by Joshua James
Ben beckoned for them all to follow him down the hall.
“And where are we going?” asked Wan.
“Hangar One,” Ben said.
“We getting out of here?” Wan said as they approached the forward hatch into the enormous ship’s bay in the belly of the Veruvian.
“We’re report to the hangar so we can get our new ship. Then we’re making the jump and finishing this—"
“A new ship?” Wan blurted out.
They stepped through the hangar hatch, and Ben glanced back and smiled. Then he nodded at a ship, whose design Wan was very familiar with. They all were.
“That’s ours?” Congo gasped. For once, Wan and his crewmate were on the same frequency.
Ben nodded at the forward berth, where a data console indicated his name. “Looks like it.”
“That’s a Supramax Hawk,” Wan said.
“A Mark Four,” Ben said. He sounded pleasantly surprised.
Wan was ecstatic. Supramax was a company that made the most advanced ships in human-occupied space. Not affiliated with either side in the Universal War, they built war machines for whoever had the credits to buy them.
“Attention, crew of the Veruvian,” boomed Rhule’s voice over the hangar’s intercom system. “This is your captain. All pilots, enter your ships and prepare for the fold jump. All other crew, report to the nearest fold restraints and lock yourselves in. Jump in five minutes.”
Clarissa ran her hand along the outside of the Supramax Hawk. “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
“She’ll be more beautiful once she’s off the deck,” Wan said as he ran up the ramp. “Let’s move.”
Congo followed.
“Will this do?” Ben asked Clarissa.
“Yeah, I think it’ll do just fine.” She looked awestruck as she headed up the ramp.
“How did we get something like this?” asked Ada.
“Let’s just say the captain is a lover of ships, and brought one of his collection on this mission.”
“And he’s letting us have it?”
“And he’s counting on us to lead every fighter in this hangar.”
Ada chuckled as she walked up the ramp. “No pressure or anything.”
Ben took a moment to admire the Supramax Hawk. “Yeah, sure, no pressure.”
Two minutes later, they were all seated in the cockpit as Rhule’s voice came over the ship’s intercom this time. “Fold jump in one minute.”
“Everyone strapped in and ready to go?” asked Ben.
“One of those things,” answered Wan.
“As ready as we’re ever gonna be,” answered Ada.
“Sure,” answered Congo.
Clarissa sat at the pilot’s chair, admiring the highly-tuned precision instruments in front of her. Despite the situation, she was excited. This was light-years away from anything else she’d ever flown.
“We need to give it a name,” she said.
“Hawk,” said Wan.
“Fold jump in thirty seconds,” said an automated voice that had taken over for Rhule.
“That’s lame,” Congo said.
“How about LeFay?” suggested Clarissa.
“For the crazy cyborg that got me into all this?” Wan asked sarcastically, but he still managed to look a little wistful, at least for him.
“The Fallen,” said Ben. “For Tomas, for LeFay, for Ace, for all the friends we’ve lost in this fight. They deserve to be represented here, at the beginning of the end.”
“I like it,” said Ada.
“Me too,” agreed Clarissa. “The Fallen.”
“You can’t give a ship a depressing name like that,” Wan said. “That’s bad luck!”
“Ten seconds,” the voice declared. The automated count continued unabated. “Nine. Eight.”
“Bringing you along is bad luck, but here you are,” Ada said.
“Nonsense,” Wan said. “I’m as good a luck as this universe has.” He paused. “Hey, what do you think the odds are we jump to the Earth and there’s no Shapeless at all? And this is all just a big misunderstanding?”
“What do you think the odds are that you take something seriously?” Clarissa asked.
“Excuse me for trying to bring some levity to our suicide pact here,” he mumbled.
“Five. Four. Three.”
The cockpit went silent as they prepared for the fold jump. Once they came out the other side, they all knew they would face a life or death struggle to save the Earth.
“One.”
Six
Pure Evil
Lee came out of the fold skip hoping for the best and bracing for the worst.
If his calculations were off and he came up short of the Shapeless home planet, he’d end up in deep space, without enough power or inertia to do much of anything. And if his calculations were off the other way, well, he’d simply cease to exist. He wasn’t a fan of either scenario.
But his calculations were good enough, and he came out of the skip a couple of thousand feet above the Shapeless’ home planet’s surface. The ship adjusted for the atmospheric pressures as best it could, but his forward console looked like one big blinking red light.
The ship was in shambles.
The engine that Chevenko’s dreadnought had clipped had exploded seconds after coming out of the fold skip. It had taken the other engines with it, leaving Lee rudderless, gliding towards the surface below at less than safe speeds.
“C’mon, baby, don’t die on me!” Lee desperately tried to gain some form of control of his ship, but it was hard with only one arm and no engines.
The ship bucked and bounced on air pockets that he couldn’t see. All he could do was hang on and hope that it crash-landed flat on its belly and didn’t go end over end.
Lee took a look out the window of his ship’s cockpit. The whole of the Shapeless’ planet was black. There were what looked like large swaths of volcanic rock, with rivers and lakes of the black oil-like substance he’d grown to hate so much.
