Hell or Highwater (Hell's Jesters, #5), page 44
“Now, we finish the job,” he replied. “We take that clown back there and put him in front of a holocamera to spill his guts to the whole galaxy. And then we play whatever’s on that peta-drive for them.” He held up both hands, as if to say, what else? “Then we sit back and watch.”
“Yeah, I meant what happens after,” Tina replied. She leaned forward, set her elbows on her thighs and folded her hands together as her gaze dipped to the floor. “What happens between us.”
“I knew what you meant.”
“I’m not...” Her eyes went glassy as she stared at the deck plate, but he knew saw something far beyond, something haunting, awful. He couldn’t imagine. “It’s not ever going to be a family-thing for us, Dad,” she said at last. “We’re not going to have holidays together and birthday wishes across the ether-tenna. We’re too far gone for that.” She dragged in a long breath that rattled when released. “I’m too far gone.”
“You’re not.”
“Dad, you really don’t understand.” She shook her head and crystal tear-flecks glinted free. “I talk a tough game, because I have to, because that’s what puts one foot in front of the other. But you don’t know what they did to me. I...I have to keep moving. I’ve got to keep fighting.”
“You’re not too far gone.” He got up from his seat, stepped over to her, and knelt before her. “No matter what. I don’t accept that. I didn’t blast my way through this hunk of junk to get you back to just roll over.”
He took her hands into his and she didn’t resist. “We’re messed up. And that’s how it is. I get that. And if you have to go on fighting the whole galaxy, fine. But even if there’s going to be a hundred parsecs of space separating us, I’m not going to have there be that other kind of space between us anymore.”
He squeezed her hands, held them up, made her look at him. “Not anymore. Do you get me, little lady?”
She blinked out more tears, laughed. “Little lady...Jesus, Dad.”
“I’m out of practice, all right?”
“Not so much that you didn’t do right, this time.” She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and pulled him into an embrace. He felt her words spoken against his brow. “You did right, Dad. Thank you.” She squeezed, hard. “I love you.”
“Love you, too, kid.”
It was the whole universe, right there in that moment, everything he was. Jerry didn’t know how long they held on to one another, father and daughter, but he finally released her and got up, strolled back to the helmsman’s station. Slumping down, he turned the chair slowly, looked at the weird nether-sights of hyper.
“Do you think this mad scheme works out?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Tina replied, getting up from the navigator’s chair and coming up to sit beside him, both staring off into the Beyond.
“All I know is that it’s a whole new game, out there.”
“WE’VE PICKED UP A TAIL!” Cory squeaked over the squadron channel.
Tim jerked upright in the cockpit of the Hellhound. Given leave to take his survivors back to Tripwire Station while Red and her wing fanned out to help screen the Union Fleet, he’d half-dozed off as the fighter crossed the system to the debris field. Rubbing crust from his eyes, he looked to the tactical display.
The hyperspace halos of the departing Alliance force were still glittering across the heavens as, one by one, groups of ships left and increasingly smaller parties guarded against a last-second rush at them. That was paranoia; the Union ships were in no shape to press another fight. But after the horror of the last twenty hours, no one was taking chances.
Except it looked like someone was.
“What the...?” Tim zoomed the tactical in on a trio of icons streaking for the edge of the asteroid belt. “What do you make of that, Jeanie?”
“Their current course appears to cross ours,” the AI replied. “Rather, it appears their destination is the same. They’re heading for Tripwire.”
“Who?”
Jeanie threw up a war book globular. The schematic of a Union Marauder appeared. “At least one friendly.” Schemata of Valkyries joined it. “And two that are not.” The icons on the tactical pulsed frantically. “And it appears the two are firing on the one.”
“Chasing it,” Tim said. “How the hell did any of them get all the way out here?”
“Drive signature fluctuations suggest all three are damaged,” Jeanie replied. “I’d hazard that they’re stragglers, the Valkyries from the debris field fight and the Marauder from another sector. We did indicate Tripwire as a fallback for any Union crew.”
“Still, a long-damned way.” Tim shook his head. “Gotta do something about it, though.”
“Tim, are you seeing this?” Cory demanded.
