Star Fire, page 7
part #1 of Stars End Series
I wind up on top of Joie, looking down at dead leaves and a few small insects beside her head. A boot presses into my back, keeping me there.
“Listen carefully, Alliance,” he says. “This is no time for patriotism. Whatever you think about the war, whatever you think about the Commune, archive it right now. We’re in deep, and the only way we don’t drown is together. Understood?”
“Understood, Captain Rozik,” I reply.
The boot vanishes from my back. I let go of Joie and roll over, coming up in a crouch above her and looking up at the Commune officer.
His appearance matches his gruff tone. Dark hair, square head, small nose, beady eyes and stocky but muscular build. He’s wearing what’s left of his officer’s uniform beneath an exo-suit, the button-down shirt torn and a small stain of blood spreading from an injury to his side. He’s coated in a sheen of sweat. “You know me?” he asks.
“By your voice,” I reply.
He heaves out a breath of air. “You’re Commander Stone.” He takes a step back. “Pick her up slowly. Don’t make a sound.”
I pivot back to regain my grip on Joie, checking her pulse before I do. Still alive, but getting weaker. I pick her up and stand.
Rozik puts a finger to his lips, using hand gestures to signal the aliens’ position. I look into the distance, swallowing hard when my eyes land on the source of the thumping.
I don’t know if it’s a robot or a mech, but the machine is nearly ten meters tall, a pair of legs leading into an oblong, headless torso. A large turret rests on top where a head should be, while a second turret sits between the legs, pointing forward. The back of the torso protrudes outward, revealing a set of thrusters.
The torso begins turning in our direction, and I duck back behind the tree.
“What is that?” I ask.
“Doesn’t matter right now,” Rozik replies. “It wants to kill us. That’s enough.” He points away from the machine. “We need to make it to those trees.”
The dense forest in that direction is nearly indistinguishable from the direction I was headed a minute ago. “Can we outrun it?”
“We have to,” he says. “Don’t worry, I have one more card to play.” He turns the rifle slightly to show me a land mine magnetically attached to the handguard. “I’ll drop this behind us. Then we pray.” He points. “That tree, to that tree, to that tree. Understood?”
“Copy that,” I reply. “Do you have another weapon?”
“Maybe when I trust you a little more.”
Rozik leans out slightly, watching the aliens. “They’re coming,” he says. “Get ready.”
I fix my grip on Joie, making sure she’s secure. Rozik has to know our odds are better if I leave her behind, but he doesn’t even ask.
“Go!” he snaps.
I run again, coming out from behind one tree and racing across three meters of open terrain to the next, with Rozik right on my heels. I hear his footsteps stop as he deploys the mine, then the machine’s legs begin moving a little faster as it sees us and gives chase.
We make it to the tree just as it starts shooting, its guns sending bolts of energy sizzling through the air and into the trunk. I can feel the heat of the blasts from the other side, flinching as shards of wood explode out from the tree, hitting me in the ribs as I cut slightly to the left and charge toward the next cover. The blasts get closer to us, enough that my back burns as the bolts hiss past me to strike whatever’s in their path. We reach the second tree alive, leaving one more before we can slip into the woods and hopefully escape.
“Hang in there,” I say, slowing just enough to change course for the third tree. The alien expects us to keep moving in the same direction, and it pauses its attack for a moment to upgrade its position. Even so, it's gaining quickly, closing to within ten meters.
I’m in the middle of the next open run when I see it in my peripheral vision. It’s nearly on us, it’s turrets adjusted and ready to fire. Rozik starts shooting, the rounds that pierced the infantry armor leaving dents in the machine but not breaking through. I’m about to fall prone to escape the coming storm when the enemy takes one step too many and triggers Rozik’s mine.
The explosion is powerful enough to lift the machine off its left leg, which in turn pulls it off-balance and sends it stumbling onto its side. I don’t slow to gawk, continuing on the ordered path past the last tree and ahead to the denser brush.