Everything about the planet was wrong. For one, it was too small. It wasn’t even the size of a standard moon, and nothing in this small system’s development should have supported it.
The asteroid belt indicated that this system had once been home to dozens of planets. Now only one tiny one remained, its own existence confirmation that something was different about it at the most basic level.
Keeping his eye on the altitude meter, Lee nervously waited for the crash. He tightened his harness and even put on the magnetic restraints. One leg nervously shook as he waited for the inevitable, all the while assuring himself that he wouldn’t fail.
Lee felt a small hand on his thigh, stopping it from shaking. He looked over and saw Ben as a kid, sitting on his mother’s lap in the copilot’s seat. Neither of them said a word. They didn’t have to. It was clear as day on their faces that they wanted to reassure him that he’d be okay.
The first impact was the worst. It was so hard that it jostled the teeth in Lee’s mouth. The second still sucked, but was nowhere near as bad. Those first two were on the volcanic rock. And though the ship was far past the point of being flyable even before it hit the ground, it stayed, for the most part, in one piece. It skidded to a stop, with the nose jutting out into a lake of black oil. Lee sat dazed in the pilot’s seat as the black oil began to envelop the front of the ship.
Chevenko sat on the floor of his dreadnought’s command bridge with his dead daughter still in his arms. He ignored the countless asteroids hitting his ship, denting it, breaking it, and taking pieces of it with them. The shields were completely depleted, but he didn’t care.
Lee was just down there on that planet ahead. Chevenko, if he did nothing else in his life, was going to kill Saito, one way or another.
Dragging his daughter’s corpse with him, Chevenko returned to his commander’s chair. The whole ship was falling apart around him. Pieces of the ceiling fell down, crashing on the floor. Everything was tinted red by the eme
rgency lighting. So lost in his grief and rage, he didn’t notice when the constant banging noise of space rocks pummeling his dreadnought stopped.
“You think you can take that from me and live?” Chevenko screamed. He wiped the sweat from his forehead and accessed the dreadnought’s controls. He accelerated, overriding safety protocols as they flared up on his controls, and headed full speed towards the planet.
Lee jerked his head up. He wiped blood from his forehead as he managed to make his eyes finally focus. He’d been knocked out. For how long, he didn’t know. He quickly unstrapped himself from the pilot’s seat. He looked at the readings from the planet. That there was an atmosphere at all was again peculiar. The tiny planet shouldn’t be able to support one at all. There wasn’t enough breathable oxygen, and there was a high concentration of noxious gases. He’d need a suit to go outside for any extended period of time, which meant going to the back of the ship—a task that was more tricky than he thought it’d be.
As soon as Lee started moving towards the cockpit exit, he realized the ship was shifting. The black ooze was trying to suck the ship down with it.
Damn.
Time wasn’t on Lee’s side. He knew that. So the first thing he needed to do was figure out how to use the nukes. Especially since that task was going to be more complicated now that he couldn’t fly the ship anymore. Which meant he couldn’t just fire one.
Lee took another step. The ship seemed to teeter. For the first time, he wondered if the ship was actually nose into the black ooze or if it was nose off a cliff. The entire topography was strange. All he knew was that if the ship was subsumed by the river of black oil, the nukes and the only chance of destroying the planet went with it.
Lee stepped across the cockpit like he was walking on broken glass. As he moved, the ship creaked and complained, but he was able to make another step, and he was out of the cockpit. Confident that he was now safe to move freely, he headed straight towards the weapons bay.
But the ship continued to shift and moan. It was only a matter of time before it was subsumed. He had to move fast.
Once down the small ladder into the cramped weapons bay—no easy task with only one hand—Lee tried to recall his training from decades ago, before the war. He’d served on a battleship for almost a year. For half that time, he’d worked on the ship’s weapons team, helping arm, load, and even replace missiles, torpedoes, and the cannons.
One of the skills Lee had learned before moving on from a weapons team and becoming a proper officer was rigging a missile to blow without it being fired. At the time he couldn’t understand why anyone would be taught that. What possible situation would necessitate blowing a projectile up without firing it? Finally, after over thirty years, that question was answered.
Lee got to work on the nukes, or more accurately, the missiles housing them. It took a little while for him to remember exactly what he was doing. There were so many small energy conduits of different colors. The trick was knowing which conduits to cut, and which to attach to each other. The problem was, he didn’t have much time.
Chevenko was out there, and there was no telling what he’d do when he found Lee.
Chevenko cradled his daughter’s body as if she was a baby being put to bed as the dreadnought entered the Shapeless’ planet’s atmosphere. The friction from entry not only peeled off some of the outer protective layers of his vessel, but also set it on fire.
The whole dreadnought shook violently as it threatened to burn to a crisp before it even reached the planet’s surface. All the lights and instruments in the command bridge blinked on and off. Fires broke out all around Chevenko, the flames reflecting off his tears.
If anyone was on the surface of the Shapeless planet looking up, they would’ve seen a massive fireball screaming across and out of the sky. Pieces of the dreadnought broke off, leaving smoking debris flying off the back. It picked up speed the closer it got to crashing.
