Revelation, page 6
part #3 of Relic Wars Series
“What is the situation?” Iris snapped, sitting up in bed. Eric reached for his jumpsuit.
“Oh, right. The wormhole's open, and we've got ships emerging. They look pretty banged up. And they're sending distress signals like hell's come after them, or whatnot.” He took another long drink from his odd smoking copper pipe.
“Put it on my main projector.” Iris climbed out of bed and grabbed her purple robe. She drew it closed and pulled the hood up over her head as she walked into the navigation chamber.
“Are you always naked underneath that thing?” Eric asked.
“More often than you'd think,” Ras said.
“Neither of you should be discussing this,” Iris snapped.
On the screen, which had zoomed in across thousands of kilometers, they could see what looked like a flotilla of junk and debris emerging from the distant iridium-white sphere of the wormhole mouth. It gradually became clear that these were ships, or remnants of ships, in even worse shape than the ones they'd passed earlier. They were like broken life rafts, barely moving, a pitiful clump of refugees.
Smaller holographic windows opened around them, pulsing bright red, indicating emergencies. Battered, beaten, exhausted-looking captains appeared, shouting, talking over each other.
“This is the mining ship Omicron Rex,” Alanna's voice cut in from her place at the comm station on the bridge. “We are on approach. What is your emergency?”
“They're coming,” came the throaty, scratchy voice of a female captain—Eric could almost see her hanging out in dim, crowded taverns, smoking and drinking, year after year.
“Who?” Alanna said, but the answer erupted immediately from the spherical wormhole mouth.
A mass of wormfighters emerged in a rapid spiraling formation, making them hard to target. They fired a heavy barrage of scrap and plasma at the flotilla of pitifully broken and damaged human ships. Several of those went up in bursts of fire, as helpless as flies who'd met the wrong end of a flamethrower. Eric heard screams over the ships' comms as their crews and passengers died. He saw them on the main projection, the ships turned to clouds of hot debris.
“Help us!” A man's voice croaked, coughing and wheezing like he was sick. “For the love of humanity...”
“Battle stations!” Hagen's voice boomed over every speaker on the ship, echoing up and down corridors. “If you're on this ship, you'd better be heading for the bridge or the hangar. Anybody caught napping will be thrown raw out the nearest airlock. That's how we do things on the Rex.” They'd never come close to doing that to anyone, but Eric supposed it was best to be firm when three of your ships were crewed by known criminals. Especially if you didn't want them backing down when things got dangerous.
“Yeah, so your presence is requested on the bridge, Eric,” Ras said, sipping from his copper-pipe drink. “Iris—”
“I know. Close that wormhole.” Iris sat on the floor, raised her hands, and the snakelike coils of the cables slithered down toward her, attaching to the silvery-palladium circles implanted in her head. Her eyes rolled back, showing only the whites, and then her lids closed.
Eric ran out into the corridor, barefoot and still pulling the zipper of his coveralls over his sweaty torso. Abel emerged from his own quarters and raised his eyebrows.
“Navigator's quarters, huh?” Abel said, whistling. “What were you two doing in there? Studying her astrolabe? Should I write a letter for Suzette?”
One of his pilots, the young lieutenant Sankara Bah, stepped out after Abel.
“There's worms out there,” Eric said, avoiding Abel's question. “Twenty wormfighters or more.”
“I know,” Abel said. He ran to the bridge with Eric, while Bah split off to join the other starfighters down in the hangar. Abel's own fighter, the Cassandra, had been lost in the last battle, fighting worms on Madbox Colony.
Everyone went to work on the bridge; they'd drilled against worm attacks every day, multiple times a day, knowing it was just a matter of time. Bartley watched with interest as Eric arrived, sweaty and disheveled. He opened his mouth to comment, but Hagen cut him off, thankfully.
“Full speed ahead!” Hagen shouted, while more of the desperate, broken human craft went up in flames under the wormfighter attack. “To war!”
Eric plugged into a console and launched an armed drone toward the battle. He found himself in the middle of a formation of eight deep blue Colonial starfighters, sharp-edged predators of sky and space.
