by M. D. Cooper
Rondo unstrapped from his seat and pulled himself back to the shuttle’s main cargo area. Grabbing a helmet, he pulled it over his head and then scrunched his beard against his neck to fit all the hair inside his collar. Finally, with everything sealed and Adama purring against his side, Rondo faced the main cargo door and activated the emergency override.
He didn’t have time to conceal his departure. Port Authority would see his emergency activation and possibly notice that the rogue drone that had just dumped its cargo was headed his direction. After that, they would need to track him.
Rondo had decided he was headed back to the Amplified Solution, so if Port Authority wanted to follow him into that mess, more power to them.
The cargo door opened on black, and then the grey face of Luna as the shuttle spun. From this distance, he could make out the lights of New Austin, along with several brilliant blue flames he had never seen before.
By the stars.
Under its domes, and outside them as well, New Austin was on fire.
Rondo stared in wonder and disgust as more explosions rippled the Lunar surface above the city, sending out jets of burning atmosphere. He could only imagine the terror happening underground.
The shuttle spun again, bringing silver High Terra and blue Earth into view, and then Rondo launched himself away from the broken vessel. He tumbled in freefall as his suit’s HUD got its bearings, and Rondo passed it flight commands.
In another few seconds, a shove in the middle of his back indicated the thrusters had activated, and he was moving further from the craft.
He didn’t have the fuel to make it back to the Amplified Solution, and as he had expected, his thruster died after thirty seconds.
Rondo rotated to watch the shuttle growing smaller beneath him, while behind it, New Austin flashed brilliant bits of color.
In another minute, the drone appeared on Rondo’s HUD. He sent it into a braking burn, and it abruptly became visible as a grey cube ringed in thrust steam.
Rondo cut the drone’s thrusters before it cooked him as it came in, and then sent a collection command. Five minutes later, he had hooked himself to a cargo strap on the drone’s body and was riding it bronco-style toward the Amplified Solution.
He imagined it was almost as much fun as riding a Russian rocket off Earth, despite the cat claws embedded in his side.
* * * * *
Rondo leant against the wall of the Amplified Solution’s engine section airlock, waiting for the system to cycle. Adama’s claws were still embedded in his side, but his cat friend had finally stopped kneading his skin. He wasn’t sure if Adama was grateful or enacting punishment.
“Come on, buddy,” he soothed, hoping the cat could at least hear the vibration of his voice. “Almost there. All we have to do now is not get shot.”
The airlock finished its cycle and opened on the interior side. Rondo straightened to face the door, and was surprised to find a pulse pistol pointed at his head.
That was sooner than I expected.
“Take off the helmet,” Cara Sykes commanded.
Rondo raised his hands, showing he wasn’t armed, and Adama dug needle claws into his side again to hang on. Rondo wheezed with pain.
“What’s wrong with you?” Cara asked.
“We met,” he said in a tortured voice. “At the symposium. I gave you the armor.”
“I can’t see your face through that helmet. What’s your name?”
“Sinclair Rondo, but everybody calls me Rondo. I see you’re wearing the armor.”
Cara’s brow knit. “I remember you. That doesn’t mean we’re friends. Take off the helmet like I told you.”
“Can I get out of the airlock? These things have been exploding lately.”
“How do you know that? Are you working for Jentry?”
Rondo wrestled the helmet off his head, releasing a mass of beard. He hung the helmet on a nearby hook and unfastened the front of his EV suit so Adama could stick his head out. The cat mewed at Cara.
“Wait,” she said, sounding flustered. “How the hell am I supposed to point a weapon at a cat? Using your cat as a shield is completely unfair.”
She raised the pistol to aim at his face again.
Rondo raised his hands. “Yes,” he said. “I was working for Jentry. But only because Fugia Wong told me to.”
Now Cara turned her head to the side, squinting at him. “You work for Fugia? Is that why you gave me the armor?”
“I thought Jentry was going to try something, and he did. Fugia didn’t tell me to give you the armor. That was my idea.”
Cara studied him hard for another few seconds, then lowered her pistol. She holstered the weapon and stepped back so he could exit the airlock.
“Come on, then,” she said.
Rondo ducked to get through the opening. “Where is Jentry?” he asked. “Are we going to have to get the ship from him?”
“Jentry is dead,” Cara said. “What we need to do is go grab Chancellor Osla. You can apparently pilot a shuttle. Can you fly the Amplified Solution?”
Rondo blinked, not believing his ears. “You want me to fly this ship?”
“I don’t want you to. I need you to. Those are different things.”
Pulling Adama from the front of his suit, Rondo held the cat up and pulled him in for a hug.
“Did you hear that, Adama?” he asked, as the cat started purring in spite of his awkward situation.
“You still haven’t answered my question,” Cara said.
Rondo nodded furiously. “Hell yes, I can fly this ship.”
“Good,” Cara said. “Let’s get up to the command deck.”
