Earth Fleet (Rebel Fleet Series Book 4), page 25
The approach worked, to a degree. The enemy cruisers weren’t able to get in close—but they were still able to hit the bigger ship with glancing blows. The damage wasn’t overwhelming from any one ship, but with the remaining fourteen of them gunning for us, we weren’t getting away without taking some hits.
“Shield four is buckling, sir. Shield nine is down to ten percent. It won’t take another hit on that flank.”
“Invert the ship and maintain our withdrawal course,” Thalia ordered.
We rolled over, presenting a new side to our dogged pursuers. That way, a different section of shields and hull was made vulnerable, but the damaged region was out of reach.
The enemy cruisers kept coming. I’d felt a surge of happiness during the first minutes of the battle. I’d helped convince Thalia not to pull her ship out and run. But now, with Fex’s forces closing in, it was hard not to feel the stress of knowing we could be destroyed in the next few minutes.
The most heartening moments came when I caught an occasional glimpse of Earth in the distance. Each time I caught sight of my homeworld, it was farther away. That part felt good. At least no one was dropping bombs on my planet now. With luck, these two hostile fleets would destroy one another.
The ship shook when we took a hard strike on our fantail.
“That one got through,” I said.
Captain Thalia snapped her head around to look at me. “You sound pleased, human.”
I shrugged. “I’m not. I don’t want to die—not yet, at least.”
She walked up to me slowly, cocking her head to one side. “I don’t know what to believe. I was impressed with your bravery when I first became aware of you. You pestered my ship when you knew we could destroy your vessel in moments. But now… I’m not sure what you’re thinking. I don’t like that.”
“I’m just trying to help Earth, Captain. Those ships out there were bombing my planet. My only interest was in stopping them.”
“Ah…” she said, walking a step closer.
The super-massive shook under our feet again. The deck seemed to buckle for a moment—but then it stretched flat again. I could only imagine the fantastic stresses it was enduring while being pounded by Fex’s determined fleet.
“I understand now…” Thalia continued. “You want our two fleets to grind each other to dust. Be assured, this Imperial vessel is superior. When we destroy the last of these rebels, we’ll deal with your homeworld in a fitting manner.”
“Providing us with a victory speech and a trophy, I hope.”
She ignored my words and moved to watch the battle again.
It was intensifying. Fex was down to twelve cruisers, but they were closing in. they began to score bigger and bigger hits.
As I watched, Thalia ordered her ship to come about again, aiming far enough back to strike again with her main guns.
Hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, the oncoming cruisers saw this and began to alter their courses at random. We were far enough apart that it took a few light-seconds to reach out and strike at one another. If a ship dodged in a random pattern, it was much harder to hit.
Again, the big main batteries sang and connected the super-massive with the hounds pursing her. One of them blew up—but then everything changed.
A hundred tiny red contacts appeared all around us—then two hundred more.
“Incoming!” one of the bridge crew called out. “Brace for impact!”
I wasn’t sure if they were missiles or fighters, but they’d managed to get in close before we’d spotted them.
“Sneaky bastards!” Thalia snarled. “They waited in stealth until we fired so our shields can’t be pumped up to maximum. Shut down all weapons other than short range turrets. Power up our shields as much as possible!”
An underling dared to get her attention. “Captain…? If we shut down our primary engines, we’d have a lot of power for the shields.”
Thalia growled indecisively for a few seconds.
Outside in space, things went from bad to worse. The small contacts appeared to be fighters—stealth fighters which had managed to get in very close indeed to our huge ship’s hull.
“Kill the primary engine,” Thalia said at last. “We’ll have to fight it out.”
“But the enemy cruisers will catch up to us.”
“Don’t you think I know that? If we don’t bolster our shields, the fighters will penetrate. We have to deal with one threat at a time.”
We started cruising rather than flying under heavy thrust, and the shields brightened on every quadrant. The enemy fighters swarmed us like furious hornets, but they couldn’t get through.
A grim methodical slaughter began. The cruisers had stopped firing, fortunately, for fear of hitting their own fighters. That left the super-massive free to abuse the tiny ships that formed a tangled mass around her.
Seven minutes later, the last of them buzzed away in full retreat.
“They lost sixty percent of their number,” Thalia said pridefully. “They won’t return again after that kind of beating. Once the Rebel Kher break, they don’t come back to the front line. A lack of discipline like that will lose every battle in the end, Blake.”
I nodded. “I hope you’re right. Those cruisers are looking kind of close to us now.”
Thalia’s eyes slid back toward the screens, and she stopped boasting.
Fex and his surviving ships were on top of us and moving to encircle.
=48=
The mood on the bridge became grim. Every Imperial gunner was fighting methodically, targeting one cruiser after another and blasting them out of space—but it wasn’t going to be enough.
Already, the big ship’s shields were buckling. The outer hull of the massive vessel was being scarred by strikes that won through. A large battery of six guns on the belly of the super-massive had been knocked out.
A simulation expert stepped up to Thalia to make her final report. Her face was ashen.
“Well?” Thalia demanded. “Will we make it out of this filthy excuse for a star system or not?”
