Starship Eternal (War Eternal Book 1) (41 page)

"No," he shouted. "Not again."

The fighters that weren't destroyed in the blast fell dead from the EMP.

He fought against the swell of anguished fury. Another friend, gone to save his life. How many more would die for him? Why? He was nothing special. No one special.
 

He checked his HUD. The carrier was still behind him, unloading another round of fighters. The Schism was... He found it ahead of him. It was still transmitting, still out there, buried somewhere in the asteroid belt. One of the Alliance cruisers tried to follow behind it, getting battered by the rocks, the force shoving it away. Weapons fired from the battleship, breaking up the asteroids, carving a path towards the ship. They would make it through sooner or later. There was only one thing left to do.

"Which way?" he asked Singh.

"I'm passing the coordinates."

A new marker appeared on his p-rat, swinging around from behind the star. It was larger than the others, and the AI refused to put a tag to it, to identify it as something human-made.

They were here.

They were coming.

Mitchell fired full thrusters, vectoring away from the battleship, away from the Schism, towards the position Singh transmitted to him. There was no way to see that deep into the asteroid field, but his first, macabre thought was that he was going to find nothing more than debris, a transmitter floating in space. Had the enemy ship already obliterated Goliath, and then lay in wait for them to arrive?

Or had they been unable to find it?

They wouldn't have either, if not for Watson's machine. Who would have thought to check bands that had been out of use for so long? Who would have expected the ship to be sending a distress signal after all of these years?

He watched the larger marker of the alien ship circle the star and begin its approach, even as he reached the belt and plowed inside. The field was a challenge to maneuver, and under other circumstances he would have enjoyed slaloming between them, seeing how close he could get without being crushed.
 

"Ares," Millie's voice found its way into his head.

"Captain," he replied. "I'm on my way to Goliath."

"Hurry," she said. "The...offline...support...failing." The asteroids were screwing with the transmission. He knew what he thought he heard.

He rolled and swung, skipped and hopped through the field, firing on a few of the smaller rocks to clear his path instead of trying to skirt around them. He kept an eye on the HUD the entire time, clenching his teeth every time it would freeze, unable to get an honest view of the battlefield through the mineral-soaked debris.
 

As he watched, one thing became clear:

The alien ship was about to fire.

The Alliance ships were still in its path, pummeling the belt, trying to reach the Schism. It didn't matter. They had shown they didn't care about human life, about casualties. They used people like robots, sending them commands. Sending them to their deaths. They had let Cornelius chase his daughter into an asteroid field, and now that he couldn't finish the job they were going to do it for him.

"Mitchell," Millie's voice crackled in his head. If their sensors were working, she knew what was going to happen as surely as he did.
 

"Millie." He growled it in his mind at the same time his concentration slipped, and an asteroid smacked the rear corner of the ship. They spun wildly, careening out of control, lucky, or maybe not lucky, that the AI stabilized the ship before they were splattered on another chunk of rock. "You need to get out of there."

"I want..." she said, not hearing him, or ignoring him. "Love you."

His gut wrenched. Why did she have to say that? Why now?

The overlay picked up the power spike coming from the alien ship. Mitchell blinked away his angry tears, fighting every instinct to turn around, as if his little fighter could do anything against the enemy.
 

He did the only other thing he could do, pushing forward, harder and more resolute than before. If she was going to die, if they were all going to die, he was going to get his revenge.

The HUD picked up the blast from the enemy, tracking it in fits and starts across open space. It collided with the Alliance ships, tearing into them, rending them apart, shifting the alloy from ultra-tensile to ultra-brittle. It would do the same to the asteroids, and then the Schism.

"No," Singh said behind him, barely loud enough for him to hear. She had a feed into his view, and she saw what he did.
 

It was the first time he had ever heard her say anything with emotion.

In the heart of the loss, in the center of the destruction, there was only silence. Mitchell's body fell numb, his mind blanking. The Schism's marker dropped from the overlay, treated as nothing more than a speck; an empty, unimportant thing. Millie, Shank, Cormac, Briggs, and all of the others. Gone in an instant. Killed in the depths of space, where no one would ever know of how they died, of what they had sacrificed in penitence for the crimes they had committed.

Mitchell didn't notice right away that the asteroids had cleared around him.

When he saw it, he wasn't quite sure he believed it was there, silent and massive and still and dark.
 

No, not dark.
 

Not dark at all.

Goliath.
 

It spread out in front of him, stretching the entire length of his vision. It was big. Bigger than he had imagined. Bigger than anything he had ever seen, save for the Federation dreadnought.
 

Big and ugly.

And already under alien control.

Veins spread around it in a liquid metallic shine, undulating across the surface, branching out from one to the other, connecting at points along the hull. A nervous system, Watson had called it. It lay over the heavy alloy of the lost starship and passed into and out of it in places, spearing the structure and cradling it as though it was the only thing holding it together. It may have been, too. The metal underneath was scarred and puckered, twisted and broken as though it had already been through a war, or more likely pelted with asteroids.
 

