The Terran Gambit (Episode #1: The Pax Humana Saga) (28 page)

“Full, sir?”

“You heard me, Ensign.” He turned back to tactical. “Ayala, get me Lieutenant Grace.” She hadn’t responded before, but Jake refused to believe the worst.

* * *

Anya Grace ducked again, just in time, as another strafing burst of gunfire raked across the wall behind her. Glancing back at Nivens, she gave him a quizzical look and mouthed,
How many?

Three,
he mouthed in reply. She motioned for him to cover her as she ran around the adjacent fighter to flank them, but was interrupted by someone calling her name.

“Anya, you copy? Lieutenant Grace, please respond.” Mercer. She glanced up at the wall panel where the voice had originated from and shouted in reply. “Yeah?”

“Anya! You’re ok!”

“For the moment.” She popped off another short volley of bullets.

“Anya, you still in your fighter?”

“No.” She glanced over at her burned out ship. “It’s seen better days. Why?”

“Can you get to another one?”

“Maybe.” She looked over at the entrance to the cockpit of the fighter she huddled under. It was right in the view of the three soldiers firing at them. “If you ask real nice and all.”

“Anya, you need to shift out to the
Caligula
. Take out their gravitics. And while you’re at it, shift over to the
Roc
, and the
Heron
, and relay them some calcs from engineering to get their own gravitics back up and running. We’ll forward you the message from here. Ready?”

“I said, only if you ask nicely,” she said, smirking. She loved getting under his skin.

“Grace! Get your ass on that boat and get to work!” His voice sounded far more anal-retentive than normal. The corners of her mouth tugged up even farther.

“All right, sir, but you owe me a date or something when this is all over. Or at least another good screw. Grace out,” she said, before he could respond.

She pointed at Nivens. “Cover me!” she said, and stood up low to prepare to run. A spray of fire from Nivens sounded out, and she was off, sprinting as fast as she could towards the cockpit door. Wrenching it open and jumping in, she winced as the door was sprayed by a flurry of bullets just as it shut.

“Looks like I finally get to be both the pilot and the gunner,” she said to herself as she transferred control of the ship’s weapons systems to her console. After a quick sensor sweep of the
Caligula,
she pinpointed exactly where she needed to shift to, and punched in the numbers to the gravitic drive.

“You ready, Grace?” said Mercer through the fighter’s comm.

“Ready,” she said, pulling the seat restraint on over her chest.

“I’m piping the instructions you need to send to the other ships. Now get out of here!”

“Copy.”

After igniting the main engines, with a pull on the controls she lifted the fighter a meter into the air, and nearly punched the command to shift when she caught sight of the group of enemy soldiers hunkered down behind the burned-out fighter. Grinning, she swiveled the fighter’s gun turret on the front bow and raked streaming red high-caliber fire into the other ship, inciting an explosion that sent the group flying backward.

Satisfied she left her people with a fighting chance, she punched the shift command, and disappeared in the blink of an eye.

* * *

Jake closed his comm and shifted in his chair. “Ayala, patch me through to the rest of the ship.”

Ensign Ayala keyed a few switches on her board. “Go ahead, sir.”

“Attention all hands. Grab a hold of something and brace yourselves. It’s about to get a lot rougher sailing.” He looked back at Po. “Is the forward section clear?” Several particularly rough impacts and explosions buffeted the ship, and Jake had to catch himself on his chair.

“Nearly. Another minute.”

Another massive explosion from the
Caligula
’s railguns helped him make the decision he didn’t want to make. The impossible decision. “No time. Ensign, now. Full speed ahead.”

The sudden acceleration knocked nearly everyone on the bridge off their feet as the ship began speeding up at over one g. “Distance to
Caligula
?” he shouted.

“Half a klick and closing fast!” yelled Po in reply.

Jake climbed up to the captain’s chair and strapped himself in. “All hands! Brace for impact!”

As the image of the
Caligula
loomed larger in the viewscreen at a frightening speed, Jake began to wonder if this was his final mistake. He made a point to ask Bernoulli if there was some gambit in chess that sent the king on a suicidal attack run at the queen.

