Even as Gina said that, a missile lock alarm sounded across the bridge.
“Go evasive!” Ethan said.
“What do you think I’m doing?”
The alarm became suddenly shrill and then an explosion rocked the deck. The inertial management system flickered, and Ethan felt a sudden, sickening lurch in his stomach before his feet left the deck. He went flying at high speed toward the ceiling as the forces of Gina’s maneuvers at the helm were suddenly fully felt. Ethan had a moment of déjà vu where he remembered dying exactly like this during the Rokan Defense simulator run, and he watched his life flash before his eyes.
But then he felt something strong grab hold of him and arrest his momentum. The emergency grav guns had fired at the last second, and when his back hit the ceiling, he felt only a mild spike of pain. The IMS flickered back on, and the grav guns slowly lowered him back to the deck. “Frek!” Ethan said, recovering gradually from his shock. “What was that?”
Gina shook her head as she settled back into the helm. This time she remembered to strap herself in. “We’re in trouble.”
Ethan hurried to equalize shields at the engineering station—the port shields had taken a nasty hit and they were in the red at 21%. After equalizing, shields on all sides were back in the green at 73%. Ethan set the shields to auto-equalize in future, so he wouldn’t have to stay at the engineering station to manage them, and then he changed the balance of energy so that it was in favor of shields and engines, bleeding energy from the guns and secondary systems in order to do so. That done, he hurried back to the gunnery control station and switched to the missile launchers to see what he could do about those enemy novas. Scopes showed a few dozen junk fighters off their port side, taking ineffectual potshots at them with ripper cannons as they flew past. Ethan guessed that one of those junkers must have launched the missile that had shaken them so badly. Hoping they didn’t have any more warheads, Ethan ignored them and bracketed the closest of the rough dozen nova fighters flying in the distance ahead of them. That fighter immediately broke formation and began jinking.
“Frek!” Ethan said. “The novas have missile lock warning systems!”
“You know that, Adan. You really are skriffy! You’ll have to dumb-fire with a proximity fuse and pray they don’t change their heading before it reaches them, or you’ll miss. Torpedoes are your best bet for that.”
Ethan followed Gina’s advice and switched back to torpedoes—Brondi’s corvette was loaded with “Cardinal” torpedoes, a far cry from Silverstreaks, but still better than nothing. With that, he disengaged the targeting computer and set the proximity fuse for 100 meters. At that range, the explosion should still be lethal to the novas. Ethan fired off six torpedoes in quick succession in a rough circle around the enemy novas. The torpedoes disappeared into the distance on bright gold contrails, and then Ethan ran back to the comm station and hailed the Defiant. “Don’t change your flight path for the next few minutes, Defiant. I have a ring of dumb-fired torpedoes closing in on your pursuit.”
“Roger that,” the Defiant replied. “We’ll hold our course.”
Ethan watched his torpedoes zeroing in on the enemy fighters. They reached 700 meters, and then Ethan’s attention was drawn by an incredibly bright flash of red light lancing past them. Ethan looked up to see an unimaginably wide red dymium beam go shooting by them and slam into the Defiant’s thrusters. A second later, the cruiser’s starboard thruster exploded in a raging fireball.
Ethan was back on the comm in an instant. “Defiant? Are you there?”
Chapter 21
Emergency klaxons sounded all across the bridge; red lights flashed; acrid smoke hissed into the room; flames crackled at one of the control stations, and an officer was slumped there—motionless, possibly dead. Dominic picked himself off the floor and turned to see that the officer who was out of commission was none other than the comm officer, Petty Officer Ashril Grames. The overlord resisted the urge to punch the captain’s table. Grames had been the only semi-friendly face that Dominic had been able to find among all the strangers on his bridge.
“Helm, go evasive! Don’t let them target us again with that beam. Engineering, what’s the damage?”
The helm began maneuvering and suddenly Dominic was wrenched off his feet again. A second too late Petty Officer Delayn at the engineering station said, “The IMS is functioning at 90% efficiency, sir.”
That explained why every little twitch at the helm threatened to send everyone flying.
