“You were right, Cam,” Deke admitted, nodding at the screen. The cluster of Unity ships had finally sped up, moving at what looked like a hundred gravities of acceleration. “They’re coming.”
I nodded wordlessly and commandeered his communications console, aiming the laser line-of-sight transmitter at the Ellen.
“Commonwealth warship Ellen Campbell, this is Colonel Alvarez on the Fleet Intelligence vessel Flying Dutchman II. Do you copy?”
“Dutchman, this is the Ellen Campbell,” Chase replied. It was good to hear a familiar voice. “We have good copy. We also have enemy inbound. What are your orders?”
“Meet us at the landing field outside Gamma Junction,” I decided. “If this is gonna be the last battle, I want to fight it inside a Vigilante, leading my Marines.”
[ 26 ]
“They’re gonna be on top of us in half an hour,” Captain Nance told me, pouncing like an ambush predator the second the three of us had boarded the Ellen, barely sparing a curious glance for Luke, as if bringing a twelve-year-old onto a warship about to do battle was among the least crazy things I’d done since we’d known each other.
We’d landed the Dutchman II just a hundred meters from the Ellen, and I tried to imagine what the gathered citizenry of Gamma Junction would have thought of the massive, alien starship setting down as light as a feather without so much as bending a blade of grass. They were too busy to offer the miracle the attention it deserved though. We’d spotted them on the way down, hordes of people on foot, in cargo trucks, or even aboard horse-drawn wagons, following dirt tracks or game trails or sometimes just blazing a new path through the tall grass and fields of wheat and corn. Thousands of them. Tens of thousands.
They’d listened, and I suppose that was some comfort.
“The second we have the Marines off the ship,” I told Nance, not slowing down, forcing him to jog to keep up as we headed for the other end of the Ellen where the armory had been wedged into her, “you get into high orbit. Keep the Unity away from the surface as long as you can. Leave your Intercepts here. Major Conners is going to stay in low orbit with them and provide air support.” I paused, turning, and Nance stopped abruptly, out of breath. “This is Luke. He was the only survivor we found on Hudson Bay and, frankly, there’s been no safe place to leave him.”
“He could go with the civilians here…” Nance suggested, but I cut him off.
“They’re not safe,” I declared flatly. “Nowhere here is safe. This ship is the best I can do and yes, I know it’s not really safe here either. Put Luke as close to the center of the Ellen as possible, give him a vacc suit, and assign someone to take care of him. If you live through this, I expect him to, you got me?”
“Yeah…” Nance blanched at the glare I offered him and tried again. “Aye, sir.”
“Luke,” Vicky said, kneeling beside the boy, “go with Captain Nance and do exactly what he tells you to do. Okay?”
“I’m scared, Vicky,” the kid admitted, though to his credit he didn’t start whining or bawling. He would cry eventually, I knew that firsthand, but he’d kept it inside at least in front of us. “Can’t I just stay with you and Cam?”
“We’re going to be outside, in our suits, fighting the aliens,” I told him. “This is the best place for you right now. Can you stay here for me and be good until we get back?”
“What happens if you don’t come back?” he asked, belligerence rising to try to camouflage the terror I knew he felt. “What happens to me?”
“You’ll be okay, Luke,” I said. “Back on Demeter, there are a lot of families who’ll take you in. They’re good people, and I know the boss there. Guy named Munroe—he’s like the president, sort of. Tell him I sent you and he’ll take care of you.”
Luke nodded, didn’t pull away when Vance took his hand and led him away. I took one last look at the kid, remembering another lost boy on a world that no longer existed, and continued through the ship. It wasn’t crowded in the hallways, not like the Orion, but once we reached the armory it was standing room only. And I knew this audience.
“Sir!” newly-minted Captain Springfield said, sounding way too cheerful given the circumstances. “Ma’am! I’m glad you’re okay!”
I’d never seen so many battlesuits packed into this small a space, but I’d asked for the entire company, and that was what they’d given me. Vigilantes stood shoulder to shoulder, with barely room for their chest plastrons to open, and Marines had to squeeze past each other to enter their suits
“Thanks, Springfield,” I said, peeling off my tactical armor and tossing it carelessly into a corner. “Glad to see you too. And glad to see these,” I added, nodding at the suits. “I’ve had enough of my bare skin being the only thing between me and hot metal.”
