‘You can read people’s minds?’
She smiled at Blake’s startled look. ‘Not exactly,’ she said, and patted his hand.
Blake’s fingers squeezed hers reassuringly. ‘Intelligent guesswork, then?’
‘Something like that.’
She almost said more, but the strident chime of the intercom interrupted her.
‘Cally? Cally!’
Avon’s voice crackled over the audio. He evidently wasn’t in the mood for a long conversation.
‘Wherever you are, get back here. Now!’
Blake released her hand. ‘You should go. Avon’s waiting. Sounds like leading the fight has gone to his head.’
‘What about you?’ she replied.
‘I’m still plugged in here.’ He nodded at the nearby equipment. The motion provoked a little wince of pain from him. ‘Like you said, I should let these medical units do their job.’
‘That is not what I meant, Blake.’ Cally studied his expression carefully. ‘Did leading the fight go to
your
head?’
Blake didn’t disguise his surprise. ‘Cally?’
‘Before we went down to the planet,’ she said, ‘you did not answer my question. Would you have done it?’
‘Done what?’
‘Would you have risked the lives of so many by destroying Star One?’
His heart rate was increasing again. The medical instruments suggested a surge of adrenaline, too. Cally didn’t need to read the display screens to tell that his breathing had become more ragged.
‘Is that what you really came here for?’ he snapped at her. ‘To ask me that?’
The intercom interrupted again.
‘Cally, where the hell are you? Those alien ships are closing in.’
There was little doubt from Avon’s tone who he thought was in charge.
She scraped her chair back, and crossed to the far wall. ‘I’m on my way,’ she said into the speaker, and switched off the intercom to deny Avon the chance to comment. ‘You and I will talk later, Blake.’
‘About what?’
‘About whether our reprisal could have cost the lives of so many innocent people.’
Blake’s only reply was a non-committal grunt.
Cally opened the door to leave. ‘In the meantime, perhaps Avon can hold back that oncoming fleet and save millions, instead.’
Avon
, she’d said. Across the room, in the harsh light spilling in from the corridor, she saw the disappointment in Blake’s eyes.
* * *
If anything, the flight deck was busier than when Cally had left it. Jenna sat in the pilot’s seat, and calibrated her controls in readiness for the oncoming attack. Vila fidgeted at his own console as he checked and rechecked the display, not quite ready to trust the readings. Zen’s flickering lights revealed that the
Liberator
systems were primed and active.
Avon looked up from his own preparations, and watched Cally take her own familiar seat. ‘Nice of you to join us.’
Cally ignored his sarcasm. And perhaps there was something more, but the chatter in her subconscious made it hard to discern.
Jenna’s look was easier to read. ‘Is Blake all right?’
Cally nodded briefly. ‘But his condition is still dangerous.’
‘So is ours!’ said Vila. He prodded a display control, and stared in agitation at what it told him.
‘We’re ready for them,’ Avon said. He stepped calmly across to the main view screen. ‘Zen, zoom in on the gap in the defence zone. Display our projected intercept course.’
‘CONFIRMED.’
Cally saw the screen dissolve and reform as it plotted the vectors. A principal red line curved across the image that represented the satellite grid around Star One. The
Liberator
‘s path had stopped in front of a gap in the defence zone. The trajectory of the enemy vessels indicated they were en route for the same position, a myriad red lines converging on a single point. The point where
Liberator
stood ready to confront them, alone.
Avon nodded with grim satisfaction. ‘There they are.’
‘There’s hundreds of ships,’ wailed Vila. ‘Hundreds!’
‘What’s the outlook?’ asked Avon. For a moment, Cally thought he was talking to Vila, but his gaze had hardened on her. ‘Come on!’
Cally was determined to remain composed, even as she realised how she’d only just returned to the flight deck in time. ‘One minute to strike range.’
Vila was a lot less calm. ‘We can’t hold all of them.’
‘They can’t all come through that gap at once,’ Jenna said.
Avon took his seat, and stared impassively at the main screen. ‘Stand by to fire.’
‘Avon,’ protested Vila, ‘this is stupid!’
‘When did that ever stop us?’ Avon’s outstretched finger hovered over the weaponry controls, though his eyes never left the screen. He was unnervingly calm, thought Cally. She wondered if any medical instruments would show he’d had a surge of adrenaline. Detect that his pulse had actually increased. Whether they could even find a heart.