Not likely.

9

C
APTAIN
T
ITUS EXAMINED
his command console from the center of the bridge. He looked back at Admiral Trajan. “All railgun crews are firing, sir. Shall I signal the ion beam cannons as well?”

“Not yet, Captain. We’ll see if this gets Mercer’s attention. He thinks he’s going to get out of this, you see, and we need to convince him otherwise. I would really like that ship in my fleet, but if he doesn’t cooperate, then so be it.” He turned to tactical. “What is the status of the boarding parties on the
Roc
and the
Heron
?”

The lieutenant touched a few buttons on his console. “Crews have landed, sir, and have secured the fighter decks. They’re beginning to fan out throughout the ships.”

Trajan nodded. “Good. Comm, get me the boarding crew chiefs.”

Ensign Evans spoke into his comm set, and after a moment glanced back up. “I’ve got them, sir. Colonel Hamm and Colonel Stauph on the channel.”

Trajan cleared his throat, his adam’s apple bobbing up and down. “Crew chiefs, as you secure the ships, isolate every officer of the rank of lieutenant commander and above, and execute them. Out of sight of the crew so as not to encourage uprising. Understood?”

After a moment of hesitation, both soldiers responded. “Yes, sir.”

“It is not the usual way we do things, Colonels, I agree and I understand your concern, but we’re facing Resistance on the
Phoenix
, and I don’t want that repeated on the other ships. Understood?”

“Yes, sir,” came the reply from both.

“Trajan out.”

“Admiral!” The lieutenant manning the sensor station had nearly jumped out of his seat. “The
Phoenix
is on a collision course. She’s accelerating!”

Titus felt a sudden rumble from the deck plate, and heard a distant explosion, followed by another louder one.

Admiral Trajan spun around to the sensor station. “What was that?”

The blood drained from the lieutenant’s face, and seeing that, a knot formed in Titus’s stomach.

“Something just hit our gravitic drive, sir. We’ve lost gravitic thrust. Conventional thrusters only.”

Titus yelled. “What was it? A ship? A fighter? Did someone on the surface fire at us?”

The lieutenant shook his head. “There was a brief gravitic field spike before the explosion. I don’t know sir. Whatever it was, it’s gone. No fire from the surface, nothing from the Phoenix. But we’re dead in the water, sir.”

“Conventional thrusters! Move us out of the way!” Titus yelled again, but knew it was too late—the other ship had already accelerated to a speed far faster than the
Caligula
could reach in the seconds remaining to them.

Trajan turned to tactical. “Make them at least pay for it, Lieutenant. Maintain railgun fire.” The calmness with which he said it almost unnerved Captain Titus.

Titus and Admiral Trajan both spun to look at the front viewscreen and watched as the
Phoenix
grew larger, eventually filling the whole wall.

He’d never been in a ship collision before. Was the energy sufficient to destroy the ship? Titus thought back to the battle over Earth three years ago when Admiral Pritchard had maneuvered a ship straight into the
Behemoth,
delivering a mortal wound. With a shudder, he thumbed open the ship-wide comm. “All hands, brace for impact.”

Trajan kept his arms firmly by his side, as if in defiance of the approaching ship. Titus wondered if the Admiral had any other meticulously planned-out strategies up his sleeve. Trajan’s quiet murmur gave him his answer.

“An interesting move. And that gravitic signal … I should have guessed that the scientists at CERN had something—”

The impact interrupted him, and everyone and thing that was not strapped down flew halfway across the bridge, several officers slamming into the wall—one at an odd angle, which, Titus noticed at the periphery of his attention, caused the man’s neck to snap back, most likely killing him instantly.

When Titus finally got to his feet, he nearly had to cover his ears against the screeching of metal on metal as the
Phoenix
continued its grinding slide to rest firmly in the bow of the
Caligula
. Glancing at Admiral Trajan, who climbed to his feet near the wall, he ran to assist the man.

Trajan’s face dripped with blood, the wall panel having left a deep laceration across his cheek which continued up and over onto his forehead. Luckily, the path of the gash was over the already empty eye socket, or Trajan might well have lost his sight that day. The Admiral removed a spotless white handkerchief from his front jacket pocket and dabbed at the blood, waving Titus off.

