by Bob Mauldin
Kitty looked around for something else to destroy. The voices in her helmet said that there were still gun emplacements active on the perimeter of the camp. As pain ravaged her soul, she saw the last Apache fall from the sky and she turned her lasers on the gun emplacements still pouring fire in on her and her fellows. She screamed in rage as two guns went up in magnificent gouts of dirt and flames, sending body parts and machined pieces in all directions, before some sense of reality returned.
After what seemed like an hour, but could only have been seconds, there was complete silence in the compound known as Camp David.
Smoke poured across the compound from five fallen helicopters, from numerous ruined gun emplacements, from fires started by these events, and from the open hatch of the stricken shuttle, masking much of the damage and softening the visual effect. Kitty maneuvered her ship toward a landing beside the damaged shuttle.
Shirley interposed her Mamba between Kitty’s ship and the ground. “What do you think you’re doing, Kitty?”
“I’ve got to get Simon out of there!” she cried.
Shirley’s voice cut to the bone. “It won’t do any good, Kitty Look at the bio-monitors.”
For the first time since the attack began, Kitty’s eyes were drawn to the lower corner of her instrument panel, and the life drained out of her. The bio-monitors of the four team members had been slaved to a small panel of lights installed in the cockpits of the escort Mambas. Four red lights, one for each person, had been glowing brightly all through the descent to Camp David. Now all four of those lights were noticeable by their absence, and the meaning was all too clear: the entire away team had been killed by whoever had attacked the shuttle during the fire-fight with the Apaches. “We’ve got to go, Kitty. Let’s move.”
The voices of her fellow pilots became white noise in Kitty’s ears. She said, “We’ve got to take care of the shuttle. I’ll do it. And I’ll take care of Simon, too.”
Wind carried the battle smoke across the helipad. She could no longer see Simon’s body, but she knew where it lay. Then she remembered: there were three who ran for the shuttle. She only got two. One was still alive inside the shuttle. He could be the one ... She couldn’t finish the thought.
Kitty slid her ship around so that she could see into the shuttle’s forward view-port. There stood two men in camouflage clothing, desperately trying to get the shuttle moving. Not caring where the other man came from, she thumbed the intercom override button. “Attention, Earth forces inside the shuttle.” They looked up in confusion at her voice. “This is Wing Commander Katherine Hawke of the TAS Galileo. You have two choices: surrender or die. That shuttle only leaves the ground with Alliance personnel at the controls.”
Knowing that they heard her and couldn’t shut her out because of her override, she demanded that the hijackers surrender. “Don’t think I won’t fire on an unarmed craft, especially when it is occupied by the murderers of my husband.”
Hearing the rising alarm in her fellow Mamba pilots' voices, Flight Control, and in the voice of the communications officer aboard Galileo, Kitty snarled and locked them out. Ignoring the slowly increasing small arms fire, she moved her ship around to the side of the grounded shuttle to get a better shot through the open hatch. This left her looking at the backs of the two men feverishly working at the controls, and she saw exactly when they brought the engines on-line.
In one last bid to keep from firing on the two men, Kitty called them one more time. “Are either one of you married?” she asked. She could see the startled look on the face of one of the men as he turned to face her. “Did you kiss your wife goodbye this morning?” As the soldier hesitated, she promised, “If you did, that will be the last memory she has of you if that shuttle lifts so much as an inch.”
Kitty was contemplating an anti-matter blast, and a massive one. The shuttle’s power core was going to explode when its containment field generator disintegrated under the two missiles she had just armed detonated inside the hi-jacked shuttle. The three explosions together should be pretty spectacular, she thought. For everybody but me. It’ll probably set off my own power core at the same time. As this thought went through her mind, she saw the look of triumph flash across the face of the second hijacker as he looked over his shoulder at her. The shuttle shifted slightly, she stroked the trigger, and the world as she knew it ceased to exist. Outside, through the gates, the forgotten camera crews continued to roll.
In the meantime, life went on around Kitty Hawke. A respectable percentage of the compound had been vaporized by the explosions, and observers, after they picked themselves up from the shock-wave, were stunned to see that Kitty’s Mamba had survived the explosion. Blown backwards by the shock wave and half-buried in the side of a concrete and brick building, covered by debris still raining down and severely damaged by its impact with the building, her Mamba would never fly again, but it did save its pilot’s life. The crash webbing, the shields, and the increased structural integrity of the re-designed Mamba combined to keep Kitty alive, but little more as it lay amid the wreckage of buildings and trees only a few dozen yards from some of the closer, more adventurous, camera crews.
Perceptions vary from person to person, and while all of the documentary evidence showed that the events following the destruction of the shuttle lasted only seconds, Kitty would forever after swear that Consciousness took her own sweet time in leaving. In the meantime, she endured an endless visit from Pain, and from Sorrow, and from Nightmare.
Mostly, she feared Nightmare, because she brought images of death, blood, and destruction, and the image of herself with twin beams of fire shooting from her fingers, destroying her enemies as she stood over the body of her fallen mate. She somehow knew that those images that Nightmare kept bringing were all too real.
