Osprey chronicles comple.., p.114
Osprey Chronicles Complete Series Boxed Set, page 114
“Because we’re the front-liners, kid,” Toner snapped, echoing Jaeger’s thoughts. “Wherever these bastards land, I’m going to be there to meet them. I’ll do it ten steps behind the fart machine. She’s an ugly monster, but she’s our monster.”
“That makes you well-matched,” Seeker called, sounding entirely too cheerful as he wove his ship in a series of figure-eights.
“HAH.” There was another series of muffled crashing noises. “Occy! Get over here and pet the piggy. Yeah, like that. That’s much better. See, she likes you.”
Jaeger buried her face in her palms. She hadn’t been a particularly religious person since her rebirth through the wormhole, but in times of stress, she did find herself flirting with the occasional prayer. Couldn’t hurt, right?
God give me the wisdom to know what I can change, the courage to change what I can, and the serenity to put up with L. M. Toner.
And thank you, she added as an afterthought, for letting us bring him back.
“We’re all set down here, Captain,” Toner called. “All drop teams in position to sweep up whatever junk falls out of the sky.”
“Kamikaze net fully deployed and in position,” Me interjected. “Kamikaze. That is a very strange term. Could you explain it to me?”
“Some other time,” said Jaeger, who was eager to keep the topic away from suicide. “Show me our cruisers.”
Sixteen mid-sized Overseer ships blossomed in the hologram around Jaeger. These weren’t the experimental Terrible-class ships. Kwin hadn’t tried to hide the truth from her. These ships were slower, not as well-armed, and more poorly shielded than modern Overseer warships. Essentially obsolete, by Overseer standards.
Still, combined with the explosive drones and the in-atmosphere transports, it was more help than Jaeger had dared to hope for from the aliens. She only wished it wasn’t her crew piloting those alien ships and learning their strange systems on the fly.
“Portia,” she called, hailing the flagship cruiser. “What’s your status?”
“Locked and loaded, Captain,” Portia answered, sliding into the comms channel without so much as a hiccup to signal her arrival. “We’re good to go. I have a whole load of men and women here itching to try out these Overseer toys in the field.”
Jaeger winced but forced her voice even. They didn’t need to hear her regret or her anxiety. Not now. “Copy that. Give my love to the crew, Portia, and stand by to kick some ass.”
Portia laughed—a rich, deep sound—and flipped her channel to standby.
Jaeger turned a circle, studying the board. There was a seventeenth ship among the secondhand fleet as well. It was a small research vessel, spinning through space between Locaur and its moon like a gyroscope.
“I still don’t understand why the council sent that one to join the fight,” Jaeger said to Udil. “Without weapons or shields, it’s nothing but a big kamikaze mine.” That was why she hadn’t bothered to put a crew in it—only a whole boatload of explosives and a short AI subprogram that understood two commands: move and boom.
“Seventeen,” Udil said. “It is a fortunate number.”
“It is?” Jaeger was surprised to find the motive purely superstitious.
“Seventeen,” Udil repeated. “United in one purpose. Cannot be divided.”
Jaeger would have to ponder on that later—when there was time for pondering.
“Terrible-class ships two through six, in position around the system, ready to provide interference and support,” Me reported. “Ninety seconds to drop out.”
“What about you, Jaeger?” Toner called over the line.
“What about me?”
“What’s your position, Captain?”
Jaeger double-checked the Terrible’s coordinates. “We’re safe in the moon’s shadow, as I promised.”
“Uh-huh,” he said dryly. “For how long?”
Jaeger bristled. “The Terrible-class ships have unreliable shields and weapons systems,” she said. “I told you. Kwin and I are going to coordinate our forces from well behind the front lines. We’re not bringing in the Terrible except as a last resort.”
“Or unless Portia’s ship takes a hit and could use some cover on her six,” Toner said. “Or until you see one transport break the blockade line and run for the atmosphere and think you can shoot it out of the sky before it lands.”