“Comm. Signal to the other ships to open fire on the
Phoenix
.”

Titus protested. “But sir! They’re lodged in our hull! If they blow, they’re taking us with them!”

Trajan flashed an eerily calm, bewildering smile. “Yes, Captain, that is true. But the fact remains that I am committed to the plan. To the goal of wiping out the Resistance once and for all. And Captain,” he lowered his chin and stared at Titus with his now even more ghoulish, bloody face, “We are not committed like the hen, but like the swine. I am willing not just to sacrifice a few of my precious eggs, but my flesh. That is the duty of an Imperial officer. Remember that,” he added, coldly.

“Yes, sir,” Titus said, with a faint voice.

“Sir! I’m reading another gravitic disturbance, this time from the
Roc
.”

Trajan’s face snapped toward the lieutenant so fast that blood actually flew off his cheek, splattering onto Titus’s uniform. “Are their engines back online?”

“No sir.”

The grinding screech of metal on metal finally ceased, and Trajan strode back to the command terminal, studying it intently.

“Comm. Tell the fleet to hold fire momentarily. Sergeant Tomaga,” he said towards the comm speaker on his console.

“Yes, Admiral?” the commander of the fifty-first brigade replied over the speaker. He headed up the group of specially trained shock troops usually reserved for planetary surgical strikes.

“The forward section of the
Caligula
is currently mated, after a fashion, with the bow of the
Phoenix
, and my console tells me there is a route you may send your men through. Get on that ship, Sergeant, and finish this nonsense.”

“Yes, sir. Sending out squads now.”

Trajan turned to Titus. “Captain, speak with the other captains on a secure channel, and let them know about the Resistance’s new technology, and to be ready for it.”

“New technology, sir?”

“That is exactly what I said. We’ve picked up two gravitic signatures now,” his eyes lost focus, as if staring at a far-away object, “No, three. One as the troop carriers first entered the
Phoenix’s
fighter bay, one right before our gravitic drive was hit by an unknown source, and another one aboard the
Roc
—”

“And another one just now aboard the
Heron
, sir,” the lieutenant interrupted.

Trajan looked annoyed at being cut off, but continued. “Obviously, the Resistance scientists have developed not only the new gravitic drives for the capital ships, but for the smaller fighters as well. I suspected they were on to something, but our scientists back on Corsica swore that the new gravitic field approximations could not apply to small mass, low energy systems. It appears they were incorrect.”

“Very well, sir.” Titus walked over to the comm station.

The Admiral leaned back over his console. “And it is a technology that will prove most useful to the Emperor and his fleet.” His voice dropped to an almost conversational tone as he continued studying the readouts on the console. “We will capture it, Captain, one way or another.”

* * *

Lieutenant Anya Grace watched with glee as the torpedoes raced away from her front bow and struck the core section of the Caligula, blasting a hole in the ship and sparking secondary explosions from cut power lines. With a deft finger, she pressed the button to initiate a gravitic shift to the fighter bay on the
Roc
, not willing to wait around to see the aftermath of her handiwork. They’d notice her eventually, and would start firing soon afterwards.

The fighter bay of the
Roc
snapped into place around her, and instantly she knew something was wrong. A large group of imperial soldiers was streaming into the bay’s anteroom, and Anya had to shake her head at the oddness of it all—not a minute before she had been firing her fighter’s guns at imperial shock troops in an exact replica of the fighter bay she now found herself in.

There were far too many soldiers to take out with her guns, not right away at least, so without waiting another second she squeezed the trigger of her torpedo launcher, launching a missile which slammed into the anteroom, sending a massive fireball blazing back into the fighter bay and pelting her viewport with shrapnel and ASA suit-clad body parts.

Before the survivors could return fire, she transmitted the calculations to the
Roc’s
computer, with instructions for it to route them to engineering and the bridge. With another press of the gravitic shift engagement button, the flaming fighter bay blinked out, only to be replaced by yet another fighter bay, this one on the
Heron
.