by Stella Cassy
“You should execute me, sir,” I said in a steely voice.
It was the right thing to do. The noble… no, it wouldn’t even be noble. Not after what I had done. There was no nobility left. For the past few solars, spending time with Essie, I had forgotten about it all. Put it aside. Let myself forget just how far I had fallen. She had made me think, for a flame-flicker instant, that I was better than I was. More than I was. Someone who deserved to live.
But I wasn’t.
“I should.” Tarion stood up and went to stare out of the window again at our home world in the distance. I remained seated, waiting for oblivion.
“Moddoc. There is more that you don’t know. More that went on behind the scenes. It wasn’t just your failure.” He turned back to face me again. “It was my own failure. It should not have been possible for one Drakon to cause the delay of our response to the Pax by so much. This goes beyond your betrayal. It goes to the heart of our people, our planet, our warriors and our defenses. If the Pax could simply bribe one little officer, an insignificant, sniveling little bastard such as yourself, to such great effect — then what does it say about the rest of us? About how we were organized?”
I remained silent. I could not, and would not, criticize the defenses of a planet that I’d partially been responsible for the invasion of.
“And we should have known. Known that you were susceptible to such bribery, known that they would attempt it, known that they were planning an assault. Our failures are not just yours, Moddoc, they extend far, far greater. Where was our intelligence? Where were our spies? Where were our outer defenses?” He paused, letting his words hang in the air. “Should I have us all executed? Perhaps one giant circle of us, together, each shooting our opposite number for our failings?”
I stared hard at the rock desk, wondering how many dozens, thousands or millions of rotations before it had been rich-red magma buried in our planet’s crust, before emerging into the air, only to freeze into its solid form.
“You are a symptom of all that was wrong with our planet’s defenses. Your betrayal was unforgivable, but it should never have been possible in the first place. If our planet were better prepared, you would not have been in a position to be tempted. Do we condemn to death a youngling for stealing mulberries if we leave him alone in a room full of them, with no other source of sustenance? Of course not.”
Tarion shook his head and let out an angry sigh. He turned back to face me again.
“You acted disgracefully. You betrayed your people. And yet… I can’t help but wonder how many others of our so-called great warriors and captains, warlords and commanders, would have acted the same. I do not know the answer. But I do know one thing.”
He stared at me, expectantly.
“What’s that?” I said, my first words since recommending my own execution.
“You are going to make up for your mistake by destroying more Pax than anyone else in the upcoming assault. You are going to be a one-Drakon fist of obliteration to their ranks, such that even on the other side of the galaxy, the Pax will quake at the mere mention of your name after this is all over. You are going to scrape up what little honor you have left from the dust-dirt of Thirren, slap it back onto your face as warpaint, and earn back a smidgen of my respect. Do you understand?”
My heart swelled inside my chest. I was not going to be executed. I was not going to die. Well… maybe I was going to die, we were going into battle after all, but it wouldn’t be at the hands of my own people!
“Sir! Yes, sir! I will obliterate every last one of them! I will rend their ships with my claws, blast the fur off their bodies with my flames, and rip the heart out of their empire with my talons.”
A cruel smile spread across Tarion’s lips at that.
“Good. And if you fail? Let’s just say… you really do not want to fail.”
“I will die a thousand times before I fail you again, sir.”
“Get back to your ship. The assault will begin in one solar. Final plans and adjustments will be sent shortly. Make sure Captain Black is fully aware of what I expect of her, as well as you. Remember, she is your responsibility as well. I will hold you accountable for her mistakes as well as your own.”
“Sir, she won’t make any mistakes.”
“And nor will you. Now get back to your ship.”
I stood and began to exit the room.
“And Moddoc?”
“Sir?”
“Good luck.”
25
Esmerelda
I was so nervous while Moddoc was away that I couldn’t sit still. I tried to sit in the Captain’s chair on the bridge and do something productive — reviewing my fleet. But I couldn’t focus.
What was Tarion going to do to him? Surely he wouldn’t execute him, would he? But then I thought about what I would do if one of my crew had betrayed my fleet. It wasn’t pretty. Not pretty at all.
So I got up, and paced around, marching up and down.
“Captain Black? You’re distracting me,” Oyna said with an irritated click of her beak, her feathers rustling as she glanced my way.
That made me irritated. It was my ship damnit. But Oyna was Oyna. And I needed all the loyal lieutenants I could get in the upcoming battle, and I didn’t want to piss her off.
So I left the bridge and went to the war-room. It was nothing like the one back on my ship, with my own chairs and furniture, and my own carefully crafted feel and atmosphere. This room felt sterile, like a business boardroom back on Earth. Not that I’d ever actually been in one, but I’d seen them in the movies.
When I got my hands on a Pax Prime ship, I’d have all my stuff transported over, really make it my own. Not like this Drakon ship. We didn’t have time to start re-decorating this one. And I didn’t think Ranel would be pleased if I returned it with a makeover.
“Moddoc, Moddoc, Moddoc…” I said to myself under my breath as I began pacing around the circumference of the room, outside of the table and chairs that dominated the center of it. Was he being thrown out of an airlock while I fretted? Was Tarion attacking him?