“I trust my crew,” she snapped. “Why are you acting like I’m going to expose the Terrible and come running to the rescue at the first sign of trouble?”
“Because it’s what you do.” He sighed, and all the manic energy had drained out of his voice, leaving him contemplative. “Because you’re you, Sarah.”
Jaeger stared up at the ceiling, struggling to process his words. For all his bluster, something had changed since he woke from his coma. He was different. He acted like he knew things he shouldn’t know—and while that wasn’t strictly unusual, this time, she half-believed he really did.
We’re both going to survive this, she thought, grinding her teeth. Because I’m not going to die before I make you spill the beans.
“It’s some load of bullshit,” she answered, trying to keep the banter light. “That you think you can dangle my name over my head like that, Toner. We gotta get you a tattoo. Jack?”
“Present,” Seeker barked.
“What name do you think we should give this asshole?”
“Gerald,” Seeker answered promptly.
“Absolutely not!” Toner yelped, roaring back to his old energy. “I’ll have you know that I already talked to Tiki about that naming stuff.”
“Did you?” Jaeger was grinning again.
“Yeah! They already have a Locauri name all picked out for me.”
“Subspace bubbles collapsing near the asteroid belt,” Me said, managing to sound entirely too anxious for an AI.
“You hear that?” Jaeger called as new hologram ships blossomed in front of her. Hundreds of tiny K’tax fighters spilled out of a dozen massive, irregular chunks of rock that appeared from nowhere. She couldn’t believe it. The bugs had slapped subspace bubble generators on entire hollow asteroids. “They’re dropping near the asteroid belt. Assume attack pattern theta.”
The door opened, and Kwin scuttled onto the bridge with the blinding speed of an Overseer with somewhere to be.
“Glad you could join us,” Jaeger shouted, dancing out of the way to give Kwin a view of the battle.
“Me as well,” Kwin answered. “There was an upset with the new humans. The matter is settled, for now.”
Not a moment too soon. Whatever drama was unfolding among the newly hatched crew, it would have to wait.
“Let’s get this welcome wagon rolling,” Seeker growled. The Alpha-Seeker’s engines began to glow. All around Jaeger, the cruisers slid forward, turning toward the belt in a carefully coordinated pattern. The crew had less than two days to learn the old Overseer systems. She was proud of how well the ships moved together.
“Hey, Toner!” Seeker called. “Just one thing, before the party starts.”
“Hit me with it, and don’t hold back.”
“What name did the Locauri wanna give you?
Toner laughed in that rich baritone boom that always seemed so incongruous on such a skinny man. “Oh, me? I’m Puncher-of-Dragons.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
“Boy, you don’ know ya lettas?”
Harlan stared at the smear of black wax coating his finger. He looked up at the empty swath of air duct lining the low ceiling and shook his head. “I know my letters just fine! I can read better than you, old man. I just—I’ve never—I never done it before—not by hand!”
The Claw’s cockpit was hot and thick with the scents of oil and inks, dyes, and stains. Amy crouched in one corner, frantically scribbling her life’s story onto the inside of a storage cabinet door with a nub of chalk she had found somewhere. Harlan hung from the ceiling, tongue poking out between his teeth as he scratched the Claw’s override passcodes into a conduit casing with the tip of a utility knife.
“I’ll help,” Amy breathed when the last of her chalk crumbled to dust and added to the thick air. She kicked, sending herself soaring over to Harlan, and snatched the tin of wax from his hands. “Tell me what you wanna say, Harlan.”
Harlan seemed about to protest but realized that there wasn’t time for it. He coughed and leaned close, dictating his message into Amy’s ear. The girl nodded and lifted her fingers to paint on the walls.
Petra’s fingers soared over the Claw’s comms station. Sypher had made good on his word and established contact with malcontents and rebels all across the fleet to warn them about Reset. Petra had scrawled her message onto her arms with Amy’s last ink pen and now concerned herself with coordinating a rebellion.