I look back as I reach it. The machine is struggling to get back up. Closer to our Skirmisher, the unarmed alien continues to watch the whole scene play out.
Then they both disappear from sight as we enter the deeper woods.
Chapter 15
We keep running for the next twenty minutes, diving further into the dense forest without slowing, speaking or looking back. Rozik stays ahead of me, his exo-suit wrapped around his limbs and providing him a little extra boost of strength and stamina that I soon find myself struggling to match. But he doesn’t slow, so I don’t slow, eager to get away from the alien invaders and resolved not to look weak in front of a Commune officer.
It isn’t long before we’re deep enough into the woods the sun never penetrates. The air is cooler and more humid here, and a light mist begins to fall over us, quickly leaving my flight suit damp. The foliage is a heavy mix of mosses, leafy plants, and huge trees with thick, ridged bark. If there are animals out here, they flee ahead of our arrival, staying hidden from us during our passage.
We climb a small hill, slowing to maneuver over a series of crisscrossing roots and vines. Rozik finally stops when he reaches the top, putting his hand on one of the trees as if it’s the finish line to a race before turning to face me.
“I think we’re clear,” he says, though I can still see the wariness in his eyes. Either he isn’t convinced we’re safe or he’s referring to me as if I’m about to attack him.
I continue climbing until I’m standing next to him. I don’t say anything as I lower Joie gently to the ground, leaning her back against the tree.
“Do you have water?” I ask.
“Do you?” he replies.
“Our emergency rations are in our ship. I didn’t have time to grab them.”
“Didn’t have time, or didn’t think of it?”
“Does it matter?”
“It does to me.”
I look back at Rozik. His eyes meet mine. We stare each other down for a few seconds. Then I give in. Joie needs water. “I didn’t plan for that thing to attack us.”
He nods. “You thought the planet was safe?”
“Safer.”
“I wish that were true.”
“Do you know what happened up there? I have family on Spindle.”
“Yes, you told me. I don’t have confirmation of the outcome, Commander Stone. I was on board Unbreakable. I barely got out alive.”
“I’m surprised you got out at all. I saw the enemy’s weapon tear your destroyer in half.”
“Like it was a piece of paper.” He shakes his head as he pulls the satchel from his back and unzips it. He finds a water pack and hands it toward me. “I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t be alive.” I take the water, and he uses his hand to push aside some of his hair, showing me a nice lump on his skull. “My watch officer hit me and threw me in his pod. He died so I could live.”
I turn away from him, kneeling over Joie and tilting her head so I can get some water in her throat. She’s still breathing. Still alive. But I know she needs a doctor, and the odds of reaching one in time are lousy.
“And you decided to repay his sacrifice by rescuing an Alliance Navy pilot?” I ask.
“If only my motives were so pure. I wouldn’t have minded if you died out there, Commander, preferably before you blew out Unbreakable’s reactor and left us crippled. But fate seems to have other plans.”
“That it does,” I agree. “What are your motives, then?”
“I’m a single Commune Officer stranded on an Alliance planet,” he replies. “If that were my only problem, I could handle it myself. But it isn’t our only problem. The enemy can’t be allowed to enter deeper into Alliance or Commune space unchecked.”
I give Joie a little bit of water. She takes it subconsciously, her eyes remaining closed and her breathing staying uneven.
“Did you add Alliance to that sentence for my sake?” I ask. “Why do you care what happens to us?”
“We’re the first humans in the universe to make contact with an alien race and it turns out they’re anything but friendly. Shouldn’t it be obvious? We can hate one another all we want, but they don’t care about any of that. The longer we remain divided, the worse the situation will become.”
“I appreciate your progressive thinking, Captain. But you did come to Warrick to pick a fight. You started attacking without so much as a hail.”
Rozik laughs. “Would you have believed me if I came out of a jump and told you we were being chased by aliens? I can still hardly believe it.”