“Easy, kid. I do.”
Tim checked over his sad bunch; seven Hellhounds, all used hard. “Number Nine and Thirteen, stay out of it, fellas. No use risking it in your shape.” He waited on their replies. “Matyszak, you take Eleven and Fifteen and cut across their approach. Don’t let ‘em by. Cory and I will cut across their tails.”
“Roger that, Jester Leader,” the former-mercenary answered in an exhausted near-monotone.
Tim couldn’t blame the guy. He didn’t want to do this. Every fiber in him cringed in resistance. But they couldn’t just leave it, not with the Marauder leading the Valkyries right back to Tripwire. He touched the comm. “Jeanie, signal the Station and warn them if they haven’t already picked this up. We got anyone back there?”
“A skeleton crew,” the AI replied. “Working on it now.”
Tim keyed the private channel to Cory. “You got one more rush in you, kid?”
“You know I do.”
“Then form up on my port wingtip,” he replied. “And let’s finish this.”
With gravity drives shivering the whole spaceframe, Tim veered towards the oncoming fighters. He drew a long breath to steady the roil of his guts, fought back the urge to leave this to someone else. He was so damned tired and the wait seemed to go on forever as they tore across the vacuum.
Faint blaster flashes chased the Marauder as it reached the edge of the debris field and veered into it. The Valkyries pursued without hesitation. For a moment, the sensors lost all three of them in the jumble.
Matyszak’s trio arched away from Tim and Cory, into the asteroids on a course that would hopefully box off an approach to the station. Tim kept going, skimming the inner periphery of the field towards the point at which the chase had pierced it.
“Coming up on optimum entry,” Jeanie announced. The tactical blinked with a pair of dotted lines, one for her proposed route; the other the estimated path of the Marauder. “We should come in directly behind them.”
“Unless they changed course,” Tim pointed out. “Cory, you seeing them?”
“Nothing, Tim.”
They were only catching quick glimpses of Matyszak’s party now, too. But the hologram fluttered, caught energy emissions amidst the tumbling rocks. The dotted line Jeanie had drawn adjusted slightly. A city-sized slab of asteroid tumbled towards them, pulsed on the display.
“Picking up weapons fire again,” Jeanie said. “We will be at optimum range when we close with them. Course change in ten seconds.”
“Do they see us?”
“Unclear.”
“Jester Leader.” Interference from the debris broke up Matyszak’s voice. “We’ve got eyes on them...here they come...”
The tactical buzzed. “Course change now!” Jeanie said.
Keeping the Hellhound on manual control, Tim nosed the Hellhound into a sharp turn. The space slab whirled by him to starboard, Cory looping off to port and straining to stay on him in the turn. A pop and a smear of sparks spoke of some micro-particle glancing off his shields. Something larger wobbled across his path and it was Jeanie’s cybernetic reflexes that took over for a second, twitched the Hellhound past a hovercar-sized fragment.
Then an azure bolt of light slashed across Tim’s nose.
“Shit!”
They were right there, hanging in space before him for a terrible instant. Only a rip back on the stick saved Tim from becoming one with a hurtling Valkyrie. The maneuver carried him over the Alliance fighter by what might have been fifty meters.
“Shit!!!”
Cory lurched in front of him, cutting into a turn after the chasing fighters, which now shot on past them to aft. No quick reaction of Tim’s or computer adjustment by Jeanie rescued them from collision, this time—just dumb luck as Cory lashed by overhead, tearing after the Valkyries.
“Watch that!” she snapped at him.
“Who the hell’s in charge here...?” Tim grumbled as he flung the Hellhound into a sideslip, pulsing thrusters and maneuvering fields simultaneously to alter his velocity and yet still maintain enough to not get left behind.
The chase wound on into the asteroids without him. Cory crawled up the tail of the trailing Valkyrie, was nearly in firing position when Matyszak’s trio slashed across the pursuers’ path in a spasm of looping, twining ships. Energy bolts sliced in the dark, smacking off debris and filling the space with whirling slag. None of the fighters looked to be carrying missiles. It was a blaster fight, a knife fight at crazy close quarters.