Thousands of questions poured across the comm channels, and the clock was ticking. Sympathetic scientists on Constitution reported that nearby pockets of space were becoming unstable as the wormhole system prepared to activate. Other informants from Reliant and Vigilance added that brass had powered up the main thrusters in each of the freighters—they were getting ready to move.
Some ex-soldiers have picked up modified multitools and are storming the bridge, someone wrote from the Constitution. They’re gonna stop us from going through the hole.
It was a nice idea, but Petra wasn’t going to count on their success.
I have an old LightCorps e-diary, one anonymous poster wrote. Will the wormhole jump erase that?
You’re all delusional! one malcontent insisted. Don’t believe these conspiracies meant to rip the fleet apart!
The messages flowed down the screen, a never-ending stream of panic and frantic activity, as people tried to prepare themselves for a surprise apocalypse. Petra did her best to answer what questions she could.
She told the user with the e-diary, We don’t know what files will survive the jump or not. Best bet is to write down as much as you can, as fast as possible, anywhere you can. Your name, your goals, a warning of what happened.
A new message on the feed caught her eye.
Something’s going on in the Vigilance storage ring, someone reported. A squad of Seekers opening one of the bays and blowing cargo.
Petra swung around to the sensor array. Sure enough, radar showed the big freighter shedding a fine mist of objects into surrounding space. Radar was showing something else, too. A massive distortion, forming not more than a thousand kilometers from the edge of the fleet.
Nascent wormhole formed! a user reported from one of the smaller labs. Two minutes until it’s stable enough to traverse!
Petra jumped as Sypher joined her at the station. These Followers, Petra was beginning to understand, didn’t have much use for personal space.
“You drownin’ in babble,” Sypher muttered, glancing over the feeds. He turned, activating a larger display at the center of the cockpit. “Gimme real eyes on da prize, not dese radar dots!”
The screens flickered and switched to visual feeds. It took Petra a moment to process the different angles she was seeing. The Claw must have synchronized her sensors with the other Follower ships because she saw the massive freighters and the rest of the fleet drifting through space from half a dozen different angles.
The wide engine cells sprayed behind the freighters were glowing cold blue as they powered up for the first time in almost a year. On another feed, Petra saw the white orb of the wormhole growing like a tumor between the stars. Tiny black dots spread across its face—ships, dwarfed by its size—and it was growing fast.
Sweat poured down Petra’s face.
We feel the Constitution rumbling, an anonymous user reported. She’s underway.
Petra spotted the Vigilance on one of the screens. The freighter, and her thin escort of Seeker cruisers, was closest to the forming wormhole. She pulled away from a cloud of glittering debris, too small for Petra to identify.
Can someone tell me what Vigilance just launched? Petra demanded.
I see activity in some of the Reliant’s bays, someone reported. It looks like they’re deploying these things, too.
Sleek dark shapes slid across several of the view screens like predatory fish. More of the ancillary labs and ships, breaking for the wormhole.
“Oh, boy.”
Petra whirled to see Harlan staring, wide-eyed, at the glittering cloud of debris the Vigilance had left in her wake. The look on his face made her heart stop beating.
“They’re proximity mines,” the young man whispered. On the screen behind him, something collided with one of the mines, resulting in a silent blossom of fire. Petra prayed it was debris and not a crewed ship.
“We’re the enemy, now,” Harlan murmured. “They don’t need us like we need them. They’ll kill us all to stop us from passing through the wormhole with them.”
“Dey can try,” Sypher growled, flinging himself toward the pilot’s console and slapping the harness over his shoulders. “But I ain’t no bad habit you can shake off in a day. Strap in!”
As Petra scrambled to latch her harness around her chest, she flipped her comms channel to audio, broadcasting her voice to anyone within range. “Any of you guys still thought the fleet cares about you? Here’s your proof—they’re dropping proximity mines behind them. They’re seeding the whole area.
“They don’t want us following them, but if we get split up from the freighters, we’ll all die out here. Once we get through the wormhole, there’s gonna be a heck of a lot of confusion. We’ll still have a fighting chance to win back control of the fleet if we hang together!”
