A moment later she felt a sharp prick and her eyes shot open—her heart pounding, her head buzzing. Her breathing was quick and shallow, reverberating in her helmet. What the frek?
“Welcome back, Alara. You must be feeling more alert now.”
Her eyes narrowed. “What did you do to me?”
“You appeared to be sleepy, so I administered a small dose of adrenaline via your suit’s stim pack to help keep you awake for the duration of your mission.”
“You what?”
“Standard protocol when a pilot accidentally falls asleep is to administer a—”
“Just shut up and fly, Ethan!”
“As you wish.”
Chapter 13
—THE YEAR 0 AE—
Destra picked her way through the shattered colonnade at the entrance of Covena. A cloud of dust and smoke hung thick in the air, dimming the soft morning light and turning it a bloody red. They could see their breath in the cool morning air—steady white puffs of condensing moisture which blended perfectly with the smoke. Digger’s stim lab was on the outskirts of the city, so it had been easy to get to Covena. They’d hiked back to the road and found the hover transport Destra had left there during their frantic escape of a few nights past. The transport still worked perfectly, so they’d driven back onto the road and quickly covered the last five kilometers to the city.
They’d left the stim lab just a few hours after dawn. Digger had stayed behind, of course, and so had Lessie’s son, Dean. That was the only concession Digger had been willing to make when it came to the scavenger hunts. Destra and Lessie would be doing all the hunting and gathering, but Dean could stay behind with Digger where he would be safe. Destra suspected Digger had allowed the boy to stay more to keep them from running off and leaving him to fend for himself than out of any real concern for Dean’s safety.
“What happened here?” Lessie asked, covering a cough as she climbed over a crumbling archway. The clouds of smoke from the fires which must have raged through the city choked their every breath. Adding to that was the fine coating of alabaster-white dust which tickled maddeningly in the backs of their throats every time it was disturbed by the wind or their footsteps. The dust covered everything in sight. It looked like snow, but it was actually white castcrete, pulverized in the attacks.
Destra turned to look over her shoulder. Seeing the pale look of shock on Lessie’s face, she offered the only reassurance she could: “I’m sure they didn’t suffer.”
Lessie shook her head. “I remember Covena. We used to come here all the time. My parents had a cabin by the lake not far from town. . . .”
“Did your family manage to evacuate?” Destra asked as she climbed over a giant boulder and down onto what had once been a cobblestone street. Now the street was a shattered ruin, covered in a thick layer of castcrete dust with scattered clumps of black ash that tumbled and drifted in the breeze. The usual sounds of hover cars and buses, of construction and people—signs of life which typified any city in the galaxy—were now silenced in death. The ruins of apartments and office buildings rose high into the sky. Twisted rebar, empty window frames, and jagged edges were all blurred a hazy white by the clouds of particulates which hung low over the city, making the ruins look like the skeletons of primordial monsters.
“I don’t know,” Lessie replied. “They weren’t rich.”
“I’m sorry.” It sounded trite, but there wasn’t much else she could say. If one weren’t rich, famous, or powerful, there was no way they’d gotten aboard one of the evacuation ships. In the case of the last one to make it off-world, that turned out not to be such a bad thing. That transport had been blown to scrap before it had even made orbit.
“Did you have anyone on Roka?” Lessie asked.
Destra hesitated. “No, just my son.” Destra felt a pang in her chest, and she nodded to the horizon. “Let’s take a look over there. That pile of rubble looks like it used to be a supermarket.”
Lessie accepted the change of topic with only a brief pause. “How can you tell?”
Destra pointed to a blackened cage lying in the street. “That’s one of the shopping carts.”
They walked down the rubble-strewn street in silence, bits of castcrete crunching underfoot, the occasional bird flitting by overhead and tweeting out a cheery tune. Destra held her ripper rifle at the ready, trying to look everywhere at once. There wasn’t much point in looking for an enemy that no one could see, but she couldn’t help it. Her mind wouldn’t stop painting monsters in all the missing windows along the street.
They reached the ruins Destra had indicated, and found that they were exactly that. There were cans and boxes of food scattered everywhere, all of them perfectly blending into their surroundings with a fine coating of white dust.
Destra turned to Lessie. “Get that cart back there and start stacking it with as many things as you can find. I’m going to go back and get the hover.”
“You’re not leaving me here! I’m going with you.”
“We’ll work faster if you stay, and besides, being together is no guarantee that we’ll be safe. There are no guarantees of that. Period.”
“You should have brought the hover to begin with. That was your mistake. Don’t punish me for it,” Lessie insisted. She tucked a greasy strand of blond hair behind her ear to keep it out of her face. Thanks to the fact that Digger’s stim lab had been built off all the grids to begin with, they still had plenty of running water, but showering had been the last thing on their minds this morning.
Suddenly, a loud crunch came from the rubble, followed by shattering glass. They spun toward the sounds. Destra covered the area with her rifle, her heart pounding. An instant sweat began to tickle between her shoulder blades.
“What was that?” Lessie whispered.
“Shhh!”