The Marauder shot through, tried to leave the scrum behind. But one of the Valkyries stayed on it, even as its wing mate writhed into a desperate course to try and draw off the ambush. Cory pursued the pursuer.
Piling on as much speed as he dared in the crowded, random-shifting maze of the asteroid belt, Tim chased after her. “Tripwire Station,” he called into the general address, “this is Jester Leader Two-One. Hold your fire! You’ve got hostiles and friendlies inbound!”
Cory peppered the Valkyrie’s aft shield in azure flame. The punishment didn’t seem enough to startle the Alliance pilot out of his pursuit. The Valkyrie’s particle cannon strobed, slammed the Marauder at a range close enough to blow out whatever shields it had left in a brief nimbus of pale fire, followed by spark-trails and a faint smear of venting gas.
“Mayday! Mayday! Jester base, I’m hit! This is Slasher Leader, flying off the Sacramento! Friendly!”
Lightning blasted through Tim at the words, at the voice. How? What is she doing here? With a snarl, he dumped power to the thrusters, ignored the peril of flying debris as he charged to catch up to Cory. His whole universe became that single icon on the tactical, rushing for the safety of Tripwire Station.
“Repeat, this is Slasher Leader, Union pilot, requesting emergency landing!”
“Hold on, Slasher!” Tim heard himself bellow.
Cory lit Kelly’s pursuer up again, this time peeling his shields apart with a sustained blaster burst. The Valkyrie jolted with a secondary explosion as its energy barrier protection unraveled. A fleck of flame leapt from its spine, sent shrapnel spinning loose. A hunk of what looked like it might have been blown-out shield projector tumbled back along its path.
“Cory, look out!”
The chunk careened into her forward shields, smashed off them in a white-fire splash of instant slag and overloaded shield. Her Hellhound jerked to starboard like a brawler caught by a right cross to the jaw and wobbled.
“Cory!”
“I’m all right! But where’s—”
The Valkyrie pulsed its particle cannon once more and a bolt skewered Kelly’s Marauder, gouging up alongside its ventral surface and whirling the quad-blaster mounted there into a cascade of glowing shrapnel. The rest of the fighter staggered, engines fluttering, speed and course going erratic.
And Tripwire was spreading out before them, the pseudo-planet swelling into a shallow horizon below and the station directly ahead, at the far side of its crater and crowning the lip of rock. The three starfighters hurtled out across that vast expanse of open, craggy plain, a cold, silent chase.
The Valkyrie fired again but seemed to misjudge how much speed Kelly had lost to damage. Energy blasts walked past her, churned the surface of the asteroid into plumes of dust that reach for them all, obscuring and setting Tim’s shields momentarily alight. The Valkyrie wobbled to avoid slamming right into Kelly’s dorsal surface, hit its braking thrusters to fall back, aft of her for the kill shot.
It was the moment Tim needed, the maneuver putting enough space between the Alliance fighter and Kelly’s Marauder. The targeting icon settled over the delta-shaped silhouette, crimsoned with lock. He pulled the trigger and plasma bolts ravaged forth. It looked like the Alliance pilot tried a last-moment juke, but the reflex only walked it into Tim’s fire and it shattered in a long, fluttering string of explosions that rained flame-splinters all across the face of the crater.
“Hit bad!” Kelly’s voice warbled in Tim’s earbud. “Coming in hard, base!”
Tim’s heart hammered up into his throat as he coursed power to the braking fields, slowed his Hellhound’s wild charge across the crater. “I’m here, baby!” he cried, not know if she’d hear or have any idea who he was. “Slow it down!”
But she wasn’t, couldn’t. The Marauder was shedding fragments of itself as it tumbled for the wide slit-opening of Tripwire’s hangar bay. Its nose started to dip dangerously, but a twitch lifted that. The correction became an error as the fighter began to slide sideways with its tail dipping. In the almost-non-gravity of the pseudo-planetoid, the debris coming off the stricken craft hung about it in a cloud, the whole coming down on the station like an explosion.
“Slow it down!” Tim wailed. He switched channels. “Tripwire, disable your emergency shielding. You’ve got to let her land!”
