pushed the fighter around in a celebratory loop when the thing exploded.
“There. All taken care of except one. It’s way below us. Ground crews firing at it. Railguns … but no lasers. They must be recharging. Railguns firing ... firing ... they can’t seem nail this one.”
“It’s a lot harder to hit a moving target with a railgun than with a laser,” Jake offered.
She scowled. “You think I don’t know that?” She studied the console. “It’s twenty klicks above the ground, now. Still firing….”
She looked up at him.
The blood drained from her face.
He looked out the window, before suddenly remembering what a foolish thing that was. He clapped his hands over his eyes, and he could hear Po follow suit.
And not too soon.
For the second time in less than twelve hours, Jake saw the red of the blood vessels in his hand filter the piercing, deadly shine of a nuclear blast.
“Get us out of here, Mercer.” Po’s voice croaked. He opened his eyes, and gunned the engine, unable to even look down at the developing mushroom cloud that rapidly swirled upward.
“It was five hundred megatons,” she said, in a near whisper. She studied the readout—she too seemed unable to bring herself to look down. “The wavefront is dissipating. Around the twenty kilometer mark.” She paused. “Downtown is gone.”
The comm crackled to life on the wide-band. “This is United Earth Prime Minister Radovan Hawkins, to all Corsican Empire and United Earth ships. The United Governments of Earth hereby offer our unconditional surrender. All Earth units are ordered to stand down.” The voice paused. “Please … please for God’s sake, have some human decency. Have mercy….”
Jake, still numb inside, looked down, finally. Where the sprawling metropolis once stood was replaced by a blackened, fiery wasteland. The center of the circle was empty of anything recognizable, followed by standing skeletons of skyscrapers a little further out, blazing like gargantuan torches. The outer city and suburbs blazed like a fireball as well, until at the outer edges of the circle, the blast wavefront had flattened some houses, but caught little on fire. But he knew that the thousands of people in that outer zone would eventually succumb to radiation poisoning in a few days, though.
“Are they going to leave us like Belen?” He couldn’t help but think about the world that the Empire had destroyed over a hundred years ago. Nuked it to complete oblivion. Nothing like it had happened since then, as the imperial senate severely chastised the emperor responsible for the genocide, but the example always haunted the thoughts of all worlds that opposed the Empire. No one wanted to be the next Belen.
“Dunno. Shotgun, the Fury just shifted away. Destination unknown,” said Po. He glanced over at her. A single tear wet her cheek, which she wiped away with her sleeve. “The rest of the fleet is standing down. We’re receiving instructions from Eglin to return to base.” Her eyes met his. “It’s over, Mercer. The Empire won.”
I always win.
“No,” he whispered. Thoughts of the decades he could spend in prison flashed through his mind. By all accounts, the Corsicans were not kind to their prisoners, and Jake began contemplating pointing the nose
of the fighter away from the Earth and making a gravitic shift to Mars or one of the Jovian moons. He could escape there. Blend in with the population. Hide out until the Resistance rose again.
“Take us back,” she said in an almost robotic voice. “Time to face the music.”
A cold knot formed in his stomach, which only grew over the flight back to the Florida panhandle.
Dad gives up. Not me. Not me, dammit.
He glanced up through the top viewport in the cabin. Po caught his eye. “Don’t,” she said. “Don’t run. Don’t even think about it. They’ll catch you, and when they do, they’ll torture you, then execute you. And me. Just … don’t,” she repeated.
“Why not?”
She set her jaw, and locked her cold, steely eyes on his. “Because. When I held the charred bodies of my children in my arms as they took their last gasp, I swore, I swore, I swore,” she said with rising intensity, “that I’d make the Empire pay. That I’d make them suffer. That I’d bring the battle back to Corsica itself and obliterate the Empire. And me hanging by a noose now means fewer dead Corsicans later.”
He looked back to the controls. The smoking crater that marked Dallas’s passing started to sink below the horizon behind them, and Jake furiously pounded once on the dashboard console, cracking the casing.
I always win.
“But not today,” he breathed.
CHAPTER THREE
THREE YEARS LATER
“ADMIRAL TRAJAN?” The graying, rail-thin officer poked his head through the ready room door. He hated disturbing the man, especially before breakfast, and made a mental note to have his XO do the honors next time. “Admiral?” he repeated.
“Do come in, Captain,” a voice from the chair in the center of the room said.
Captain Titus of the Corsican battleship NPQR Caligula stepped through the door and started to walk towards the chair when the voice interrupted him.
“Close it, please, Captain,” the sonorous, husky voice said. Titus pulled the handle and shut the door, standing at attention. He’d learned months ago not to speak out of turn with the new Admiral—new, not as an Admiral, but new aboard the Caligula. The Imperial Fleet Command had transferred Admiral Trajan to the Caligula’s battlegroup recently, and so far Trajan had not revealed his true purpose onboard, which ostensibly remained highly classified.
Captain Titus looked around his old ready room. Unfortunately, Admiral Trajan had converted it into makeshift quarters. A mat lay spread against the wall behind the desk, without so much as a pillow or blanket to suggest that it was, in fact, the man’s bed. Very few personal belongings cluttered the space, except for the wall, which now displayed a variety of musical instruments. A violin, a trumpet, several exotic looking wind instruments that Titus could not immediately identify, and one pair of horns that looked deceptively like blowpipes hung crossing one another like an old-style skull and crossbones.
“Do you like heavy metal, Captain?” the Admiral asked, without turning his chair around to face him, which was fine with Titus—he loathed looking at the Admiral’s face, as did most of the crew.
“Sir? Like tungsten?”