“And?” Dominic insisted as his XO helped him off the deck for the second time in as many seconds. If the other officers were smart, they’d be strapping into their control stations right about now.
“We’ve lost our starboard thruster and maneuvering jets. Our reactor is damaged, but holding steady at 92% integrity. Aft shields are damaged and offline. The last twenty meters of decks four through eight are open to space, and the starboard engine room bled out a quarter of our fuel before we could shut it down.”
“Is that all?” Dominic asked, feeling strangely fatalistic about the damage. Is that the best you’ve got? he thought. Come on, finish us!
Engineering responded to the rhetorical question: “No, the starboard nova launch tube is inoperable.”
“And the hangar?”
“Still fine.”
“That’s something, at least. Helm, how far are we from the gate?”
“If we head straight there, one minute.”
“Do so at all possible speed. Sacrifice shields and weapons to get there faster. Instruct the novas to get aboard if they can, if not they’ll have to meet us separately on the other side.”
“It’s an eight-hour trip through the gate,” Petty Sergeant Damen Corr at the helm remarked. “The novas will run out of fuel and fall short by several million kilometers.”
“Then we’ll send probes back to locate them! But we can’t stand another hit like that!”
“And the corvette? Should we wait for them to catch up?”
Dominic’s eyes turned glassy and distant. “Yes ... I had forgotten about them.... What’s their ETA?” Dominic asked absently, his gaze locked on a distant star.
His XO replied, “Looks like they’re three minutes from the gate, sir.”
“Too long. That corona beam will be recharged before then and we’ll be hulled.” He turned from the viewports to the gunnery chief. “Set the fuse on our space mines for five minutes. That should give the corvette enough time to get through. We can’t afford to leave the gate intact longer than that.”
“Roger that, sir,” Deck Officer Gorvan said.
* * *
“Oh, for frek’s sake!” Gina said. “They’ve got the Valiant’s main beam online!”
Ethan tried the comm again. “Defiant? Please respond!”
Looking out the forward viewports with his naked eyes, Ethan could see the Defiant ahead of them, cutting an evasive pattern toward the Dark Space gate. That much at least suggested that they were still alive. Unfortunately, they hadn’t stayed still, so the enemy novas had changed course and four out of the six torpedoes Ethan had fired were way off target. The other two, however, were still racing toward the unsuspecting novas within an acceptable blast radius.
Ethan held his breath and watched.
In the next instant one of the novas let loose a torpedo of its own, firing at the unprotected and now flaming thruster banks of the Defiant. The rest of the enemy novas were quick to let their own torpedoes fly, and Ethan’s heart sank. There was no way the Defiant would be able to either outrun or shoot down all of those warheads. He was too late.
Then Ethan’s torpedoes reached 100 meters and they exploded. One of the enemy novas was caught in the blast wave and sent spinning into his wingman. Both of them exploded, and for a miracle, the shrapnel from that explosion hit the nearest enemy torpedo. It detonated with a sudden starburst of light, and that explosion fully engulfed the enemy fighter wave, setting off a chain reaction which wiped them and their torpedoes o
ut in one fell swoop.
“Kavaar!” Ethan whooped. He gaped at all the wreckage which they were now flying through. It pelted their shields and plinked off their hull. A full minute later the supreme commander came on the comm, and Ethan could hear wild cheering in the background.
“You did it, you old frekker!” The overlord said in an unexpected breach of his usually clean language. “We’re clear to the gate! Our mine goes off in five, so be sure you make it in time. See you on the other side, Ethan. Defiant out!”
Ethan’s heart froze. Ethan. The overlord just called me Ethan. He knows who I am! Ethan spun around to see if Gina had noticed the slip, but her eyes were intent upon her control station.
“We’re still a few minutes out,” she said, sounding tense. “We’ll make it before that detlor mine goes off, but the Valiant’s main beam cannon should be almost charged. If it even grazes us, we’re dead.”