The “irregulars” flew alongside them, not quite as symmetrical or impressive—Caliban's old patrol boat, the Tempest, its signal lights still intact so he could lure unsuspecting crafts into slowing or stopping; Captain Morvini's small but fast armored parcel ship, the Bonefish, once used by banks and governments for high-value interstellar cargo, now used for illegal smuggling; and Krauler's Dagger, a stealthy wartime saboteur ship once used for sneaking up close to enemy vessels, close enough to plant tracking devices, explosives, or marines, as needed.
All three had been repaired at Alanna's expense back at the Cargo Exchange, and Alanna was already wielding those debts like chains around the necks of the three criminal captains, not letting them forget. Abel might have seen her as just some flighty rich girl he could seduce with his usual combination of charm, looks, and confidence, but she was no simple trophy. If Abel got on her bad side, he'd been for in some serious hellfire.
There was no time to think of that now, though. Ahead, the slaughter continued, the swarm of wormfighters refusing to show any mercy to the flotilla of broken ships. They continued to rain down plasma and scrap, sinking more of the defenseless humans. Either the humans' ships were unarmed, or they'd already depleted all their weaponry fending off the worms, managing a desperate escape through the wormhole, into what they'd probably hoped would be safety. But instead, they'd been pursued.
That was the worms' mistake, Eric thought, while his drone zipped into the debris field of broken human ships that was expanding around the wormhole.
There were easily two dozen wormfighters, maybe more—it was hard to tell, with their fast-changing formations. They seemed to notice the fighters and other ships on approach through the debris, and most of them broke from their merciless refugee hunt to face the new threat.
Abel's voice gave the order, and an instant later, the debris field was full of metal and fire.
The starfighters opened up with a volley of plasma missiles, eight AI-guided streaks of supersonic death, slamming into the mass of wormfighters. Bright white explosions tore through them; Eric saw a couple of them rupture open with direct hits, but others managed to twist aside and come through relatively unscathed, the plasma only scalding their edges.
At the same time, the wormfighters unleashed a barrage of scrap and plasma.
One scored a direct hit, immolating a starfighter flown by a young pilot named McGregor, leaving nothing but a cloud of glowing ash in the space where he'd been.
Plasma and scrap mingled to create waves of molten metal, and one of these swallowed a starfighter almost completely, melting it and roasting alive its pilot, a dark-skinned young woman named Jones. She'd been quiet, wearing a somber expression every time Eric had seen her. Now he heard the scream of her death over the comm. At least it was mercifully brief.
Eric snarled and put on speed. The little drone was easily camouflaged among the cloud of broken starship debris, where pieces of metal flying at high speed collided and ricocheted all around. It also made the flying dangerous, though.
He dipped low and slow as he approached the wormfighters, not wanting to draw their attention. He dropped far out of the plane of battle. Overhead, space lit up with tracer fire as the starfighters unleashed incendiary uranium from their rotary canons, carving into the rocky shielding of the worm craft. Plasma rained out of the wormfighters, in glowing streaks of return fire.
“Again!” Abel shouted over the comm, coordinating the attack. The surviving starfighters launched more plasma missiles, at much closer range now, hitting more of the wormfighters. The wormfighter swarm spread out as the worms focused on different human targets, and Eric saw the humans were even more heavily outnumbered than he'd realized at first. There were at least three times as many wormfighters as human ones, especially with two starfighters already lost.
Eric's job was to get the little drone over to the enemy rear and aim for the sensitive back ends of the wormfighters, shooting until they inevitably destroyed the drone.
He looked out through the drone's rear lens and saw the Rex approaching in the distance, much slower than the nimble fighting and smuggling crafts. The tough, massive ship, with its array of heavy weaponry, might turn the tide of this fight, like a grizzly chasing a pack of wolves off from a fresh kill...if only the sluggish thing could get here fast enough, before all the smaller craft got slaughtered.
The refugee ships were sputtering toward the Rex with whatever power they had left, approaching the massive craft like it was the only island amid stormy seas.
