Vila stared at the back of Avon’s head, visualising a target. ‘It’s only your encouragement that keeps me going, you know.’
But Avon had already crossed the flight deck, and was sliding Orac out from a side cabinet. He swept his hand across a table, scattering onto the floor what few items had not already been thrown there during the violent manoeuvres of the previous few hours. When he had Orac on the table, Avon slotted the activation key into place. A querulous whine indicated that the computer was active.
Avon placed his hands either side of the transparent box. ‘Orac, what have you discovered about the alien fleet’s intentions?’
Orac responded immediately in his familiar irritable fashion. ‘As I have mentioned before, your frequent and impertinent interruptions do not change the situation.’
Avon slapped one palm against the side of the computer. ‘Your regular and predictable evasions aren’t helping, either.’ He tried again. ‘What have you found?’
This time, there was a pause before Avon got a reply. Vila thought that Orac’s tone was now more evasive than aggrieved. ‘The alien technology is too inferior for suitable analysis.’
Avon gave a great laugh of derision, an odd contrast to his coldly imperious command of
Liberator
so far. ‘Of course! Their systems do not use Tarial Cells. Therefore,
you
cannot interrogate them.’ Avon’s humour didn’t last as he pondered the implications of this. ‘That doesn’t make them stupid, Orac. It makes them impenetrable.’
‘I thought,’ said Vila, ‘that all computers in the known universe were based on Tarial Cells?’
‘Well, you’re looking at the unknown universe now.’ Avon gestured expansively towards the view screen. In the distance, hundreds of alien ships lurked beyond the satellite defence barrier. ‘Orac, try something else. Assimilate all Zen’s current long-range scan data, and cross-reference it against the known movements of the alien fleet over the past two hours. Extrapolate their next moves, and advise.’
‘If you insist,’ grumbled Orac.
‘Oh, I do.’ Avon snatched at the activation key, and the chattering whine disappeared as he left Orac to complete the assignment. Avon slid the computer back into the side cabinet.
Vila wanted to ask what Avon had actually asked Orac to do, but Jenna was already calling over to him.
‘Watch it. Some of the smaller ships have broken through.’ She studied the display in front of her. ‘Must be…’
‘Half a dozen,’ suggested Cally.
Jenna was already steering
Liberator
back into a defensive position. ‘Here they come.’
Vila looked wildly at the view screen. A scattered group of gleaming points of light twisted towards him. Two of them executed an eccentric route that followed no logical pattern. The others zoomed larger and larger, aimed unerringly at the
Liberator
. He stabbed repeatedly at the neutron blasters, unsure whether just to blast away at random in the hope of catching all of the attackers, or to concentrate on fewer, more targeted shots and risk missing some of the others.
‘They’re too fast!’ he wailed. ‘I can’t pick them off.’
Jenna wasn’t making it any easier, he decided. Perhaps as a result of the previous attack, she was shimmying the ship from side to side to make it less obvious which direction they might finally commit to. The engines swooped and boomed. The view screen wobbled in response, and Vila quivered along with it.
‘There are more coming!’ Jenna warned him.
‘Another four,’ Cally confirmed.
Jenna twisted
Liberator
aside, and the ship rolled abruptly. But it was to no avail. ‘They’ve got us in a pincer formation!’
A coruscating barrage of alien blasts pummelled the
Liberator
. The flight deck lit up, brilliant light searing from the main screen until the automatic filters cut in to compensate for the painful brightness. The ship’s engines dipped ominously, then re-established their familiar note. Vila wondered if the defences had been breached. Were they holed? Could they still defend themselves from this fresh onslaught?
He examined his readouts worriedly. He wasn’t optimistic at the best of times, but this really didn’t look good. ‘Our neutron blasters are almost exhausted.’ He looked over at Jenna for reassurance.
She had none. ‘The force wall is failing, too. Zen, what’s our status?’
‘DEFENCE FIELD NOW AT TWELVE PERCENT EFFICIENCY. BATTLE COMPUTERS PROJECT THAT CURRENT RATE OF DAMAGE WILL EXHAUST THE AUTO-REPAIR SYSTEMS IN TEN MINUTES.’
‘What was that?’ asked Cally.
Vila saw that she had her head tilted at an angle, as though straining to hear something. ‘That was our last chance of survival!’ he told her.
