Excelsior (46 page)

“They’ll adjust their headings and evade,” Cardinal said.

“So we track shoot! We might score a lucky hit. It’s better than waiting for them to hit us. Open fire!”

“Yes, sir.”

Alexander watched on the main holo display as bright golden streams of hypervelocity rounds raced out into space, tracking the tiny gray specks of enemy warships.

“They’re returning fire!” Vasquez announced.

“Davorian! Evasive maneuvers!”

“Setting thrust vectors. Five Gs maximum. Brace for maneuvering thrust!”

Suddenly Alexander was pinned to his couch, immobilized as the ship executed a series of random maneuvers that would throw off enemy gunners’ aim. Stars pinwheeled and zagged in bright silver blurs while hypervelocity rounds went on stuttering out into the void in shimmering waves of computer-simulated light. Enemy rounds came racing back, impossibly fast, and far too close for comfort. Cannon fire streamed by on all sides.

“Taking fire!” McAdams gritted out between bursts of acceleration.

Damage alerts sounded. Then came a tooth-rattling screech of metal shearing and of high caliber shells digging into their armor.

Another alarm blared, this one more distinctive. Every spacer knew that alarm from their drills. The subsequent shriek of air hissing out confirmed it.

“Hull breach! Losing pressure,” McAdams said.

Alexander’s ears popped and he heard his suit auto-pressurize. His eyes darted around the bridge, trying to find the source of the breach. Switching from external speakers to comms, he ordered, “Seal it up!”

“Repair drones deployed,” McAdams replied.

Alexander heard more shells hitting their armor. He winced with every hit, watching as they streaked in. Then one of them blew a hole straight through the main holo display, taking out Davorian and his control station in a puff of red mist. The vacuum sucked both the debris and Davorian’s body out in an instant, along with all of the remaining air on the bridge, leaving nothing but a glaring hole full of stars, and a ragged scar on the deck where their helmsman used to sit.

 

Chapter 45

Catalina watched as the raft ran aground on the shore of some jungle-infested island. A sea-salt smelling breeze ran through her sweat-matted hair, cooling her momentarily. She’d taken off her and Dorian’s helmets soon after making it to the raft. No need to hang on to those anymore.

“Everybody out!” the captain roared as the raft came to a stop. “Move it! We need get under cover A-SAP.”

The colonists clambered out, splashing nosily in the shallow water as they tripped and stumbled their way up the beach.

“Let me help you,” someone said.

It was the lieutenant she’d been speaking to earlier. Caty nodded and allowed him to lead her to the front of the raft. He jumped down first and reached up for her to pass Dorian down. She withdrew sharply, as if the lieutenant had threatened to snatch Dorian away from her. The man smiled and waited patiently, and Catalina realized she’d overreacted. It would be safer to pass Dorian down than try to climb out of the raft with him in her arms. She passed her baby down and then crawled over the side of the raft. As soon as she was standing on the beach, the officer handed Dorian back to her.

“Let’s go! Let’s go!” the captain shouted down to them from further up the shore. Catalina noticed that she and the lieutenant were the last ones out. Everyone else was already fleeing for the jungle.

Catalina ran up the beach, kicking sand and trying desperately not to trip. She reached the end of the beach and barreled into a dense green wall of ground cover and trees. Forcing her way through with a crying baby, she caught up to the rest of the colonists. They stood still and frozen near the edge of a clearing, speaking in urgent whispers. Someone scowled and hissed at her to keep her baby quiet. Dorian wasn’t the only small child making too much noise, but she got the hint. She did her best to shush Dorian, bouncing him and cooing softly in his ear. That calmed him somewhat, and she turned her attention to the clearing.

It was some type of farm. Based on the amount of water she saw shimmering in the sun between the bright green tufts of plants, she guessed that it was a rice farm. A trio of workers were out in the field, their conical rice hats shining in the sun.

Caty tried not to give in to despair. The workers hadn’t seen them yet. They could go back and walk farther down the beach, look for a more remote area to hide. She heard the jungle rustling behind her and turned to see the captain joining them. One of his officers greeted him and quickly explained the situation. She overheard them arguing about it.

“We can’t go back,” the captain snapped. “There’s two confederate destroyers sailing down the coast as we speak. If we go back to the beach now, they’ll see us.”

“That was fast. What about the other rafts?”

The captain shook his head. “We can’t afford to worry about them right now. If they’re smart, they’ll head for another part of the beach and spread out. Do those rice farmers look armed?”

“No.”

“Then that gives us the advantage. Get Guitierrez and let’s go. Leave the colonists here until we’ve cleared the area.”

“You want them to watch?”

“They can look away if they have to. Move up.”

Catalina heard someone shouting in the distance, and she spun around to see one of the workers in the field pointing at them. The others looked up and froze. The captain and his officers made their way to the edge of the clearing, their weapons drawn. Catalina followed, driven by the horror of what they were about to do.