The simulation officer shook her head. “We will destroy most of them… but when they are down to five ships—maybe six—we’ll be disarmed and overwhelmed.”
“That’s it?” Thalia snapped. “No tactical ingenuity? No last-ditch defensive miracles to offer?”
The simulation officer looked surprised and blinked. “There are several such items in the report—the prognosis includes the full implementation of all of them.”
Captain Thalia threw the flapping computer sheet at the officer, who scrambled to catch it.
“Fine. Implement everything on your list. Let’s hope you’ve failed in your predictions.”
The simulation officer rushed away and relayed the orders. We soon began a sickening series of rough course changes.
Captain Thalia walked to where I still stood, clamped between her two robotic males. They’d never spoken a word to me. Perhaps their vocal chords had been determined to be superfluous.
“And here you are with your talk of glory and honor. Are you pleased now? We might have run and saved this ship.”
I shrugged. “Why do you care what an Earthman thinks?” I asked.
She came dangerously near.
“I find you oddly attractive,” she said. “You’re not like our males—you haven’t been tamed. It has an inexplicable effect on my thinking. Too bad we’ll all be dead soon.”
I smiled. “If by some miracle your war game officer is wrong, I’ll go on a date with you, Captain.”
Thalia snorted and shook her head. She paced the deck and all around us people scrambled to fight the battle. As was the case on most large facilities, the overall commander decided the big-picture strategy, but once the fighting began she was a spectator for the most part.
Soon the Rebel fleet was down to ten cruisers, then nine. On the Imperial side, the damage was mounting up. The key to the battle wasn’t for the smaller ships to destroy the super-massive outright. They lacked the firepower for a deadly single punch.
But they could snip off pieces. All the external armament was being trimmed away. Thalia had already expended all her missiles and now was down to gun turrets. These were half-gone as well, and her shields were all flickering out.
When our last offensive armament was knocked offline, the big ship would be nothing but a punching bag. Sure, we could turn tail and run, but to what purpose? The cruisers would chase Thalia’s ship down like a pack of baying hounds, shooting out her engines. In the end, she wouldn’t even be able to steer.
Suddenly, Thalia straightened her spine and swung her body around. There was a new light in her eyes.
“Helm!” she roared. “Swing around their satellite. Return to the planet, throttle full-forward. Send all the power we’ve got left to the engines and the aft shields. Ceasefire with all cannons.”
The bridge crew looked at her in shock. The pilot obeyed, however, and I felt a surge of acceleration under my feet, combined with a lateral centrifugal force. The big ship was making a slow curve, coming around our moon to aim toward Earth again.
Clearing her throat, the simulation officer approached in a wary fashion. “Captain Thalia? I’m so sorry, but this course will hasten our doom—”
“Oh really? Can we, possibly, destroy a few more of these cruisers if we stand our ground? What a pity. Well, I’ll tell you what’s on my mind, tactician: I want vengeance. I want to go out in a fashion that’s memorable, rather than ignoble.”
“I don’t understand what—”
“Of course you don’t! You know nothing of glory or how to die with style. Shall we ask this ape here what my plan entails? Come here, ask him.”
The two approached me. They were both lanky but attractive women. I’d seen their kind in clothing advertisements all my life. It was odd to be faced by such a pair at such a dramatic moment.
Captain Thalia raised her eyebrows expectantly.
I looked up at the big screens. We were coming around the Moon now, soon to be aimed back at Earth. Our velocity continued to rise, and the trip back from the Moon to Earth’s orbit would be much shorter than it had been on the way out here.
My first thought was Thalia was going to try to fly through one of the rifts that Fex had created when he’d come to assault Earth. Perhaps we could attack his homeworld by doing that.
But a quick perusal of the facts dashed that idea. First off, the rifts weren’t in front of us. They’d orbited around to the far side—or we had. Secondly, the super-massive was just too big to fit into one of those spinning breaches.
Then, at long last, I got it.
“You’re going to ram Earth?” I said. “Crashing down into a city or something?”
“Or something,” she said. “I think a better choice would be one of your deepest oceans. Why take out a single city when a tidal wave might take out a hundred?”
I stared, aghast. The simulation officer looked as horrified as I did, but for entirely different reasons.
Captain Thalia laughed bitterly at us both. “This could even be an extinction event,” she said. “If we can build up enough kinetic energy…”
I was no longer listening. I was too stunned, too sickened.
The worst part was I knew that I’d helped bring about this sequence of events. I hadn’t been satisfied knowing Fex had chased off the Imperials. No, I’d kept pushing, driving Captain Thalia to this fateful moment.
My only solace was that if Earth did perish with me, no one would ever be the wiser. My sick failure as a human was a secret the cosmos would never share.
=49=
As a veteran trickster, I was now regretting some of my life-choices. I’d gotten entirely too fancy, too fast-and-loose with reality. I’d helped change a bad situation into one that was nearly hopeless—and my homeworld was about to pay the ultimate price.
I didn’t let my state of near despair show, naturally. There was no reason to give these vicious Imperials an extra boost of pleasure.