She didn’t seem to hear him. Or maybe she was concentrating on whatever had caught her attention. Though what she could possibly hear above the cacophony of the alien assault, Vila couldn’t imagine. He returned to his controls, firing the neutron blasters as the alien counter-strike continued.
Liberator
‘s hull groaned ominously.
‘Can’t you hear it?’ Cally asked. Her voice was insistent, but so quiet that she was barely audible beneath the noise of the attack. ‘It’s a babble of voices… a kind of continuous chattering…’
‘The aliens!’ groaned Vila.
‘Or,’ suggested Avon, ‘she’s been listening to you for too long.’
‘INFORMATION. DETECTORS INDICATE SEVERAL HUNDRED ADDITIONAL SHIPS APROACHING
LIBERATOR
, VECTOR SEVEN-NINE.’
‘At last!’ A surge of relief flooded through Vila, almost as good as a slug of soma. ‘The Federation fleet! I never thought I’d be glad to see them.’
‘Impossible,’ snapped Avon. ‘They are a long way off. Zen, identify those ships!’
‘THAT INFORMATION IS NOT AVAILABLE.’
Jenna already seemed to be considering other possibilities, but the instrumentation was not helping her. ‘Rear sensors have been knocked out.’
‘I only realigned those the other week,’ grumbled Vila. The emotional rush had well and truly dissipated. ‘I don’t fancy going out there again, Jenna. Those hull suits make me claustrophobic.’
‘Auto-repair should be able to handle it,’ she reassured him.
‘Not at this rate of damage,’ said Avon. Trust him to crush any remaining optimism.
Vila was exasperated. ‘We’re surrounded! Defenceless. Blind. Let me know if I’ve missed any other kind of catastrophe. I’d hate to die misinformed.’
Avon clearly still couldn’t believe the evidence of the readout in front of him. ‘How the hell did so many alien ships get behind us?’
Vila glared at him. ‘You know what they say about “fight or flight”? Well, I’ve always been quite keen on flight. How does that sound to you, Avon? Jenna?’
‘Neutron blasters are depleted,’ she replied. Her choice was clear, at least.
Avon was still searching for straws to clutch at. ‘We’re running out of options.’
‘Running out sounds like a pretty good option to me!’ Vila retorted. ‘So what’s keeping us here?’ He twisted around to appeal directly to the others. ‘You agree with me don’t you, Jenna? And you, Cally?’
Jenna was frowning. But it wasn’t Avon she was worried about. ‘Cally? Are you all right?’ There was no reply.
A fusillade of alien fire raked across
Liberator
, and a control panel next to Zen exploded in sparks. Everyone ducked instinctively.
Everyone, Vila noted, except Cally. She remained standing by her console, rocked from side to side by the lurching movement of the flight deck, yet otherwise unmoved by the bedlam around her.
Her expression had glazed over. Despite the commotion of the alien bombardment, her attention was somewhere else entirely.
Cally could feel her body swaying to and fro. She sensed movement around her, the flicker of lights in her peripheral vision, and the sense that her friends were trying to talk to her.
But there was a more insistent conversation in her mind. She’d perceived it faintly at the start of the alien attack, but dismissed it as her mind playing odd tricks at a time of great stress. Odd sensations that had tickled at the edges of her consciousness since arriving in this sector had continued to build, like a voice calling ever more insistently from a distance. Was it trying to attract her attention?
It had grown into many more, all calling, all appealing… to her? Low whispers that were building into a shout. Becoming a chorus of voices.
She concentrated. Tried to make out what they were calling out to her. No, it wasn’t a chorus. They were not all chanting the same thing at once. The words were not the same. But surely, Cally sensed, their
meaning
was the same. Not the same words, exactly. Not the same vocabulary. Not even the same language. But the same
theme
.
Cally focused in on that theme. They were not even voices – they were minds.
She felt a thrill ripple through her whole body. A mixture of dread and exhilaration. For a brief moment she contemplated the prospect that she had reached out to the consciousnesses of the alien fleet. The excitement faded as she realised that the enemies’ thoughts were utterly closed to her. Unknown. Unattainable.
Despite this, she felt no disappointment. Because there was something else. Something reassuring. Something familiar. Sensations she knew all too well.