After a dozen circuits of the war room I could take it no more. I had to do something productive. I made my way toward the bridge.
“Wrigo!” I called.
“Yes, Captain Black?”
“Prepare a craft for me. One of those small scout ships, with cloaking and the shields.”
He stared at me for a moment, and I could feel Oyna’s eyes burying into me from behind as well. They didn’t like it when I went off on my own. They worried about me like a pair of old clucking hens.
I stared back at him, daring him to question me. I hoped he wouldn’t though. I wasn’t in the best of moods and I wasn’t sure what I might do.
“Ye-es, sir,” he said tentatively, before beginning to work at his comm station to make the arrangements.
The ship he was going to prepare was one of a pair of experimental ones we’d stolen from the Yortlek shipworks a couple of jobs back. They were two tiny little things that you could barely strap a laser onto, let alone any real weapons. They had no cargo-hold either, so they were useless for stealing anything bigger than data-chips. The Dirty Duet we called them.
They were a deep-gray color, like dust from crushed lava-rocks, and inside there was just a single solitary room, a cockpit, with a couple of chairs, some controls and not a lot else.
So at first, they seemed like a pretty crappy pair of spaceships.
But they weren’t.
Inside of them, they had these new, experimental power systems that allowed them to move at an incredible speed without sacrificing inertial dampening systems, or shields. Speaking of which, these two little ships seemed to be near impregnable. The power sources they had inside allowed them to project the kind of shielding you’d expect on something like a major battle cruiser, or a Pax Prime ship, rather than a tiny little rocket-sled of a ship.
Not to mention the cloaking. They wouldn’t show up on any kind of r
adar, and once the cloaking was turned on, they were almost invisible to the eye as well. They were coated in such a way that they completely adapted to their surroundings, a chimera-like blending that it made it next to impossible to even focus your eyes on them when they were still. When they were moving? No hope.
I’d got Lognx to have a look at them to see if we couldn’t incorporate the technology onto some of our larger ships, but he’d said it was a no go. He couldn’t even figure out how to examine the power sources without tearing the things apart, and he said the technology probably wouldn’t scale anyway. Something about too much power in one place causing black holes or some such technical garbage.
But I had the pair of them. The Dirty Duet. We hadn’t even given them a proper run, yet. That’s what I intended to do now. To take my mind off of…
“Essie?”
I spun around to see Moddoc standing at the door to the bridge.
“You’re…” I was going to say alive, but I didn’t want to be overly dramatic in front of the crew. Even though my heart was thumping in an overly dramatic manner, “...back. Come into the war-room.”
With the doors closed behind us I hugged him tight, and he lifted me bodily off the floor, picking me up.
“I’m sorry,” I said again.
He put me back down. “Don’t be. It’s probably better it came out now. I mean, what was he going to do, execute me before the grand assault? Of course not. So I have a chance to make amends. If I perform well in the battle, he will forgive me.”
I gave him a playful smack on the chest. Thumping him was like thumping the side of an elephant and caused just about as much distress. He smiled down at me.
“I’ll try to keep my big mouth shut in future. I was just going to go for a ride. Want to join me?”
“A ride?”
“Yeah. A little bit of reconnaissance. While our scanners are pretty good, there’s nothing quite like some eyes-on information gathering.”
I told Moddoc about the Dirty Duet, and my plan to take one of them for a bit of solo scouting. I didn’t tell him about how powerful they were though. I’d let him find that out for himself.
“These ships… I don’t think you mentioned them in the briefing when Tarion was aboard, did you?”
“Must have forgot,” I said with an innocent shrug. Forgot my ass. If the Drakon commander knew about them he would have wanted them for himself, if he had any brains that is. I’d had no intention of sharing my latest toys, not with him, not with anyone.
Anyone except Moddoc.
“Come on. Let’s go to the hangar bay.”
“Which one?” I said pointing my finger back and forth at the two identical ships.
“Whichever you prefer.”
My finger hovered over the one on the left, and then flicked over to the other one.
“That one,” I said with a jerking nod.
“Why?” he asked curiously.
“Because I’m always right,” I said with a cackling laugh as I headed over to the right-hand ship of the pair.
A confused Moddoc followed behind me as he tried to figure out what was so funny about what I’d just said. I guess the pun didn’t translate into Drakonian or whatever they called their language.
I touched a part of the side of the ship, and like magic, a section of the side pushed itself out from the seamless body and folded down, revealing a small staircase.
“Come on!” I said, bouncing up the eight stairs, two at a time until I was inside. Immediately I inhaled the awesome scent of new-ship smell. It was kind of like new-car smell, but much more galactic.
Moddoc lumbered up behind me and had to crouch to enter through the relatively small door. When we were both inside the ship, he turned his head around, examining the small room we were in. It wasn’t much bigger than the supply closet we’d been in together a few days before.
“Is this… it?” he asked. “It seemed small from the outside, but not this small.”
“Yep. Most of the ship is inaccessible. It’s all power systems and machinery and whatnot. This is it. Come on. We won’t be out long anyway.”