Eric got the weird out-of-body vertigo that sometimes happened when he was plugged into a drone. His biological body was back there, on the bridge, but his consciousness was out here with the drone...it made him momentarily dizzy to think about, so he looked away from the Rex and focused on the task at hand.
Something moved off to his side, a shape snaking through a couple of molten-edged chunks of freighter, a shadow momentarily blotting out a few stars.
The Dagger emerged, a thin black needle of a ship that lived up to its name. Up close, it had an irregular curved surface, specially designed to absorb, deflect, and scatter radar and any electromagnetic energy, including visible light.
Krauler's old saboteur ship began its climb, its sharp nose pointed like a swordfish at the underbellies of the wormfighters above. Eric fell in line with it, trying to block out the voices on the comm. The humans and worms were tearing into each other, blasting each other's craft with fire and deadly metal, and it was hard for Eric to keep up with what was happening. Call signs flew past; he recognized Paladin as Abel, and Viper as Bah, and Daisycutter as tough, wiry Lieutenant Flora Hernandez.
As they drew closer, Krauler began to shoot out spidery metal devices that grabbed onto the wormfighters above. They scuttled like insects over the rocky surfaces of the fighters until they reached the most vulnerable part, the junction of the spiny fuselage with the bulbous nose of the craft; here they latched into place and hunkered down.
“Prepping targets,” Krauler said over the comm.
A trio of wormfighters noticed Krauler's activity and twisted loose of their formation, whipping down toward him and opening fire. Krauler managed to dodge, returning fire with a sizable laser cannon, but his beam only seared a wormfighter that rolled aside in time to avoid serious damage.
Eric gave him some cover with a couple of blasts of plasma, but they weren't carefully aimed at the wormfighters' weak points and didn't melt through the hull. The damage was minimal, but the two shots helped save Krauler and his crew.
“We've been spotted,” Krauler announced.
“Don't worry, Half-Face,” Caliban said. “We're here to cover you. What's left of you, anyway.”
The Tempest and the Bonefish swept in from the side. They'd taken a long, curving path around from the Rex to flank the enemy from deep space. Now they were flying in below the lowest layer of the worm formation. Caliban's Tempest struck a worm with a missile, blasting away most of its spine. A second missile hit the wormfighter's plasma cannon, and its fuel reservoir erupted, sending that wormfighter streaking away, a fiery white comet that faded into the distance.
The Bonefish peppered another wormfighter with a wide, fine spray of plasma, which seemed ineffectual at first. But the scattered white glowing tongues burrowed into the hull in dozens of places. Eric wondered how deep they would go.
He didn't have time to wait and see, though. A cluster of wormfighters dove toward them now, firing scrap and plasma at all three criminal craft. An entire separate battle was erupting down here. Above, the wormfighters outnumbered the starfighters; down here, it was the same, at least two worm ships for every human one. It was hard to get an exact count with their swarming, snaking formation.
The three criminal craft were quickly surrounded, and the wormfighters began herding them together.
“They're puttin' us in a kill box!” Morvini barked over her comm, while her Bonefish spattered more plasma along a wormfighter's tail. “Any bright ideas?”
“Several bright ones, coming up,” Krauler announced.
The half dozen wormfighters where he'd successfully landed the little spider-bombs ignited at once, filling the starry darkness with flashes of deadly light like a thunderstorm. Glowing red cracks opened all over the pebbled surfaces of half the wormfighters that had surrounded Caliban, Morvini, and Krauler.
The three ships slipped out of the kill box, using the damaged wormfighters as partial cover from the others. Eric moved behind the pursuing wormfighters, shooting at their tails. He managed to land one critical shot that severed a wormfighter tail from its head.
“We're clear down here—” Krauler began. “Wait!”
Another wormfighter dove toward Krauler's ship, dipping aside to avoid Krauler's laser beam, letting Krauler's bullets chip away at its armor. It looked like a kamikaze move, the bulbous blind rocky face of the wormfighter on a dead-set course for Krauler's narrow black ship.