Then they heard a man groan. It took a moment for them to pick his form out of the rubble because he was covered in white dust like everything else. He was also covered with a glittering sheen of broken glass. Between the sound and the fact that the glass lay on top of the dust layer, Destra deduced that it had been recently broken. Couldn’t be a window, she thought. Those were usually made of transpiranium, not glass. It had likely been some drinking vessel or ornament. Had that man broken it to get their attention?
Then she saw a stream of dust pouring from the pile of rubble over the man’s head. A quick look at the way the rubble rested on the only wall still left standing, bending and cracking the castcrete even as they watched, Destra realized that the structure was unstable and what was left of it was about to collapse on top of what might have been Covena’s sole survivor.
They just stood there blinking at him.
Destra was the first to snap out of it. “Help me!” she said, rushing forward. She unslung her heavy rifle and set it down so it wouldn’t get in the way as she crawled through the open window to reach the man. She heard Lessie crunching through the gravel behind her. As soon as she was by the man’s side, Destra grabbed his hand. He squeezed her hand incredibly tight, grinding her bones together, and looked up at her with wild, bloodshot eyes. As soon as he saw her, he began to kick and scream in the dust. His foot hit a fallen timber and the ceiling dropped another handful of white dust on them.
“Stop it!” Destra spluttered, spitting the dust out of her mouth. “We’re trying to help you!”
The man shook his head from side to side, his eyes rolling. He was delirious. A quick look at the redness seeping into the dust at his side told her why.
“Frek!” she whispered.
“What’s wrong with him?” Lessie whispered back, but then she saw the red color spreading through the dust and she gasped. “He’s hurt!”
Bending down to eye level with the ground, Destra tried to see what the man had landed on. She saw that he was suspended partway off the ground with a twisted piece of rebar stabbing into his back, and she grimaced.
“Help me roll him over.”
Lessie got down
beside her, but her hands were trembling and her eyes were wide. She began shaking her head. “What do you want me to do?”
“Just reach under him and lift when I tell you to. Ready? One, two, three—now!”
They both heaved at the same time and the man popped free of the rebar with a wet sucking noise. They rolled him onto his stomach, and then his eyes shot open and he screamed. He twisted around and sat up with blood boiling from his side, his head turning quickly from side to side like a frightened bird. He was trying to push himself to his feet, but his sudden burst of energy had already faded.
“Oh no, oh no!” Lessie said as she saw all of the blood. She stumbled away from the man as though his mortal wounds were contagious.
Destra grimaced again and drew the pistol at her side.
“What are you going to do?” she shrieked. “You’re not going to shoot him!”
“That’s exactly what I’m going to do.” She set her pistol for stun and shot the man at point blank range. He jittered uncontrollably, and then slumped back toward the bloody metal bar which had impaled him.
Destra caught him with a grunt before he could impale himself for a second time. “Help me get him to his feet!” she gritted out through the strain. The rubble shifted again and more dust trickled over them. “Quickly!”
Lessie and Destra each grabbed him under one armpit and dragged him through the opening out onto the street. Once they made it there, they laid him back down and stood straight, feeling their aching backs and panting heavily.
“Shouldn’t we bind the wound?” Lessie asked.
“We should, but I don’t have anything here. I need to go back and get the hover. There’s a medkit in there we can use. He should be okay for now. That stun blast will have slowed his heart rate enough to buy us some time.” Destra turned and nodded back to the overturned shopping cart. “Start collecting the food. I’ll be back in a minute.”
Lessie turned to her with a scowl. “I told you, I’m not staying here.”
Destra bent to pick up the rifle she’d set down and then handed it to Lessie. “Here. Now stop whining. We need to get him back ASAP if we’re going to save him, and we can’t afford to leave without first collecting some food.” Destra was already turning away. “I’ll be back soon.”
She started off at a jog, heading back the way they’d come. Finding the man lying in the ruins had changed the focus of the mission from their survival to his. Destra had a feeling Digger wasn’t going to be pleased with the new addition to their party, but there wasn’t much to be done about it. If they left him among the ruins he’d either die from blood loss or he’d be found and eaten by the Sythians. Either way they’d be condemning the man to die, and Destra wasn’t about to do that just to please their reluctant host. Digger would have to get used to the idea of sheltering the man—at least until he recovered. Besides, having someone else on their side in the event that Digger became a problem was not a bad idea. Destra remembered his insistence that she and Lessie be the ones risking their lives to gather food and supplies and she nodded to herself. Not a bad idea at all.
* * *
—THE YEAR 10 AE—
Alara watched the range ticking down to the next waypoint—1586 km and dropping fast, although a quick look at the speed gauge showed her velocity dropping, too. Her engines were in full reverse, her fighter decelerating to an appropriate speed before entering orbit around Taylon. So far they hadn’t seen a thing on their recon of the system. The whole mission had been a waste of time! They could have just sent the fighters out with the AIs piloting them. Of course, she wasn’t complaining that they hadn’t encountered enemy contacts, but it still seemed like a waste. Why couldn’t they just send the Defiant through each system by itself? They didn’t need fighters to go ahead of it. No one could see the Sythians’ ships, regardless of whether they were looking on a nova’s scopes or the Defiant’s.