NEW AUSTIN BLUES
STELLAR DATE: 3.23.3011 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Near-Luna Orbit, MSS Amplified Solution
REGION: Luna, Terran Hegemony, InnerSol
The Amplified Solution jumped through space, followed by a braking burn that placed the ship in an overwatch position above New Austin.
Scan showed a battlegroup of TSF vessels inbound from Beatrice Station, but that left a good fifteen minutes when Cara was the only thing standing between the city and a wave of Psion attack drones that had poured out of shipping drones in high orbit above Luna.
Don’t forget, you agreed to this.
Cara wished she had her crew back. For now, she had Sinclair Rondo and the Amplified Solution’s advanced systems. The ship could almost fight on its own once it had a target, but Cara didn’t fully trust the automation. The NSAI might decimate a human target, but this was Psion.
From the engineering control section, Rondo shouted over the ship’s comms.
“We’ve got full repulsor shields, and the engine is humming. You’ve got fuel adjustment maneuvers, but we’ve only got one hard burn left. If we need to get out of here in a hurry, don’t forget that.”
“I won’t,” Cara said. “And you don’t have to shout.”
“I’m excited.”
“You sound like a Saint Bernard.”
“What’s that?”
“I big dog that slobbers all over the place.”
“Not far off,” Rondo agreed.
With the full power of the courser at her command, Cara raised the astrogation display to track the waves of Psion drones. There were thousands of fighters, spreading out like a swarm of insects to fall on the domes of New Austin.
Cara had placed an expanded model of the Lunar surface in the holotank, showing the many fires burning across New Austin. Several domes had blown outward, and local space was a mass of debris. A cruise liner that had been orbiting above the city was slowly exploding a section at a time, long streaks of flame arcing into space as it spun.
“Great,” she muttered, realizing that the Andersonians had neutralized all the local ground defenses. “How do I shield half a billion people with one ship?”
With no one else on the bridge to provide advice, she activated the ship’s automated point-defense cannons, and reviewed specs on the i
nbound drones.
There were two distinct configurations. The first wave were high-g fighters designed to take out space-borne defenses. Behind them were heavier drones, loaded with short-range missiles.
Striking Luna wasn’t like hitting a world with atmosphere. Not only was there no concern about weaponry breaking up in the air, but ships could fire from mere kilometers above the surface, giving almost no time for countermeasures.
Which probably didn’t matter, since there likely were none.
It was obvious that Camaris had been behind much of the Andersonians’ success. There was no way that people who were near-total luddites could disable so much of the moon’s defense systems.
Picking her targets, Cara turned the ship toward the Psion drones and fired the engines, boosting toward the enemy.
“What are you doing?” Rondo called up to the command deck.
“Hoping that, with Camaris gone, these things are all just on autopilot. What I’m planning will work best if they don’t get too creative.”
“Great. Is it too late to get back to my shuttle?”
She ignored the man and held off on firing until she was in close range with the ship-to-ship fighters. The courser’s beams sliced into the enemy craft, destroying dozens with ease, though it barely made an impact on their overall numbers.
Felix gave a nervous laugh.
Cara barely gave the words any thought as the Amplified Solution slipped through the first line of drones, and she set the weapons system to targeting the heavy Psion fighters. Beams and missiles streamed out from the courser, lighting up space for a hundred kilometers with exploding drones and EM.
The strike brought the first wave of fighters arcing back around, and Cara watched as the courser’s SC batteries drew down further, the beams firing just under lens-melting thresholds.
There was nothing for it, and she launched another volley of missiles at the heavy drones, smiling with satisfaction as dozens more turned into small clouds of debris. A thousand kilometers closer to Luna, the city’s patrol craft were firing on stray missiles and pieces of debris.
A few dozen of the ship-to-ship Psion drones peeled off the perimeter and dove straight toward the moon. Cara set the courser’s beams to slicing them apart, but the small craft moved too fast, jinking in ways that would turn an organic pilot to jelly.
At that range, even the Amplified Solution’s targeting systems could only hold a beam on them for a second, which wasn’t enough to penetrate a hull.
She pulled her focus away from those craft, knowing there was nothing she could do, and returned to firing on the heavies, which were now reaching an optimal firing range for their loadouts.
Her own weapons had destroyed over a hundred of the craft, but that was less than a sixth of the force she was facing.
Cara was rapidly flipping through available systems and patterns, looking for options, when a missile mode labeled ‘239’ caught her eye.
“Really?” she whispered, using her command codes to access it. “Oh stars yeah.”
Deep within the ship, automated systems swapped out the warheads on the next volley of missiles, which she configured to strike in a dispersed pattern within the drone formation.
“C’mon…” she muttered, her missiles finally launching just as the Psion fighters began to release their own volley.
Cara quickly reconfigured half of the missiles to detonate between Luna and the drones, and then sat back, a knuckle between her teeth as her weapons streaked through the sun-lit space around Luna.