She sensed fear. Not her own, but the fear of whoever was out there. Cally felt like weeping in acknowledgement and relief, because she also felt in every fibre of her being that they knew fear could not hold them in its cold grasp. Because the coiled spring of anger was driving them onward. The primal urge to defend and survive.
They were relentless. They were defiant.
Cally laughed out loud. ‘They are humans!’
The flight deck surged back into reality. Weaponry slamming its relentless bombardment against the hull. The heat of the flight deck around her. The yaw of the
Liberator
as the alien assault continued. Her friends staring at her in concern.
‘Humans!’ Cally repeated. ‘Not alien vessels. There are human ships coming!’ She took a few unsteady steps across to the main computer. ‘Zen – visual.’
‘CONFIRMED.’
The main screen flickered and refocused, revealing a motley array of space vessels approaching from sector ten. Although they had many and varied designs, their appearance was reassuringly familiar. A comforting alternative to the unrecognisable shapes of all the alien attackers they had faced so far.
Cally almost laughed again at her friends’ expressions. ‘I could feel their emotions,’ she explained.
‘What? You can read their minds?’ Vila looked amazed. And then he had another thought. ‘Can you read
my
mind?’
‘No-one would want to read your mind, Vila,’ she smiled.
‘Where did they come from?’ Jenna wanted to know.
Cally closed her eyes to concentrate. Trying to recall the intense emotions and intentions of the approaching humans. She focused her mind again on what disparate humans were saying, thinking, hoping ‘It is a flotilla from the nearest frontier worlds,’ she explained.
Avon was already checking the call idents from the arriving ships. He ordered Zen to filter key information and incoming messages. Cally could see relief in everyone’s faces as human voices spoke to them over the audio, rather than the impenetrable noise of the aliens.
There were military cruisers arriving from Vilka and Herom, not Federation standard but still armed and ready to engage. There were also mining vessels out of Carthenis, their industrial laser cutters adapted as crude weaponry. Solar shuttles from Palmero flitted in and around the larger vessels. It was clear from the chatter over the comms systems that there were even tourist craft from Harnup and Moran, whose asteroid repulsion systems had been converted in a makeshift manner into armaments.
Jenna had completed her scan of the approaching fleet. ‘Hundreds of them!’ she confirmed, her voice cracking with excitement and relief. ‘All armed.’
‘They heard about the invasion,’ said Cally, ‘and they have come to defend their galaxy.’
The first of the human ships had started to engage with the enemy. The nearest of the alien ships peeled away from their attack on
Liberator
, and veered off in the direction of this new threat.
‘Defend the galaxy?’ Vila snorted with disbelief as he looked at the view screen. ‘That ragtag bunch of ratty little ships?’
‘Those ratty little ships are holding off the alien fleet,’ Avon said.
Vila looked dubious. ‘But for how long?
‘Long enough for us to fall back for a while. Give the auto-repair systems time to recover, and the weapons systems time to recharge.’ Avon began a swift set of calculations and adjustments at his console. ‘Jenna, get us out of range, standard by seven.’
‘I’m on it.’
‘Zen,’ continued Avon. ‘Keep monitoring the alien fleet.’
‘CONFIRMED.’
Cally heard the engines surge as the ship prepared for its manoeuvre. On the view screen, she saw the human flotilla swarm around them and interpose itself between
Liberator
and the aliens that poured through the defence grid. For the first time since the war had begun,
Liberator
was pulling back from the front line.
The clattering of alien salvos against the outside of the ship gradually faded, and then ceased altogether. The engines took on a steadier tone as the ship travelled to a comfortable distance from the main conflict.
Cally watched Jenna steering them to safety, and was once again impressed with her friend’s calm, almost casual confidence. It was as though Jenna and the
Liberator
were connected through the flight controls. Jenna was instinctively at one with the ship. Completely at home. This was where she belonged.
Avon was busying himself with some calculations at his console. Vila tapped his fingers impatiently on his.
With a final flourish, Jenna completed their manoeuvre and released the flight controls. ‘This should be far enough.’
‘Not far enough for me,’ said Vila. ‘Are there still alien ships following us?’
Cally ran a rapid scan of the immediate area. ‘One small vessel. Vector eight six.’