“Sir!” It was Kenna, one of the Vergai recruits, a big grin plastered across his face, a new buzzcut decorating his head. “Check it out!” He tapped the sides of his head at the temple where fresh ‘face jacks had been implanted. “Back on Demeter, they fitted all us Vergai with jacks and now we can control the suits just like you!”
“That’s great, Kenna!” I tried to sound more enthusiastic than I was, because I knew how much it meant to them. The Vergai had always worried they weren’t real Drop Troopers because they lacked the implant jacks, but I’d sort of envied them the ability to change their fate and not be constantly reminded of what they were. “Glad you guys had the time for that.”
“And our suits all have plasma guns now, sir!” Brevet, another of the Kergai, told me, smacking the weapon mounted on the left arm of his Vigilante. “No more of those underpowered coilguns.”
Now that I was enthusiastic about. Having a weapon that could run out of ammo wasn’t ideal for any situation, but particularly not today.
“Good. Let’s make the most of it. Everyone, suit up and un-ass this ship so they can go do their best to make sure we don’t have too many of these bastards to fight. Believe me, they’re going to be hard enough to handle as it is. Listen to your squad leaders and keep moving, and make sure you shoot every one of the bastards you see, whether they’ve already been shot or not. Got me?”
“Hoo-yah, sir!” The chorus came from the Vergai mostly, though I knew the others felt the same way. They’d just seen too much to be zealous about it.
So had I.
It had been dark not that long ago. Hours before dawn, no moon in the sky, cloud cover, as dark as the inside of an elephant’s asshole. Not anymore. The Vigilante was friend and lover, holding me in her arms, keeping me safe and warm and lighting up the world. Every centimeter of Gamma Junction was clearly delineated, standing out like the computer graphics blueprint… even from a couple kilometers away.
“We’re really gonna let them destroy the city, sir?” Springfield asked over our private channel.
She was nearly a klick down the tree line where we’d taken cover, and even though we were under radio silence, Springfield could still signal me with laser line-of-sight by passing the transmission down the line from one suit to another.
“Hopefully it won’t come to that, but if even one of their ships get through the Intercept cordon, they’ll wipe the floor with us if they see us. If that happens, our only chance is to let them take out the buildings. After that, they’ll send troops down to check for survivors. If we’re going to protect the civilians, we have to take out those ground troops. And if we’re going to live through it, we have to take them out under the concealment of the trees.”
“I get it, sir,” she assured me. “I just feel like these people are going to lose everything they have.”
“Not their lives. Their lives are all that really matter.”
“Hey, Cam, you down there?” Deke asked. I blinked. So much for radio silence. “You don’t have to answer. I know you don’t want to give up your position. But I figure you want to keep tabs on what’s going on up here, so I’ll send the signal down broadband and encrypted and you can follow it.” He paused. “Consider it my way of saying I’m sorry for being a dick. I was pissed about you not keeping me in the loop with the Project Rho AI, but it doesn’t seem all that important right now. Good luck down there.”
I wish I could have told him thanks, but I had other things to think about. The transmission filled a quarter of my helmet’s HUD with the view from high orbit, from the cutter Dutchman II. It wasn’t just optical, because the Ellen was too far away for that, outside the orbit of Hausos’ moon, but the tactical computer combined the sensors into a complete picture that wasn’t too pretty.
The skull ships deployed in multiple globular cluster, still hundreds of thousands of klicks away, yet no less threatening for it. Too damned many of them. Forty, ten in each cluster, spread out over nearly a hundred thousand klicks. The Ellen didn’t wait for them, doing what I’d instructed, engaging as far away as possible, moving so fast the Dutchman II’s sensors had a hard time keeping up with her.
When the weapons struck, they weren’t the green-tinted gravitic force beams I was used to from Predecessor ships. Instead, there was a barely perceptible shimmer from the nose of the ship that lashed out at the closest Unity vessel in the nearest of the formations. The skull ship shimmered in tune with the beam as if there was a bubble around it, until that bubble popped and took the spacecraft with it. Nothing spectacular, just a flash of white that formed into a sphere for just a moment until it disappeared.