He has a point, but I’m not going to let him off that easy. “You could have mentioned it. Maybe Captain Yeoh wouldn’t have gone for your throat up front, and once that other ship showed up…” I let my voice trail off. I’m saying the words. I don’t believe them. When push came to shove, Yeoh was an idiot. He probably would have provoked the attack anyway. “What are you doing so far from the front, anyway?”
“I’m not at liberty to discuss that, Commander. What I can tell you is that my ship was part of an exploratory fleet under the direct command of Vice-Admiral Jessup Caine. What showed up in orbit around this planet is all that was left of it after our first interaction with that alien ship.”
“Exploratory fleet?” I say, latching onto the one thing he probably wants me to ignore. “I could be wrong, Captain, but isn’t exploration usually done by fast ships that can run away in a hurry, and not fleets headed by capital ships?”
Rozik smiles. I realize he dropped the clue on purpose so I would ask the question.
“You didn’t let me down, Alliance,” he says. “And you didn’t hear any of this from me. The only reason I’ll tell you more is the same reason I saved you. I need your help.” He looks at Joie. “Do you mind if I take a look at her?”
“You can stare all you want, it isn’t going to make her better.”
He smirks and reaches for his satchel. “It’s quite obvious to me that the Alliance doesn’t properly equip its Skirmishers with survival equipment. That SMG you were carrying was a poor defense, and you don’t have a first aid kit.“
“The first aid kit is on the ship. It’s filled with lots of stuff for external wounds. There isn’t much you can do for internal damage. And the SMG is fine for most situations. Just not this one.”
“When you need it most, eh, Commander?”
“This isn’t the first time I’ve needed it. It’s a good weapon, and it’s served me well before.”
“Get shot down a lot, do you?”
I clench my teeth, feeling stupid for walking right into that one.
Rozik pulls a small device out of his satchel and points it at Joie. “May I?”
I have to admit, I appreciate his asking. “Go ahead.”
He positions himself over her, reaching for the seal on her flight suit and beginning to pull it open.
“What are you doing?” I ask, the fatherly part of me making me maybe a hair too quick to react.
“Only the flight suit,” he replies. “She’s wearing underclothes.” He looks at me. “Some of the other officers say Alliance Skirmisher pilots often share more than their minds. Is that true?”
The question makes me want to deck him, and my hand curls into a fist. He notices and smirks again. I’m already starting to hate the expression. “No need to get upset, Commander. I’m asking with true curiosity, not to get under your collar.”
“It does happen,” I admit. How could it not when two people share zero secrets? “About twenty percent of the time. But I told you, I have family on Spindle. A wife and two of my children. The Ensign and me are close. She’s like a daughter to me. If you can help her, yeah, I’ll be appreciative.”
He turns away from me, pulling down Joie’s flight suit. She’s got a tank and panties on beneath. I flinch when I see the bruises along her arms and legs. Do I look that bad beneath my uniform?
Rozik runs the device over her body, careful not to get too close to anything sensitive. “This is new technology out of research and development. A JIT diagnostic tool.”
“JIT?” I ask.
“Just-in-time,” he replies. “Not quite real-time. The AI builds a complete profile from the scan within a couple of minutes. It used to take hours, and couldn’t be done in the field.”
I’m impressed. As far as I know, the Alliance doesn’t have anything like it. “What do you do once you have the diagnostic?”
“That depends on the situation and the results.” He looks at me, his face stone. “Sometimes mercy is better.”
The statement goes down hard, even though I was ready to kill both Joie and myself a half-hour ago to stay out of enemy hands.
“To get back to your earlier question,” Rozik says as he continues the diagnostic. “Yes, it’s more ordinary to send a fast ship into unexplored systems, just in case. More often than not, we run into Alliance forces that have beaten us to the punch or fragmented independents who managed to get their hands on some surplus or salvage. But this was different. We went beyond the Sphere.”
He stops talking to give me a chance to react. I stare at him in surprise. “You can’t go beyond the Sphere.”