"This," Mitchell said, trying to contain his disappointment and disbelief. It didn't matter if the aliens had already taken it. "This is what was supposed to save us?" How? How could it? It was nothing more than a shell, a mangled piece of wreckage in worse shape than the Schism had ever been. It was old and useless, another human corpse.

"I..." Singh tried to find the words and failed. There were no words. In the aftermath of losing everything, there were no emotions. Or there were so many they were both overloaded. "What now?"

He didn't know. Was he supposed to? The Schism was gone. Millie was gone. Even the Alliance ships and General Cornelius were gone. The alien ship was outside the asteroid field, waiting. For them? For something else?

He kept the fighter moving towards the ship, deciding to go in for a closer look. Their odds of survival were small, but if they did manage to escape he wanted a good look at what they were up against.
 

"It's amazing," Singh said behind him, so quietly he barely heard her.
 

The truth was that the structure was amazing, the way it flowed across the hull like metallic vines, the way the energy coursed and pulsed along it. As they drew ever closer, he wondered if it had the capability to attack them. The original Goliath had no weapons, and he didn't see anything augmenting the ship beyond the veins.

He checked his HUD. The alien craft was moving closer, along with the Alliance carrier. He had forgotten about that ship. They were keeping it alive for now. The reason became clear the next time the sensors punched through the asteroids. Two squadrons of fighters had dumped from the carrier, along with a larger dropship.
 

They were coming in.

"We're going to have company," he said.

Singh didn't answer him.

"Singh, are you alive back there?"

"Yes. Mitchell, look."

They were nearly on top of the Goliath now, close enough that he could feel the charge of the pulses running across the hull. They were near the front, near the belly of the ship and rising up along the side. He didn't see anything.

"What is it?" he asked.

"There. To your left."

He turned his head, scanning along the side of the ship. He could see the veins looked more like bundled wires from here, so densely woven that they appeared unified from a distance. They rose two or three meters off the alloy plates, curving and diving back in. They were lashed to the hull with larger, denser splashes of the material, or in some cases vanished into the metal, disappearing inside a small spread that sealed the inside of the ship.

He saw it then. A spot of green light near the aft of the behemoth, growing larger and spilling further out into space with each passing breath.

A door.
 

It was opening.

"Is that good or bad?" Singh said.

Mitchell watched the heavy door. The Goliath had a hanger, a launch bay intended for future missions that it had never gotten the chance to go on. Were they about to be ambushed from two sides?

He checked his HUD. It was only updating every few seconds, and only a few of the fighters were marked inside the belt, the rest disguised by the interference. The dropship was sitting right outside, floating along the edge in sync with the smaller ships. They were searching. For him? Or for Goliath?

He eyed the hanger door. They had nothing to lose.

"Either good, or dead," he said, firing the thrusters and sending them skating along the side of the ship.

His p-rat beeped as the first of the fighters entered the opening in the field, appearing in his vision. He turned and vectored towards it, launching two of the discs as he swung away from Goliath and then flipped the fighter over to face back towards it, and the hanger.

The Moray vanished in a short, silent explosion, at the same time he rocketed towards the opening. The doors were only a third of the way to their fully retracted position, split in the center and moving at a snail's pace. He couldn't see much of the inside of the ship through the green glow of the lighting, but nothing was coming out at them and he took that as a good sign.

The p-rat beeped when the rest of the squadron appeared, eleven strong and coming on hard. They were only two seconds away from the hanger doors. Could the other pilots make the squeeze? Could he? He flipped the S-17 again, giving it some thrust to slow it down and letting it float backward towards the opening in the ship's hull. It was going to be close. Very close. He opened fire with everything he had, laying down cover while he made his escape. He only hit one of the enemy fighters, catching the edge of it, blowing it out from the side. It careened away and smashed against an asteroid.

The S-17 jostled as it passed through the gaping mouth of the hanger, the top of it smacking the top door, the shields bouncing it down and off the bottom. They were coming in fast, too fast. He fired the thrusters, watching the inside of the ship pass on either side of them, slowing at the force of the thrust but not slowing fast enough.

"Mitchell!" Singh shouted, the fear in her voice clear.
 

Mitchell gritted his teeth. He was at full thrust. There was nothing else he could do to stop them, and the p-rat was screaming out in warning of the imminent collision.
 

He wasn't sure what happened next. It was so fast that he couldn't follow.

First, the S-17 went dark. The thrusters stopped firing, the engines shut down, the neural link vanished.

Next, something stopped the fighter from its crash into the back of the hanger wall. It didn't do it gently, bringing it to a heavy stop that drove them both hard into the rear of the seats with enough force to wrench the air from their guts and leave them unable to gather more.
 

Finally, it pulled the S-17 to the floor of the hanger.

The doors started to close.