“I got you, Krauler,” Caliban announced, firing a missile at the suicidal worm.
The worm curved sharply away from the Dagger at the last second, narrowly averting a face-first collision. But Eric had a pretty good idea of what it was doing, and Krauler wasn't in the clear at all.
The flexible spiny tail of the wormfighter swung around like a whip, crashing into Krauler's ship and ripping it open from bow to stern. The saboteur ship, built for speed and stealth but not heavy combat, went careening into a broken chunk of a passenger carrier whose passengers had already died, scattered as bone and ash in space.
A blob of plasma from another wormfighter landed in the ripped-open side of Krauler's ship, and the Dagger was filled with white death. The crew's screams sounded over the comms before the equipment burned out. Eric was hearing too much of that these days.
Nasty dogfighting continued, filling the space around Eric's drone with plasma, broken ships, shattered rock flakes, tracer fire. He did his best to get a good shot at one of the wormfighters; his plasma was getting low, and red dots flickered at the corner of his vision, indicating the drone was hit, but there wasn't much he could do about it.
Then a bright glow surged behind him, reflecting off all the broken metal floating before him. Eric looked out through the rear camera.
The wormhole gate was opening, the iridium-colored sphere expanding, indicating that something bigger was coming through.
“Iris, get that wormhole closed!” Hagen's voice barked somewhere; Eric couldn't be sure whether he was hearing the man over the comm or with his physical ears back on the bridge.
“That's what I've been trying to do!” Iris's voice snapped. “The gatekeeper at Juno Station was trying to do the same, but I think she's offline.”
Eric hadn't even thought about the station orbiting the wormhole, providing a base for a gatekeeper to open, direct, and close the wormhole gates.
The station was kilometers away from the gate, but it must have taken some damage if the gatekeeper had lost contact. The worms might have destroyed it altogether.
He heard Iris grunt, then cry out in pain as the sphere expanded even wider.
Three sizable ships, shelled with asteroid rock, emerged from the gate. They were a sort of mushy rectangular shape, each one the size of a castle, floating fortresses in space. Worm destroyers, maybe.
“We're in a lot of trouble,” Eric said.
Each worm destroyer fired, not a bolt or ball of plasma, but a long stream of it. Three rivers of pure glowing death flowed out from their rocky prows.
One struck the Bonefish, incinerating the armored parcel ship and consuming it completely, leaving nothing but a burned-out hulk.
Another struck Caliban's ship, the Tempest, and turned it to molten metal.
The third struck Eric's drone, evaporating it, sending his mind snapping back to the bridge of the Rex.
“They're all dead,” Eric said. Heads swiveled in his direction, and he was distantly aware of people staring at him—Bartley at the weapons console, Carol turning back in her pilot's chair, and the four young fleet officers. Alanna frowned at him from the comm. Abel had joined her there, staying in touch with the pilots of the eight fighters and the three criminal ships.
Except now they were down to six fighters and zero criminal ships.
“I ought to be out there,” Abel growled. “I should have kept McGregor out and taken his fighter. He wasn't ready.” He shook his head, then resumed snapping orders at his remaining pilots, based on the big picture he could observe from the bridge.
Outside, another starfighter went down. It dodged a two-prong attack of scrap and plasma from two fighters, but a long plasma ribbon from one of the worm destroyers caught it and annihilated it, as if the wormfighters had deliberately planned to drive it into the destroyer's sights.
“Devil take it all!” Abel snapped, slamming his fist. “They're butchering us.”
“It's going to get worse,” Eric said, as another stream of plasma obliterated another starfighter.
“We're in range, sir,” Bartley said from the weapons console. A scrawny fleet gunner's mate, pale as milk with wispy white-blond hair, sat beside him, looking a little overwhelmed by Bartley's presence. The guy seemed too young to have seen any of the war.
“Hold your fire, Flynn,” Hagen said. “We don't want their full attention yet. But ready the rail guns and the cannons.”
“You heard the man,” Bartley told the kid beside him. “Let's get ready for the killing.”