“Fly an evasive pattern, then,” Ethan suggested cautiously. Did he even want to make it to the other side? If the supreme overlord knew his real identity, did he also know about Ethan’s role in the epidemic which had swept the Valiant? There were surely some fates worse than death, and if the surviving crew from the Valiant found out what he’d done, even though he’d done it unwittingly, he was sure they would contemplate all of those fates for him and more.
Abruptly, a blinding red flash suffused the entire deck, and Ethan’s contemplation was cut short. He could actually feel the heat of the beam radiating through the transpiranium and threatening to give him a sunburn. The air seemed to hum and vibrate all around him, and a computerized voice sounded across the deck with, “Shields critical.”
And then the beam was gone, and Ethan gasped for air, feeling like someone had just tried to suffocate him with a sun.
“We’re alive!”
“Barely,” Gina said through gritted teeth.
Ethan watched the Dark Space gate swelling before them, growing larger and larger—the shimmering portal looked like a dark pool which they were about to plunge into, and then—
Space disappeared in a bright flash and was replaced by the streaking star lines of superluminal space.
Ethan couldn’t believe it.
Gina breathed a sigh. “Now maybe I can die in peace,” she said, but she wasn’t actually in any danger of dying—probably just in a lot of pain from her broken ribs.
Ethan shook his head. They’d escaped! They were alive! He wasn’t sure whether to be overjoyed or apprehensive. What would the overlord do to him on the other end?
Suddenly, they heard a crackling hiss start up behind them, and Ethan turned to see a hot, molten red line appearing on the duranium bridge doors.
“Frek!” Gina said.
“I think our guests are getting restless,” Ethan said.
Maybe he wouldn’t have to worry about the overlord after all.
Chapter 22
Dominic strode onto the bridge of the Defiant with a scowl. He stopped in front of the captain’s table and gave a quick nod to his XO who was already standing there, waiting for him. He’d had a very rocky night’s sleep while they were travelling through SLS. In the subsequent hours after the ship had dropped out of superluminal, and while they were waiting on the other side of the gate for emergency repair crews to finish crawling over the outside of the hull, he’d awoken briefly to give his bridge crew orders, sending out search and rescue shuttles to find their missing nova pilots. Now, just a few minutes ago, his comm officer had roused him once more with the news that all of their fighters had been found—just six of them. According to the pilots, the other two had been taken out by junkers just before they could make the jump to Sythian Space.
Dominic turned from the captain’s table to Deck Officer Grimsby, the replacement comm officer. “Have we seen any sign of the corvette which was following us to the gate?”
Grimsby shook his head. “No, sir, but our sensors are significantly impeded by the nebula. Perhaps they were damaged or short of fuel and they didn’t make it as far as the exit gate.”
Dominic turned to stare out at the gray Stormcloud Nebula which had hidden the entrance to Dark Space for the past decade. As he watched, there came a bright flicker of static discharging deep within the clouds.
“If they haven’t arrived by now,” the overlord began, “then we have to assume that they’re gone. Helm—” Dominic turned to find Petty Sergeant Damen Corr staring at him expectantly. “Set course for the Stormcloud Transfer Station. We’ll lie low there until repairs are completed.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Wait!” Corpsman Goldrim at the gravidar said, drawing everyone’s attention. “I have contact, coming out of the Dark Space gate ... It’s a corvette analog.”
Dominic whirled to face the comm officer. “Hail them!”
Grimsby nodded and began hailing the corvette, but before he could even reply, the gravidar officer reported once more, “It doesn’t look good.... The corvette is venting atmosphere, and the bridge is open to space.”
Dominic’s heart sank. “So they’re dead.”
“Unless they suited up before the bridge was breached.”
“Comms?”
“They’re not responding to our hails, sir.”
“Are they under power?”
“Yes, sir, but they’re not maneuvering. By now they should have spotted us and begun heading this way if their intent were to rendezvous with us.”
“If they are alive, then they’re cut off from the auxiliary bridge controls.” Dominic turned to Damen Corr at the helm. “Bring us alongside.”
“Yes, sir.”