Alara’s gaze dropped to the star map projected from her nova’s MHD, and she tracked the two, small green icons which resembled Mark II’s. They were already sling-shotting around Taylon for the return trip, meaning they hadn’t discovered anything amiss on scanners either. That begged another question—why not simply send out the interceptors as scouts? Why send the whole squadron? She crossed her arms over her chest and glared out at space. During the last 30 minutes, with nowhere to go, nothing to do, and nothing to look at besides the same pattern of stars and the same mottled red and purple planet, she’d grown thoroughly bored. This wasn’t a glamorous job. It was just one step above night watchman!
She heaved a deep sigh.
“Alara, if I may point out, it appears that you are distressed by something. As you already know, any and all physical states which may interfere with the mission are my job to address. Would you like a pick-me-up stim? I have a wide variety of anti-depressants to choose from.”
Alara’s eyes narrowed. “Are you offering to drug me, Ethan?”
“There are no long-term side effects, and I promise it’s not an addictive substance.”
“I’ll take that as a yes. Just give me an estimate of how long before we’re back aboard the Defiant. My legs are cramping, and I need to use the bathroom.”
“Approximately one hour, but your fighter does come equipped for such an eventuality.”
“For what eventuality?”
“The need to relieve yourself.”
“You’re joking.”
“No, I’m not. It’s a suction hose. If you would open your crotch, I’ll extend the hose.”
“Excuse me? Open my crotch?”
“Yes, your flight suit has a separate opening for you to relieve yourself on long flights. Don’t worry, it’s independently pressurized in the event that disaster should strike while you are doing so.”
“Never mind, Ethan. I’ll hold it.”
“Very well, though I should warn you that a full bladder has been known to increase pilot error by a significant—”
“Shut up, Ethan.”
Silence fell in the cockpit once more and Alara shook her head in annoyance. Talking with her AI instructor wasn’t much better than talking with no one at all. She wasn’t sure who had programmed the AI, but it was the most annoying bot she’d ever had to deal with.
Alara went back to watching the star map. Once she had remembered how to use the universal coordinate system and star map, she’d begun to play around with the different settings, finding that she could simply change the zoom level of the map to alter the granularity of the display, rather than always show the default, which was one whole division of space.
The nova’s AI had been impressed with Alara’s so-called intuition with the controls, but she knew it was more than simple intuition. Her surprising knowledge of star navigation and gravidar systems was clearly coming from somewhere—old memories which her slave chip had somehow been unable to completely suppress.
My slave chip.
Alara pursed her lips into a bloodless line. She was startled by how quickly she’d allowed herself to adapt to the fact that she was really Alara rather than Angel. But she couldn’t fight it anymore; too many things weren’t adding up. She still wasn’t sure she wanted to bring Alara back, however, because if she did, then what would happen to her? Would she cease to exist just as Alara had?
For now it was easier to ignore the question than it was to answer it.
Alara eyed the green nova icon immediately to the right of hers and then looked out her window to see her wingmate’s fighter glinting sharply at her in the mauve light of Taylon’s sun. She could make out every detail of the fighter clearly with her naked eyes, which was a deceptive visual reference, since a nova fighter was only 16 meters long, and the star map reported her wingmate was actually a kilometer away. At that range his ship should have been little more than a speck.
While she’d been idly waiting to reach Taylon, Ethan the instructor bot had explained this discontinuity. Space battles usually took place at relatively slow speeds and clo
se distances due to the requirement that one had to first overcome momentum in order to change directions. Even so, fighters and interceptors were so small that one would barely be able to see them if it weren’t for the ships’ AIs making compensations for scale. As such, what one actually saw in space was more simulated than real—much the same way that sounds were simulated because nothing could be heard in a vacuum.
Visual auto-scaling was currently set to the default factor of five times actual, so small contacts would be visible at range, but not overwhelmingly large. The effect would taper off exponentially as range to target dropped, so Alara would still be able to execute precision flying around large capital ships and stations without feeling like she was about to collide with them all the time.
Alara glanced up and out her forward viewport to visually locate the rest of her squadron. All around her she could see their glinting hulls and the blue ion trails of their thrusters.
“Ethan,” Alara began, a thought occurring to her as she returned to gazing at her wingmate’s fighter.
“Yes, Alara?”
“Can you temporarily increase the scale of a ship—just one in particular?”
“Of course.”
“Would you increase the scale of my wingman’s fighter to a factor of say . . . 100 times actual?”
Without bothering to reply, Ethan did as he was told, and Alara flinched as a massive nova suddenly appeared flying beside her. It appeared so close that she could even read the stern expression on Captain Reese’s face as he worked his nova’s controls.
“Interesting . . .” Alara smiled. She could spy on her squad mates like this without them ever even knowing.
“May I ask what purpose this magnification serves?”
“Sign language,” Alara said, trying to come up with something plausible.
“That would only work if your wingman did it, too.”
“Well, tell him to enlarge me.”
“Comms are restricted.”
Dark Space- The Complete Series Page 32