She could hear the tick of the computers. The hum of the engines. The sound of her own breathing. And faintly, in the background, a babble of distant voices.
Avon’s finger stabbed down onto the controls. ‘Fire!’
The
Liberator
‘s hull groaned with the strain of another brutal change of trajectory. A deep, guttural moan, like a wounded animal protesting as it was forced into a painful turn to avoid a predator. It seemed to Jenna as though the flight deck warped and twisted in front of her eyes while she wrestled with the controls. But it was probably just the sweat that drenched her forehead and stung her eyes.
How long had they been fighting? It must have been hours since the first engagement, and yet it felt like a lifetime. Jenna ruefully thought of how all her smuggling career had been about avoiding the enemy. Hiding from them, or making a swift retreat if detected. It went against every instinct she had to steer her vessel into a confrontation. And yet here she was, principal pilot of the
Liberator
, and facing down hundreds of alien vessels as they forced their way through the single hole in the Star One defence grid.
She risked a look up from her controls. Cally was monitoring the battle formations, and remained calm despite the buffeting of the ship’s abrupt movement. Jenna had long abandoned warning them before she made any sharp manoeuvres – the crew had got used to the idea hours ago that they should expect the unexpected. Vila managed to maintain a firing procedure against the approaching ships, despite his plain terror at the onslaught. It was clear that his every instinct was to flee from the room and cower in a distant corner, but he gripped the weapons controls with grim desperation.
Avon was preternaturally calm, a still point amid the chaos. Jenna suspected it was a cold anger that let him remain in quiet control of the
Liberator
. How different Blake would have been in this situation. But was that necessarily better?
A hail of shrapnel rattled across the hull, and Jenna wrenched the controls aside to avoid the remaining debris. The flaming wreck of an alien ship, gutted by the neutron blasters, tumbled past
Liberator
and into the cold depths of space. Like so many of its predecessors, its bulbous shape seemed utterly inimical to conventional space travel.
Avon was already snapping out fresh orders. ‘I want a full sensor sweep, Zen. Have we enough energy in the primary power banks to sustain this strafing pattern ahead of us?’
‘PRIMARY POWER AT THIRTY-SEVEN PERCENT. SECONDARY POWER IS STILL RECHARGING.’
Avon moved over for a closer look at the main view screen. He clutched at the bulkhead to help himself stay upright when the ship lurched again. ‘Initiate pattern sigma positioning. Random manoeuvres at your discretion.’
‘CONFIRMED.’
The next bizarrely-shaped alien ship was squeezing into their sector from beyond the Star One defence grid. ‘Look!’ called Jenna. ‘That’s another of them through.’
This one, however, had an extraordinary turn of speed. Even at that distance, Jenna saw its knobbly hull fluoresce in a rainbow display of colours before it sped at incredible velocity towards
Liberator
. Vila was caught by surprise. He gave a little squeal of alarm as the vessel loomed impossibly large, impossibly quickly in front of them. Before Jenna had time to wonder if the shield would deflect it, or Vila had time to retarget, the ship had whooshed past and vanished from the screen.
Jenna let out a huge breath. ‘I thought it was going to ram us.’
Cally was already tracking it with the detectors. ‘Vila, can you pick it off with the rear neutron blasters?’
‘I can’t see it,’ he admitted, becoming flustered. ‘Wait… er… No.’ He flapped a bit more. ‘Yes! Oh… it’s out of range.’
‘Should we pursue?’ asked Cally.
‘Leave it,’ said Avon. ‘Stay focused on the gap in the grid. A handful of fugitives can’t do much harm.’
‘That’s what
you
used to say about us,’ muttered Vila.
‘And now look at us,’ agreed Jenna. She thought about the fluorescing vessel that had just escaped through the defence grid. The display screen showed that another strange ship was easing its way through the breach, growing larger before her eyes. ‘How many alien ships have slipped through now?’
Cally pondered the question. ‘Eight? Maybe nine?’
‘And we’ve destroyed twenty in the past hour alone,’ Avon reminded them. His finger stabbed at the controls for the neutron blasters. A fierce shaft of brilliant green light speared into the oncoming attacker and tore it apart. ‘Twenty-one now,’ said Avon. ‘Zen, how many more?’