She welcomed Pain with open arms, knowing that for the few moments she allowed Pain to overtake her, she wouldn’t have to endure Nightmare’s images. She welcomed Pain also because she knew, somehow, that soon after would come Oblivion. And she prayed for Oblivion.
The four remaining Mamba pilots, unsure what to with their superior tactical position, milled around above the devastated Presidential retreat, until one pilot, a little quicker that the others, dove on Kitty’s ship and lifted it in its capture fields. The other three, flying escort, followed straight up out of the atmosphere, leaving cameras filming quiet devastation as crews stared first at the departing space craft then back at the immense hole left by the explosions.
EPILOGUE
The nearly Earth-sized planet swung around its reddish-colored primary a bit closer in than did Earth around the star its children named Sol, or more commonly just “the Sun.”
Too faint to be seen from Earth with the naked eye, the dim red star was an unremarkable notation in a compendium of stars notable only for its relative obscurity except to astronomers. The portion of space the red star occupied was only visible from the southern hemisphere, and marginally closer to the galactic center than humanity’s star.
A tall, red man put down the file he had just finished reading for the third time. He leaned back in his chair, frustrated. He knew his father would have only needed one reading to arrive at a decision, but his father was three-months dead, killed in the same Isolationist attack that had injured his mother and catapulted him into his father’s office.
For three months now he had filled his new and unexpected position as Minister of Spatial Affairs for the Shiravan Polity and this was the first time he had needed to do anything other than initial some report.
Not that he didn’t keep track of what his position entailed. Oh, to be sure, he did. Too many young, ambitious men had thought to inherit their fathers’ position and rise through the levels of Shiravan society without having to actually work at their assigned tasks. After all, males were not the norm in polite Shiravan society. Only recently had they been allowed outside their compounds to release the females for more important duties off-planet.
So he read those reports before signing off on them, sometimes adding comments of his own to show someone that he wasn’t the dilettante some thought him to be. He had already acquired the reputation of staying until the last secretary and runner had gone home for the night before he left himself. Often the evidence of his late stays would show up in the form of memos found by various secretaries the next morning. Few suspected that he was working at a frantic pace just to keep the position he had inherited. Fewer still guessed that it was a matter of honor that drove him.
Let the many think that his late stays were an attempt to thwart a repeat of the Isolationist bombing that killed his father. No matter what others thought or said behind his back, he knew that it was an attempt to catch up in a system where those who didn’t learn quickly were either gobbled up or pushed aside by the stronger. And it was a perfect place from which to plan and execute the revenge the do’ Verlas family required.
Rentec stared blankly out of his third story widow as the Dukara Mountains slowly swallowed the sun, thinking more about the letter he would have to write in response to the report than the spectacle he still hadn’t gotten used to. He glanced across the landing field at the shuttle from the returned colonist hauler Kemara Vasit, the sight crystallizing his resolve. He turned back to his desk and reluctantly picked up his stylus. He stared at the offending instrument for a few seconds, then put its tip to the blank paper on his desk. “Minister Foran,” he wrote, “appended is the report from Colonization Ship Captain Serris do’ Kerran. In brief, it details her ships’ arrival at Descaret Four. Where the Colonization Ship Dalgor Kreth should have built a functional base for her load of colonists, there was nothing to be found. No sign at all that the Dalgor Kreth had ever even arrived at the Descaret system. In view of the fact that there were no ground-side facilities for her charges, Captain do’ Kerran wisely elected to return to Shiravi rather than abandon the colonists to an unprepared planet with little resources or weapons.
“It is my opinion that Captain do’ Kerran acted in the best interests of her charges and should be commended for her decision. I also recommend that a search be instituted at once for the missing vessel and crew. While the loss of one-twelfth of our colonization fleet is a severe economic blow, it is as nothing beside the loss of life and knowledge represented by the crew. Ever your servant, Rentec do’ Verlas.”
He folded the report and his recommendation together, slid them into a security seal and addressed it. Dropping it in his secretary’s out-box, he finally left the darkened office for the small apartment assigned to him in the bachelor dormitories the city of Quillas maintained a few blocks away.
END OF BOOK ONE
Thanks for reading LEGACY!
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bob has lived in Montana for over thirty years, since late '85. He fell in love with the state almost instantly (who wouldn't after spending the previous twenty or more years trapped in Houston, Texas). Out in the Big Sky Country, he found the “elbow room” he didn't even know he was looking for. He lives quietly with his two cats and library of nearly two thousand books—about ninety-five percent Sci/Fi. He discovered that he liked to write as well and can often be found doing just that.
Learn more at:
https://www.bladeoftruthpublishing.com/bob-mauldin
Also by Bob Mauldin
The Stellar Heritage Series
Legacy
Spheres of Influence (Coming Soon)
Far Horizons (Coming Soon)
When One Door Closes (Coming Soon)