“He’ll pay ,baby girl. He’ll pay for all of—" Chevenko was cut off by a sharp pain in his back and chest. He looked down and saw a grey curved blade sticking out of the front of his rib cage. His own blood dripped off the end.
“I’m sorry, friend.”
Chevenko was in such shock and pain that it took a moment for the voice of the yellow-eyed alien to register. He’d forgotten all about his otherworldly prisoner. “You,” he sputtered.
“I cannot let you stop him,” the creature said.
Chevenko, eyes wide, looked down at his daughter’s lifeless face. His own blood dripped off the blade-shaped limb sticking out of his chest, and onto her face. Moving his body became close to impossible. He just sat there, pinned to his seat.
When Chevenko looked up at the viewing window, he saw the black surface of the Shapeless planet rushing up fast behind a filter of flames. The last thing he heard before succumbing to the darkness of death was the alien apologizing one more time.
“That should do it,” Lee said aloud as he put the finishing touches on rigging the nukes in his ship. He’d set them up so that with one command in his HUD, they would remotely trigger and blow up. The power rating of the nuclear weapons was nothing like the primitive ones that had once put the Earth on the brink of its own extermination. These were many, many times more powerful. True, they weren’t in the same league as the planet killers that the AIC and UEF liked to point at each other, but they didn’t have to be. The Shapeless world was tiny.
Considering the amount of power packed into those weapons, combined with the large chunk of Herald Stone next to them, it should’ve been plenty to level the planet. At the very least, it would leave it unstable to the point that its rotation would soon falter and decay.
With that done, Lee had to get his suit and—
“Brace for impact!” the ship’s AI said sternly through the intercom speakers.
Brace for impact? What is this crazy ship talking about?
A huge earthquake sent him flying off his feet. The nukes were locked into place, still stowed where he’d been reworking the energy conduits. Even so, they bounced around violently in their housings. If one came loose, it was liable to crush Lee.
“What was that?” he shouted.
“The pursuing vessel has crashed into the side of the planet. It has made a massive impact that may well have begun a—”
The ship shifted again under Lee’s feet, again sending him sprawling. “What now?”
The AI was silent for a moment. By the time it spoke up, he’d figured it out.
The impact had knocked the ship loose of whatever had been holding it in place. It was now succumbing to the black oil.
“This ship is no longer anchored, and—”
“Yeah, got it,” Lee said, cutting off the ship. It would soon be sucked in. Which meant he needed to get out of it as quickly as possible.
Lee quickly climbed up the ladder out of the weapons bay. The ship was shifting fast now. It had already started to slide into the black oil, throwing him off his feet. With only one arm, he had trouble catching himself, so he fell hard, face-first. Undeterred and bolstered by the fear of drowning in the Shapeless’ black oil, he pushed himself up and scrambled towards the space suits hanging near the loading ramp.
As quickly as he could, Lee put on the suit as his ship sank. At the same time he opened the loading ramp, determined to jump out of the ship as quickly as possible. Immediately upon the seal being broken, black oil started to quickly rush into the ship from around the opening loading ramp.
Lee’s suit protected him from the black oil, but as soon as the airtight seal of the ship was broken, all the oxygen rushed out. Lee held his breath as he struggled to put on his helmet with one arm. As the levels of black oil rose, he knew he needed to get out. He looked at the open loading ramp, which extended up in the air as his only way out.
He had to think fast to get out of his current predicament. He tossed his helmet up and out of the ship, hoping that it would hit the lava rock instead of the black oil and
not disappear like his ship was slowly disappearing. Because then he wouldn’t be able to breathe, and his mission would end on a pathetic note. Then he jumped up and tried to grab the ledge of the opening loading ramp.
Never in his life had Lee been more thankful for incorporating pull-ups into his regular workout routine. With one arm he grabbed the edge of the opening for the loading ramp. Satisfied that his grip was tight, he gritted his teeth and groaned as he pulled himself up out of his ship. All that working out paid off as he rolled over on what was actually the side of his ship as it sank.
Not able to breathe, Lee quickly looked around for his helmet. It was on the nearby lava rock beach. Struggling to hold his breath, and feeling like his eyes and face were on fire, Lee got up and ran towards the end of his ship and jumped off. His boots landed hard in the assorted small pieces of lava rock. He scrambled forward and grabbed his helmet.
With one arm, Lee had to concentrate to figure out how to secure his helmet over his head and clamp it to the ring of the suit around his neck. All the while, he had to do so without being able to breathe. He felt light-headed as he worked.
As he choked, Lee’s hand struggled to clamp down the helmet. His mouth kept opening and closing like a fish out of water, struggling to breathe. Was this how it ended for him? Suffocation on an alien planet? With a loud pop, the o-ring around his neck snapped into place. The rudimentary automated system within the suit instantly registered that a seal was established in his helmet, and oxygen came rushing in.
Exhausted, Lee fell backwards and lay on the lava rock, looking up at an alien sky.
Seven
The Battle For Earth Begins
The Veruvian came out of the fold jump at its pre-set coordinates just beyond Earth’s moon. Fold blockers on Earth prevented any unauthorized ships from fold jumping any closer, but it was close enough.