Lights flashed across the main fascia of the ship’s computer. ‘SENSORS INDICATE NEARLY ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-NINE VESSELS BEYOND THE OPENING IN THE BARRIER. THERE ARE AN ESTIMATED FOUR HUNDRED AND FIFTY-EIGHT VESSELS PROBING THE SATELLITE NETWORK AT OTHER POINTS.’
Movement on the screen made Jenna realise they’d forgotten something. ‘Incoming debris!’
‘Hold tight!’ yelled Avon, his previous composure gone. He threw himself into the nearest flight seat and held on. A metallic clatter on the hull indicated that the momentum of pieces from the shattered ship had carried them through the
Liberator
‘s defences.
‘INFORMATION. DEFENCE SHIELD AT TWENTY PERCENT EFFICIENCY.’
Vila groaned. ‘Now they can see us as well as hit us! Oh, where are those Federation ships?’ He seemed to ponder this irony. ‘We spend years trying to avoid them, but when you
really
need them to turn up…’
‘You are babbling, Vila,’ said Cally.
‘Babbling is what he does best,’ said Avon. ‘Concentrate on the neutron blasters.’
Vila looked furious. Jenna smiled encouragingly at him, but he wasn’t amused. ‘I’m not a soldier in your army, Avon,’ he snapped. ‘Picking pockets is what I’m good at. And picking locks—that’s my area of expertise. I’m a genius at that. But this is just… madness.’ Even so, he continued to focus on the screen, and his hands flickered over the blaster controls in anticipation of his next target.
Avon wasn’t interested in Vila’s protests, and was already considering their next options. ‘Zen, can you intercept any alien communications? Tell us what they’re saying.’
‘SENSORS HAVE DETECTED ALIEN COMMUNICATION, BUT TRANSLATION IS NOT AVAILABLE.’
Jenna was intrigued. ‘What do they sound like, Zen?’
‘NOW PLAYING INTERCEPTED MESSAGE.’
At first Jenna thought that there was interference in the signal. It soon became plain that the noise they could hear was actually the alien communications. This was what they sounded like. A warbling, guttural gargle of noise, swooping across a full octave and utterly dissimilar to any voice she had encountered. Unlike any animal noise she’d ever heard, too. It was completely… well, alien to her.
‘Turn it off, Zen!’ said Avon. ‘Keep monitoring for anything that makes sense. But if we can’t understand them, I don’t want to hear them.’
Vila agreed. ‘It was just gibberish.’
‘Maybe I should have asked you to translate,’ Avon told him.
This was no time to undermine Vila, Jenna thought. But she didn’t have time to comment, because of a sudden new turn of events. ‘Two more ships are through!’ She pointed urgently at them as they loomed larger and larger on the main screen, spiralling towards the
Liberator
. She considered an emergency manoeuvre, but concluded that the corkscrew pattern of the aliens’ approach had locked
Liberator
in their sights. Could she reverse away from them? That would take
Liberator
off-station and allow other ships unfettered access through the hole in the defence grid.
Perhaps it was already too late.
‘They’re locked on,’ Jenna yelled. ‘Brace for impact!’
Vila’s hands froze over the neutron blasters. The two alien ships coiled through space towards
Liberator
. Their hulls blazed with light, and a glittering tail of luminescence curled in their wake. It was almost hypnotic.
Jenna was yelling something at him. Or someone else. Or everyone. Or maybe just yelling. He felt like screaming himself. Instead, he grabbed hold of the console before him, just as the alien ships smashed into the flare shield.
A deep vibration struck up throughout the flight deck, juddering and shaking him to his core. It was disorienting, slightly nauseating. Vila slammed back in his seat, and gripped the console even more tightly in a desperate attempt to stay upright. Distant alarms blared. A rattle of debris on the outer hull echoed throughout the room.
There was fresh yelling in his ear. Too close for Jenna. It had to be Avon.
‘You have them, Vila. Fire!’
Vila risked letting go of the console with one hand, and prodded hopefully at the activation control for the neutron blasters. It loosed off a fusillade of shots. Two, three, more…
The lights on the view screen flared brilliantly, blindingly. The flight deck tilted sickeningly to one side, and then just as abruptly to the other. When his eyes recovered, Vila saw only sparkling debris where the two alien ships had been.
‘Got them!’ he shouted, almost delirious with delight. ‘I got them!’
‘Well done,’ said Avon. There was a grudging note in his voice. ‘Stay alert. There’ll be plenty more.’