A board lit up as half the SC battery banks ran dry, and Cara noted that she’d need to upgrade those if the ship was going to get in further mix-ups like the one she was in.
The forward reactor spiked to max power, running several beams on direct power—something that wasn’t wise, but apparently Rondo had spotted the potential issue and had configured a workaround.
“You’re welcome,” he called up.
“Don’t give me that, you’re on this ship, too.”
“And if I was at the helm, we’d be flying away from this mess. Still an option, by the way.”
Once again, she didn’t respond, but this time it was because she was watching her nukes go off amidst the enemy formation and then closer to Luna, engulfing the inbound missiles.
She knew that some would make it through. When scan was able to get a clear picture, she saw that a dozen had survived. The patrol boats had spotted them and were firing wildly, taking out eight in the final seconds before the weapons struck the city.
Domes broke open, and new gouts of blue flame poured into space.
Cara bit her lip and brought the Amplified Solution around, the g-forces mashing her into the command chair. Another volley leapt from her ship, streaking toward the remaining heavy drones, of which there were still over two hundred.
Seconds later, the ship-to-ship drones all changed course, every single one of them vectoring toward the Marsian courser. Their beams slashed through space, overwhelming the electrostatic repulsors, and burning into ablative plating.
Whether it was an automated threat assessment or there was an intelligence behind it was unknown to Cara, but what she did know was that it would only take a minute for the drones to slice through the ship’s hull.
She was about to change course and boost away from Luna, when explosions began to detonate all throughout the drone formations.
“The TSF!” she shouted, then laughed at the idea of being elated for salvation at the hands of the people who had imprisoned her for years.
A dozen destroyers had boosted ahead of the heavier cruisers and were launching salvo after salvo of missiles. The drones selected the more serious threat and shifted to attack the inbound fleet, giving Cara and the beleaguered New Austin defenses a much-needed reprieve.
“That was a near thing,” Rondo called up. “Though our engines took a beating. The port bell got sliced up, so I’ve got the bots out there welding a new flange on.”
“Crap,” Cara muttered.
She hadn’t even noticed the warnings flashing on the nearby engineering console. She missed her old crew all the more and made a mental note to find both them and her old ship before long…orders from her mysterious benefactor and Felix be damned.
While Rondo fought the engine control, Cara scanned the remaining drones. A phalanx had drawn off and was headed for a group of commercial spacecraft still sitting in parking orbits. As Cara studied the grouping, she realized the mass signature didn’t match the number of ships shown by scan.
“Rondo,” Cara called over the comms. “I’m sending you the registry of a shuttle. I want you to crack its communication system.”
“Little busy here,” he growled.
She thought she heard a cat yowling over the channel.
“I’ll manage the maintenance system,” she offered. “You’re better at comms cracking than I am. I want you to get me access to that shuttle.”
“Why that one?”
“It’s Osla. He’s hiding.”
The big man chuckled. “Say no more.”
Cara spent another five minutes mopping up stray Psion drones, until Rondo announced, “Got him.”
“He on the channel?”
“He is now.”
A wave of static crossed the speaker, and then the sound of laughter filled the Amplified Solution’s command deck. Osla was either high or thoroughly enjoying hims
elf.
“Osla!” Cara shouted.
“What? Who’s that?”
With a lock on Osla’s comms system, Cara set the Amplified Solution on a short course adjustment that would take them to the shipping lane where the chancellor was hiding. She was getting her shuttle back.
“This is Cara. Are you going to hide while your people destroy New Austin?”
“They think I’m dead, and they fight in my name! Why would I stop the fun now? Once the city falls, I’ll swoop back in and take control. It’s beautiful. That idiot Harrin didn’t realize what a present he was handing me.”
“That was Camaris, and she meant to kill you.”
“Quibbles. You’re always getting hung up in the details, but you need to look at the big picture. By the way, are you still on that courser?”
“I’m not helping you.”
Cara locked on to the shuttle’s location and dispatched one of the Amplified Solution’s heavy maintenance drones. With a larger engine than the shuttle, the drone could attach itself to it, and pull Osla back to the Amplified Solution.
Cara tracked the drone as Osla continued to celebrate on the open channel. Frowning, she realized Osla wasn’t alone in the shuttle.
When did he pick up passengers?
The drone connected to the small craft and began to haul it toward the courser. The sound of complaints filled the channel.
“What’s going on, Captain Sykes?” Osla demanded. “Is that you?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Chancellor.”
“Yes you do.” Osla raised his voice, asking, “You in the pilot’s seat, what’s going on?”
A woman’s voice explained that the shuttle had been tethered. When Osla told the pilot to break the tether, the woman informed him that they were out of fuel, and that she wasn’t a pilot.
Cara smiled.
“Rondo,” she asked, switching to the internal channel. “Have you recalled the remaining drones?”
“I’m still waiting on a few stragglers. They might be damaged. I could send some out to grab the others.”
“Let them go. I’m taking us closer to Osla’s shuttle. I want to get him on board as soon as possible.”