“No, Commander. The Alliance can’t go beyond the Sphere. Your ships can’t pass the Disturbance.”
“And you’re telling me the Commune can?” There’s a lot of disbelief in my voice, and for good reason.
If you can imagine the excitement when humans first discovered how to transport things faster than light without screwing up Einstein’s theory of relativity, then you can imagine the disappointment when we eventually discovered what the non-science types like me know as the Disturbance. I had a scientist explain it to me once, and what I gathered is that there’s some kind of opposite force that prevents our technology from bending spacetime past a certain point. He said it was like taking a bedsheet and having someone hold either end and then trying to fold it in half from the center. You can only get so much of it to alter before the resistance stops the stretching and you’re stuck.
That’s where we’ve been for nearly two centuries. Stuck. There’s still lots of unexplored space in the Sphere because the Sphere is still almost four hundred light-years around. But the very fact that we can’t get beyond has, of course, made us eager to find a way to do it.
Until this second, I’ve always believed it’s impossible.
I still do.
“I know it’s difficult to accept,” Rozik says. “Especially as an Alliance pilot. But I assure you, the fleet did jump past the Sphere by ten light-years. And we believe we could have gone further.”
It still takes me another minute of ruminating on the idea before I speak again. “So you brought a lot of firepower because you were afraid of what’s out there?”
“Not exactly. We weren’t convinced the Alliance hadn’t already made the discovery. We thought we might jump into a system outside the Sphere and run right into you.”
“But you ran into those aliens instead?”
“That’s right.”
“How many ships did they have?”
He doesn’t respond immediately. His head drops as if he’s ashamed to answer.
“One.”
Chapter 16
“One ship destroyed your entire fleet?” I say. It’s still the most believable part of his story because it casts the Commune in a weak light, and I know he wouldn’t admit to it unless it were true.
Even so, I don’t want to believe it.
“That’s right,” Rozik replies.
“How many capitals did you have?”
“Four other destroyers like Unbreakable. Six heavy cruisers. Two battleships. Two carriers. And a dreadnought.”
“And they had just the one ship?”
“I already told you they did.”
“How?”
Rozik finishes moving the scanner over Joie and puts it on the ground beside her. “That’ll take a couple of minutes to process,” he says, falling silent.
“How?” I repeat.
“You got a count of the guns on that ship?”
“I did.”
“And their positions?”
“They’re all over the ship, except for the aft near the thrusters.”
“And the thrusters are pushing so many ions you can’t get in behind her. We came out of the jump near a dead star. We were in-system for about an hour when we started getting strange readings from our sensors. An object moving out from behind the star. We tracked it until we got visual, and when we saw it was a ship, we assumed it was a new Alliance design. We tried to hail it, hoping to head off conflict, but it didn’t reply.”
“So you started shooting at it,” I say matter-of-factly.
“The Vice Admiral sent the cruisers forward to engage. What happened to them is identical to what happened to Unbreakable, except the cruisers still had shields at the time. That beam hit them and drained them to nothing before tearing the ships apart. Of course, after the first cruiser went down we were ordered to full assault. It was a stupid, overconfident decision. We committed almost everything we had, including Unbreakable. The alien ship started shooting with every turret on her. A massive barrage we couldn’t escape. I don’t know how much you know about modern fusion reactors and energy drain, but to send energy out from that many guns is impossible.”
“Obviously not impossible. So that ship tore your fleet a new one. How did you escape?”
“It was the Vice Admiral’s final order. Get clear and get home to tell the President. Except we couldn’t reach our nearest system with the power drain from the attack. We could only reach Warrick.” He pauses again, sighing. “I didn’t know they would follow us. I don’t know how they did. We can’t track ships through jumps. We intended to hit your garrison to speed up our refuel. We expected to run into light resistance, the dregs of your military—typical defenses in such remote places.” He looks at me curiously. “What is a pilot like you doing out here? I saw you slip that plasma toroid.” He shakes his head. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