The overlord turned back to the comm. “Have the hangar operators standing by with the grav guns and bring her aboard as soon as we’re in range. And have a boarding party waiting for me on the hangar deck in five minutes.”
“Yes, sir.”
Dominic nodded and began striding from the bridge. His XO caught up to him a moment later and began speaking to him in hushed tones. “With respect, sir, you shouldn’t take the risk. Let the boarders do their work. You don’t need to go with them.”
As they reached the lift tubes, Dominic turned to her. “I’ll be the judge of what risks I should and shouldn’t take.”
Deck Commander Loba Caldin frowned, but then she nodded curtly. “Sir.”
* * *
After just a few minutes of searching the ship, the boarding party found them—locked inside an escape pod on the shattered bridge.
The overlord peered grimly into the pod as his sentinels unsealed the hatch. “Hoi, there are our heroes!”
Ethan lifted his head sleepily from the single bunk inside the pod and turned to see who it was. “We made it....” He noted with a groggy smile.
“Yes, you did.”
Now Gina sat up beside Ethan. “Finally,” she said.
The overlord jerked a thumb to the shattered bridge deck behind them. “What happened here?”
Gina spoke first: “When we realized the enemy was coming through, we set charges to blow the viewports, and then we retreated to the pod. Seems like they got sucked out into space.”
“A risky plan,” the overlord said.
“No riskier than a firefight on the bridge, which would have blown the viewports anyway.”
“Well, come on out, then.”
Ethan and Gina crawled stiffly from the small escape pod, the latter clutching her ribs and wincing. Once they were standing on the other side, they were able to survey the damage firsthand. Several control stations had been shattered by the blast, and all the viewports were blown out. Jagged pieces of transpiranium glittered on the deck and crunched underfoot as they walked around.
“So,” Ethan said, giving the overlord a measuring look. “Were there any surprises waiting on the other end?”
Dominic met that look with a wry smile. “None at all, Lieutenant Adan.”
The way the overlord emphasized his name, Ethan felt a sharp spike of dread, and he was now surer tha
n ever that his cover was blown.
The overlord shook his head and went on, “No, everything went according to plan, and if the detlor mine we dropped did its job, no one will be following us out for a long time.”
Gina snorted. “They’ll have to make a new gate from scratch after that. There won’t be enough constituent dust left to powder my nose.”
“Sir!” Everyone turned as a pair of sentinels came striding through the melted hole in the bridge doors. “What is it, Sergeant?” Dominic asked.
“We’ve found three more survivors on the detention level, sir.”
“Good! Release them, and bring them to my quarters aboard the Defiant for questioning.”
Ethan was looking at the sentinels like he’d seen a ghost. There’d been people still locked up on the detention level....
“Something the matter, Lieutenant?”
“No, nothing, sir,” Ethan said, making an effort to hide the surge of hope he’d felt at the mention of prisoners aboard Brondi’s corvette.
“Good, go get cleaned up and get some rest.” Turning to Gina, the overlord took in the way she was clutching her side, and he said, “As for you—head to the med bay immediately and get yourself examined.”
“Yes, sir,” they said.
* * *
Maybe I imagined it, Ethan thought. It was just the stress of battle, or maybe some comm interference.... Maybe he didn’t call me Ethan. But the overlord had just summoned him for a personal debriefing—alone in his office—and that made Ethan a whole lot less sure that he’d imagined it.
That wasn’t the only strange thing. They’d found three more people aboard Brondi’s corvette—on the detention level. Alara immediately came to mind. Could one of them be her? He didn’t allow himself to hope for it, but just maybe, if he were lucky—and if she were lucky—then she would be among those three. Or maybe she wouldn’t be all that lucky. There was the small matter that now they were stranded in Sythian Space, in a damaged cruiser, and with barely any fighter escort left to defend them.
Now, five hours after being brought aboard the Defiant, Ethan was all cleaned up, rested, and waiting to meet the firing squad which was surely awaiting him for his crimes. He reached the double doors to the overlord’s quarters and checked in with the pair of sentinels stationed there before being cleared for admittance. The doors parted with a swish, and Ethan stepped inside.
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