It was my first time piloting the ship, but I’d been in several others from the Yortlek shipyards and thankfully the controls were much the same.
“This should close the door…” I tapped a button, and sure enough, the entranceway sealed up behind us. “You ready?”
“Are you sure this is a good idea? We’re co-commanders, shouldn’t one—”
I switched off the inertial dampers, then flicked the ship forward to the exit of the hangar. Without the artificial dampening effect, Moddoc was thrown back into the chair he was standing in front of like a sack of rice thrown off the side of a cliff. He crashed into the back of the seat with a thump that sounded heavy enough for me to feel a twinge of guilt. But just a twinge.
“What’s the matter with this ship?”
“Nothing,” I said as I switched the inertial dampers back on. “You were just sounding a little bit too much like Oyna for a moment there. Now let’s rock and roll!”
Moddoc gripped the sides of his chair tightly, making me think perhaps his translator chip had been a little too literal. My hands flew over the controls and I danced us out of the hangar in a spinning pirouette that would have had us splattered on the walls without the aid of the ship’s advanced technology.
“Can you even fly this thing?” he asked grumpily.
“I can fly anything,” I boasted. It wasn’t strictly true, unless the ability to crash spectacularly counted as being able to fly, anyway. But I could sure as shit fly the hell out of this ship though.
I flicked a couple more switches, turning most of the walls around us into high-resolution viewscreens which may just as well have been windows. I glanced behind us, and so did Moddoc. I hit the gas, and we accelerated away at such a rate that our fleet of ships went from hulking monsters to distant dots in a mere micron.
“What the… what is this ship?”
“Don’t know exactly. Something experimental. But it’s fast, and it’s got amazing cloaking. That’s why we’re using it.”
Moddoc looked around the ship again, as if looking for clues as to its provenance. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Nor had I, until I sto— acquired it.” I played with the controls, speeding us up and slowing us down at rates that would normally have pulverized us, but we didn’t even feel a thing. “Now let’s do some scouting.”
I turned on the cloaking and stealth devices and accelerated us toward Thirren. I turned the shields up to maximum and was amazed to see that the power-draw still read near-zero on the control system. This ship sure was something. When this technology got out into the verse it was going to be game-changing.
“Are you… are you flying us to Thirren?” Moddoc asked, in a deep, masculine tone designed to hide an undercurrent of worry. It didn’t work.
“Yep. I told you, we’re going scouting.”
“That does not seem wise. If we are spotted, we will be blown to smithereens. This ship wouldn’t be able to take more than a shot or two. Does it even have shields?”
“Oh, it’s got some,” I said with nonchalant understatement. This was kind of fun. “Scared?”
“Of course I am not scared. But, tactically speaking, putting ourselves in danger may not be good for the upcoming battle to free our home planet. If we are captured or destroyed, then—”
“Knew it! You’re scared.”
“Am not,” Moddoc said sullenly.
To my continuing astonishment, the ship was fast enough to get us to near Thirren in mere microns. I had to react quickly to slow us down in fact, otherwise we would have overshot it by a few million miles. I slowed us down and brought us into a distant orbit.
“Is that…” Moddoc said, pointing up above our head.
“Yep. It’s gonna be mine,” I said happily. Up above us, was a Pax Prime ship, so close that we could make out the individual gun emplacements. If it kn
ew we were there, it could have over a hundred weapons trained and firing on us.
“It’s not reacting.”
“Yep. Because we’re cloaked.” I leaned over to Moddoc, and put a hand on his leg, giving it a squeeze. I lowered my voice to a whisper. “But don’t be too loud, or they’ll hear us.”
His eyes widened for a moment before narrowing again, and he slapped one of his own heavy hands on top of mine in rebuke. “Sound does not travel through a vacuum. I must say, I am very impressed by this ship’s cloaking ability. At this distance they should at least be able to get a visual on us.”
“I know, good isn’t it? Right, let’s see what they’ve got.”
I zoomed us around the planet in twenty different orbital configurations, taking note of the numbers of ships we passed along the way. The Pax had brought a massive fleet with them, dwarfing my own paltry hundred plus sized armada. Among the ships were four of the massive Pax Prime battlecruisers, each of which could happily level a planet.
“It is going to be a mighty battle,” Moddoc said as we descended from space down to his home planet.
“It’s going to be awesome,” I said.
And it was. The biggest battle I’d ever seen, that was for sure. But it did make me think, at least a little, about the possibility of it all going wrong. But I’d been in tight scrapes before. What would one more battle hurt?
We descended into the atmosphere and found it thick with Pax flyers. The giant ships were in space, but down here there were dozens of smaller craft. Flying gnats that wouldn’t be a problem alone, but a swarm of them would do real damage to our ships.
“I’ve got a good idea,” I said with a beaming grin. It was one I didn’t think Moddoc would think was so wise. But I’d been wanting to test out the shields on this little ship. “Watch this!”
“Essie? What are you—” He clutched the arms of the chair he was seated in hard like it would make a difference. Either this was going to work, or we were going to be toast. “...doing!?”