“No, Captain. Like the music.”
Captain Titus shook his head. “I’m sorry, sir. I’m afraid I’ve never heard it.” Up until that point he hadn’t been aware of a barely audible screeching noise that permeated the room. At first it seemed to him just background noise of the ship, or the work of some mechanic one deck below or above.
Admiral Titus motioned with his finger, which the computer assistant understood as an increase in volume. Captain Titus clamped his hands over his ears as a cacophony of pounding sounds blasted his head. Hardly music, the clashes and screeches made his head pound, and he winced. Half a minute went by and Titus considered bolting from the room, wondering how long he might have to spend in the brig for the deed. Thankfully, a raised finger from Trajan decreased the volume to a tolerable level.
“Isn’t it magnificent, Titus?”
The Captain hesitated. He wasn’t sure what Trajan was expecting him to say—in the Corsican Empire fleet, one gave the answer his superior expected, or there were consequences.
“It is … certainly interesting, Admiral.”
“Please, Captain. Your true feelings. I assure you I will not be offended.”
He hesitated again, unsure of whether to take the Admiral at face value. But the Admiral’s sigh interrupted his ambivalence. “I’ll speak your thoughts for you, Captain. How could this be music, you’re thinking. What riffraff would even think to listen to this garbage for leisure? For fun? It’s like listening to two cargo freighters attempting to make love to each other.”
Captain Titus couldn’t help but smile at the disturbing imagery.
“These are the dulcet warblings of a late twenty-first century band called The Sweet Nothings. Quite popular in their day, back on Old Earth. Perhaps even our own ancestors thrashed their heads along to the music as they operated the machines that churned out the myriad of plastic commercial trappings that made life worthwhile back then.” He laughed. “Well, maybe not my ancestors. Mine were too busy infiltrating the Italian government at the time. Yours too, perhaps.”
The Admiral’s back was still turned to Captain Titus, but now he swiveled the chair to face him. Over time, Titus had learned not to wince. His former XO had not learned that lesson, and the Admiral’s response was … uncharitable.
His eye. His right eye. It was missing. Just gone. And worse, the Admiral made no attempt to cover it up, giving no thought to the comfort of those around him. Ah, except that was the brilliant strategy of Trajan’s that Titus had finally understood. It wasn’t that the Admiral had no concern for the comfort of those around him, it was that he was entirely concerned with the emotional state of those around him. The more discomfort he could incite in whoever he was issuing commands to or negotiating with, the better. He was a master of controlling the situation around himself, and Titus guessed the gaping hole in his head, mottled with veins and scar tissue, was exposed to the world precisely as just another tool to assist him in his control of others.
“Captain,” the Admiral began, locking his remaining black eye on the man. Titus shifted uncomfortably on his feet. “Do you realize you can tell everything there is to know about a people by its music? Their aspirations. Their fears. Their thought processes and outlook on life. How they process information. How they value beauty and handle suffering and pain. Even how they formulate strategy, and dare I think it, battle plans. Not details, of course, but broad narrative arcs.”
It was posed as a question, but Titus had interacted with Trajan long enough to know not to answer. The answer would be given to him at the appropriate time.
“Did you know that a culture’s music is the window to its very soul? Tell me, Captain, what does this music tell you about the soul of those who enjoy it?”
“Chaotic? Unbalanced?”
The Admiral frowned. “Are you certain?”
Titus swallowed. “No, sir.”
Admiral Trajan pulled a comb out of his pocket and ran it through his thick, black hair, which showed the gleam of some type of oil-based product. “Unbalanced? No. Captain, you might not be aware, but this is the music of the rebellion. Nearly every rebel fighter listens to it. Almost every space jock has it ringing through his fighter’s cabin as he flies. Even Admiral Pritchard himself, before he disappeared, was known to have a fondness for it, and his men adored him.”
Pritchard. The empire’s scouts had searched the settled part of the galaxy for two years and still hadn’t found the bastard. Where you hide a battleship the size of the Fury was beyond Captain Titus. He nodded in response to the Admiral’s monologue.
The Admiral continued, the age lines on his face stretching as he smiled. “And what it tells me about the rebellion is that it is not dead. They will rise again, and will choose their moment soon, if I have a correct read on them.” He dropped his chin and glanced at Titus. “Which,
I assure you, I do.”
Titus protested. “The Earth rebellion? Rise again? But they are finished. They have no political organization, and their military ranks have been absorbed into the Imperial Fleet. What about the Truth and Reconciliation process?”
“The Senate may have forced us into reconciliation with the rebels after the Dallas incident, but that doesn’t mean the rebels just went away. No, Captain. They are not finished. They are simmering below the surface. They know a watched pot never boils, and so they are lying low. Waiting until we are looking elsewhere. But they will choose their moment, and we will be ready.”
Titus nodded. “Yes, sir. And so that is the nature of your mission? To wait for them to make their move, and then to crush them?” The Admiral had been on board three months, sending out a constant stream of communications through gravitic pods, and directing the Caligula’s course from the privacy of the Captain’s ready room, which he had transformed into his command center in addition to his quarters.
The chair swiveled back around to face the viewscreen, and Titus breathed a silent sigh of relief that he didn’t have to stare at the gaping hole in his face anymore. “You’re half right, Captain. We will not wait for them to make their move. We will, in fact, encourage them to take it. We will set it on a gold platter and decorate it and entice them to bite. And when they do, yes—we will crush them.” He keyed the display on the wall in front of him and it snapped to life. “Why I called you here,” he said, tapping the screen, indicating a stellar map of the galaxy within fifty light years of Earth.