Instead, I put on an expression of confidence and even amusement. As the final minutes passed by, this seemed to annoy Captain Thalia.
“What are you grinning about, ape?” she demanded at last. “Are you glad to die with your pathetic sub-species?”
“Sometimes, ma’am, things aren’t as they seem.”
This annoyed her to no end. She paced around me, frequently casting glances in my direction. Her kind wasn’t used to acts of cheerful defiance from a beaten enemy. Either you hissed and spat, or you groveled and begged—there were no other options in her mind.
“What could you be thinking…?” she asked herself, looking over every monitor and sensor reading.
Not long after that, she started her search for a phantom detail she’d missed. The tactical officer then made a surprising announcement.
“Captain? More ships have appeared.”
Immediately, Thalia and I swung to look toward Fex’s rifts. We saw nothing new there.
“No… behind us. The ships are small, but they appear to be engaging the rebel cruisers.”
The primary display swam sickeningly for a moment, giving us a view of this new development.
“Phase-ships?” Thalia asked in surprise. “Are those Imperial vessels?”
“No,” I said loudly and with utter certainty. “They’re our ships. Earth vessels.”
She swung her eyes to me, and her mouth was slightly ajar. I felt a surge of happiness to see the alarm in her expression. Things were happening that she hadn’t expected—and to be honest, I hadn’t expected them either.
The tactical officer came to the center of the bridge and pointed at me. “It’s my suggestion that we execute this beast, Captain,” she said.
“Why?” Thalia asked. “He’ll be dead soon enough if the simulation officer is correct.”
“Things have changed. The cruisers are being hit hard on their flanks. Another has been destroyed.”
Thalia and I both examined the data. It was true. The phase-ships were outdoing themselves. Probably, Fex had taken down his flank shields during the long chase after the super-massive, believing he needed all his power to chase down the larger ship.
“The cruisers are slowing down, engaging…” Thalia said.
She looked up at me sharply then turned toward the tactical officer. “You still haven’t explained why we should kill this clever beast.”
The tactical officer glanced down at the deck, steeled herself then met the captain’s eyes.
“He’s distracting you. Altering your judgment. It’s my belief that he may yet endanger—”
“Nonsense!” Thalia shouted. “This human is nothing to me! He’s a distraction, I admit, but his presence changes nothing. Besides… if the humans manage to destroy the other rebels for us, what’s the harm in that?”
The tactical officer compressed her lips tightly, and she said nothing more. I got the feeling that arguing with this captain might be fatal.
“Get back to your post,” Thalia ordered, and the other woman rushed away. “Helm, start braking. Come about—slowly. We’ll see if we can help these crazy humans with their task at a safe distance.”
I watched, uncertain how this battle would play out now. Earth had built over two hundred phase-ships, but they hadn’t been deployed optimally. Not knowing where the next attack might come, we’d stationed our vessels in various positions. About half of them had managed to get close to Fex’s cruisers.
But not all of those ships had been in range for that all-important opening volley. As I watched, three phase-ships were destroyed and one more of Fex’s cruisers vanished as well.
That was enough for the enemy. They spun up rifts and ran for them. The phase-ships gave chase, but they phased-out rather than going into rifts that led to unknown places.
Dumping gravity waves and braking for all she was worth, the badly damaged super-massive managed to slow down and slip into orbit over Earth.
Captain Thalia approached me in wonderment. “What’s next?” she asked. “Will this vessel be enclosed by your ghosts?”
“Maybe,” I said. “It’s all up to you.”
Thalia squinted at me like an angry cat. “We could bomb your pathetic planet, you know,” she said. “What’s to stop us from doing that?”
I shrugged and gave her a mysterious smile. That bothered her a lot. I could tell now that she didn’t trust me. She suspected she’d been set up from the beginning.
“I think there’s been entirely too much fighting and dying today,” I said. “When I came here, I did so in good faith. I offered to provide you with an example of the technology you fear so much.”
“We fear nothing!”
“Just so. Clearly, I misspoke.”
She paced around me in a tight circle, muttering to herself.
“I should abuse your neural transmitters. I would find that amusing.”
“I’m sure you would, Captain. But torture won’t solve your problems now.”
She paced some more. The next time she came around, she put her face close to mine. The two marines who had me clamped between them tightened their grips reflexively, just in case I was thinking of pulling something.
“You’ll give me an alien responsible for this mess and a sample of the technological ability to spin up long term rifts?”
“That was my original offer,” I said. “In return, we ask only that you leave our system intact.”
She paced some more, but at last, she agreed to my terms.
“Well?” she asked. “Show me!”
It was my turn to laugh. “I don’t have such things on my person. You’ll have to come down with me to our command center. We can use the transmat.”
Her suspicious eyes tracked me. She stared at me unpleasantly.
“This seems like another base trick, human. You’re attempting to lure me off my bridge so you can abuse me.”
“All right,” I said. “If you don’t want to complete this mission in person, I can certainly reveal the truth to one of your underlings. Perhaps the simulations officer—or the tactical leader.”