“Does anybody speak English?” she called out as loudly as she could. “We need help!”

The captain rounded on her and grabbed her firmly by her arm. “Are you crazy?”

“Someone had to warn them,” she said.

“And now they’re going to warn the nearest platoon of soldiers. Nice work.”

“Ahh, Captain…” one of the officers said.

“What?”

Catalina saw what—the farmers were approaching, not running away in fear. Maybe they hadn’t heard her clearly enough to realize she was speaking English, not Mandarin or Indonesian.

One of them called out in heavily-accented English. “Hello?”

“Shit…” the captain growled. “Let me handle this. Everyone get back under cover!”

Catalina refused to budge. The captain stepped out of the jungle with his weapon drawn. “Don’t move,” he ordered.

The Indonesian farmer stopped, his eyes widening. The other two advancing behind him also froze and traded glances with each other.

“Who are you?” the nearest farmer asked in accented english.

“We’re Alliance colonists. We crash-landed off the shore. Your people are looking for us. If you take us somewhere safe, I promise no harm will come to you or any of your friends. If you don’t, I’m going to shoot you now. Nod if you understand me.”

The man nodded once. “You do not have to threaten us. We will shelter you, but you must agree to come quickly, before it is too late.”

“We’re enemies. How am I supposed to believe that?” the captain demanded.

“We are not enemies. Our governments are enemies.”

The captain stood there staring at the farmer for a long moment, clearly unsure about what he should do. Catalina feared for the farmers’ lives and covered Dorian’s eyes. But the farmers seemed completely unconcerned, as if their instincts of self-preservation had been engineered out of them along with all other types of self-interest.

“And if I shoot the three of you here?”

“Your weapon is not silenced. The sound will carry. People will come looking for us, and no one will agree to shelter you after identifying yourselves as hostile. You will trade an uncertain fate for a certain one.”

The captain’s shoulders slumped, defeated by that logic. “Lead the way.”

The farmer nodded once. “We must be quick,” he said. He and the other two with him turned in unison and ran, splashing through the field.

“Let’s go,” the Captain called out in an urgent whisper before running after the rice farmers.

Catalina followed, trying desperately not to trip in the water-logged rice field. Here they were placing their lives in the enemy’s hands, hoping for mercy.

She tried not to worry about that. Maybe those farmers really didn’t see Alliance civilians as the enemy. It made a certain amount of sense to her. She didn’t feel any animosity toward them, but she couldn’t help remembering all of those news reports about Confederate people being ant-minded, cold, intensely logical, and self-sacrificing to the extreme.

They were perfect communists, hard-wired from birth to always put the greater good ahead of individual needs.

So the question was, did sheltering Alliance colonists somehow serve the greater good, and did their their definition of the greater good extend beyond their own kind?

They ran through the clearing and crashed into another stretch of untamed jungle. Catalina felt her arms burning pitilessly from carrying Dorian’s weight for so long, but she gritted her teeth and forced herself to focus on something else. Eying the dark shadows between the trees, she imagined enemy soldiers lurking there, the bright red dots of their laser sights landing on the colonists one by one.

But that didn’t happen. Instead they came to another clearing, this one much smaller than the one with the paddy field. A well-worn footpath led straight to a short, squat concrete building with a rusted metal door.

Is that a bunker? She wondered. What are rice farmers be doing with a fallout shelter out here in the middle of nowhere?

Maybe it wasn’t a shelter.

Maybe it was a Confederate military installation.

Catalina felt her heart rate spike with dread. She imagined that rusty door bursting open and hundreds of enemy soldiers boiling out with their weapons at the ready.

It’s a trap!

 

Chapter 46

“I’m transferring the nav to my station,” Alexander said, glancing at the ragged gash in the deck where Davorian had been sitting a moment ago. Alexander mentally activated the nav functions, and a flurry of control panels crowded the heads-up display inside his helmet, giving him access to the ship’s thrusters, maneuvering jets, and a three-dimensional grid for course plotting.

He focused on the grid to enlarge it, and a miniature representation of the Lincoln cruised along a jagged yellow vector that zagged back and forth randomly. A second line, this one green, showed the ship’s average heading. A sensor overlay highlighted incoming hypervelocity rounds as over-sized golden streaks, moving so fast compared to the Lincoln that they were almost impossible to evade. The only advantage they had was that those rounds took more than ten seconds to reach the Lincoln, and the payloads weren’t nearly large enough to destroy their ship unless a solid stream of them hit.

“Captain, the admiral is ordering us to withdraw,” Hayes said. “We’re getting too far ahead of the fleet.”

Alexander zoomed out the nav map and saw that the Lincoln was leading the Alliance formation against the enemy. No wonder they were taking fire. “Coming about,” he said, setting a waypoint behind the rest of the fleet and calculating a new random evasive pattern to reach it—minimum acceleration three G’s, maximum seven. “Brace for—”