What he knew the sparse Jester crew manning the station had to consider was that the out-of-control wreck was as deadly as an attack now. Its normal crews would likely have thrown up shields and sacrificed the ship to save the station and its occupants.
“Let her land...” Tim pled.
Kelly’s Marauder flinched at the last moment, nose leveling as the whole seemed to right itself. But it wasn’t enough. Shrapnel flying ahead of it slammed into the cliff face, impacts walking up to the lower lip of the hangar bay and flinging metal and rock into its path. This jolted the nose back up and left the tail dragging—then striking the edge of the hangar mouth. The whole ship flopped forward, crashing belly-first into the bay. Sparks and shrapnel sleeted into the space. The Marauder spun across the blastcrete and crashed into the far side of the hangar in a plume of flame.
“Noooo!!!”
Tim decelerated with violence that flung him into his restraints and nosed his Hellhound down into the fiery chasm of the hangar. Shields fluttered from the fumes and he killed them before his own ship did more damage to the station. He found what looked like enough room and killed the gravs, flooded the ventral maneuvering fields, settled the Hellhound down to the blastcrete.
Practically sobbing with panic, Tim cracked the canopy and writhed free of his four-point harness. The air of the hangar bay was a horror of fumes that scathed nostrils and throat instantly. Alarms wailed. Automated fire extinguishers hissed, were joined by the crackle of force fields activating to contain the blaze of the crash. They’d suffocate the flames.
If Kelly hadn’t gotten free, they might suffocate her.
Tim flung himself down the Hellhound’s wings, slid, and hit the floor at a sprint. Weaving around scrambling crews trying to bring firefighting gear to bear, past drones still mindlessly carrying out their tasks in the midst of catastrophe, he reached the scene of the crash in moments.
Subdued by the emergency measures, the inferno consuming the wrecked Marauder was beginning to gutter down. But the heat of it still shriveled the flesh of Tim’s face, scathed his eyeballs till tears ran. He stared vainly into mangled, glowing twists of metal. The crash had warped any sense of its normal shape. But it was clear anything—anyone—still trapped in the midst of that hellishly-contorted mass would be ash by now.
“No...”
The tears came from within, now. Pain like he’d never experienced lanced through him. Mom and Dad dying in that factory accident, all those years ago hadn’t cut him like this. Finding his ex-wife taken up with another hadn’t stabbed through to the heart the same. This was the death of something he’d given himself to, heart, mind, and body. Kelly had been his everything. She’d been his future.
And now his future burned down to slag and cinder before him.
He peeled off his helmet, let it dangle in his hand a moment before dropping it to the floor. The other hand went to his matted hair, twisted through it, fingers writhing across his scalp. He couldn’t tear his gaze away from the smoldering pyre.
“I love you...” he rasped at the flames and fumes. “This doesn’t change that. Nothing will. I’ll always love you.”
“I love you, too.”
Tim flinched. The words weren’t in his head. Were they? Had he gone mad? But he’d heard them, spoken from behind. Numbly, he turned.
A ghost stood before him. Union-issue flight suit hung partially off a wasted, weary figure, armor pads singed and smudged. A battered helm, scorched on one side, dangled from the phantom’s hand. Like his, it fell from the fingers, landed with a clack on the blastcrete. Green eyes throbbed out from a hideously pale, blood-smudged face. Rags of auburn loosened down either side of it.
It was all there. Wasn’t it? She was there.
“Am I seeing this?” he warbled. “Is this real?”
The specter held out the hand that’d grasped the helmet, took his. The contact blasted through him like a blow to the chest. The fingers were tacky with drying sweat, but worked in between his, trembling, clenching.
“Does this feel real?” Kelly said to him.
Tim nearly collapsed. “How?”
“I ran,” she replied unevenly. “I deserted, made a run across the system. Those guys that picked me up must’ve been orphans from a carrier that went down, or something, ran across me on the way back to their fleet.”
“You...deserted?”
“Again,” she said with a hopeless, little chuckle. “Deserted back to where I deserted from before.” She looked into his eyes. “I know it won’t be easy...with all the lies. But I need to be around people I know, now. People I love.”