“Vigilance just dropped off the radar,” Harlan said. “She’s gone down the rabbit hole. God, fleet trapped some of its ships behind the minefield.”
Petra felt the Claw’s hull rattle around them as Sypher activated thrusters.
“Don’t try to traverse the minefield,” Petra cried to anyone who was listening. Fleet loyalist or rebel or Follower, it didn’t matter. She didn’t want to see ships full of people get blown up today. “Go around it! The hole ain’t goin’ anywhere!”
“Constitution approaching the horizon,” Harlan gritted. “A few cruisers hanging back. Picking up a patrol pattern around the wormhole.”
“Dey gonna try shootin’ anyone who gets too close.” A wild grin spread across Sypher’s face. “But they can’t catch me.”
The engines surged, flinging Petra backward in her harness as Sypher banked his ship into an impossibly tight arc. The hull rattled and screamed around them. As the g-forces pushed all of Petra’s blood to the back of her brain, she heard Sypher’s high cackle as he laughed.
The wormhole grew on the display screens.
Sarah, Petra thought. Larry.
Rush.
One way or another, I’m gonna see you all soon.
“Hope is out there,” Petra shouted into the comms channel, her voice thin and hysterical and on fire with adrenaline and resolve and terror. “Right on the other side of that hole. Now let’s go get it!”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Jack Seeker sat in his fighter, snug and warm, happy as a chick in the egg. His fighter, the Alpha-Seeker, buzzed with activity, the display screens dancing beneath his fingertips as a stream of sensor readings poured through the neural link. Seeker didn’t need to see the screens to know all that the ship knew. For a brief, glorious moment in time, man and machine were one.
One after another, massive chunks of stone appeared against the backdrop of stars as their subspace bubbles popped. He itched to spring forward, to strafe the ugly things, blow them out of the sky before they knew what hit them. But the Overseers had warned him—they would have to wait until the entire K’tax strike force dropped out of subspace before engaging. The twisting energies of subspace could easily scramble the computers of anybody who happened to be close when the bubble popped.
He watched, heart pounding, as more of the asteroids appeared on his display. Four chunks of rock, the size of small mountains. Five. Six. A white line of K’tax fighters began to spill from the first asteroid, racing ahead of their lumbering motherships to clear a path.
Seeker’s instinct said go.
His training said wait.
“Final bubble collapsing,” the Overseer—Udil—called over the comms as the seventh asteroid appeared at the end of the line.
“All right,” Jaeger cried. “The way is clear. Engage!”
Her words didn’t reach Seeker’s brain before he squeezed the thruster controls. The ship burst forward like a restless stallion at the gate, pulling g-forces that clouded the edges of Seeker’s vision. He shot forward to meet the leading cluster of K’tax fighters.
“Jesus, how many fighters can they cram into those fucking rocks?” From where he waited in his transport in the upper atmosphere of Locaur, Toner stared at his display and wanted to explode. The K’tax vanguard had arrived. It was seven asteroids, hurtling toward the planet at a fraction of light speed.
Endless streams of bloated K’tax fighters spilled out of each rock like clowns flowing out of a car. Thousands of them, it must have been—fanning around and ahead of the asteroids.
His fingers wound restless circles over his scalp. Something hard hit his shoulder, making him jump.
“Here.” Occy shoved a length of rebar into Toner’s arms. “Stop pulling your hair.”
“Oh, hey.” Toner blinked at the rod in surprise and set his restless hands to folding steel instead. It was a much more satisfying distraction than ripping out his hair in clumps. “Thanks.”
Occy grunted and plopped into the seat beside Toner, staring at the screen.
Seeker’s jet strafed circles around one of the asteroids, pummeling the rock and its buggy escort with laser pulses.
“All asteroids on a collision course for Locaur,” Udil said over the comm line. “At this rate, they’ll hit the upper atmosphere in thirty minutes.”
Portia swore, breaking her long silence. “Those things are huge! The impact—I thought they weren’t trying to destroy the whole planet?”
