Authors: Craig Alan
“Impact,” Ikenna said. “Multiple breaches, but she’s whole. Scratch damage.”
“Fuck.” Elena would trade four missiles for a kill, but not for a wound. Her pods were now empty. “Where is she?”
“Fled to a safe distance,” Ikenna said. “One hundred kilometers above and to starboard.”
“Radiators coming back online,” Hassoun said. He looked up, and he was smiling. “And the jamming has ceased.”
“It worked after all. Do you have line of sight?”
“No, Cap’n, we’re still behind Jupiter.”
“Demyan, can you set a course for home?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Hit it.”
Gabriel
went to hard burn once more, and sprinted towards the daylight. From high above,
Metatron
tilted down onto her nose and fired her ballista at long range.
Gabriel
shifted to port, and the shell never got close. Next came a pair of missiles, also to port.
Gabriel
killed them with ease.
Metatron
made no further effort to close for a better shot as
Gabriel
drifted away from her, now hundreds of kilometers distant.
“She’s not even trying,” Elena said.
“I’m not complaining,” Hassoun said.
Five minutes had passed, and still
Metatron
lurked above her, as if she were afraid to close. Another shell passed to port, and once again Demyan dodged to starboard.
“She can count, she knows we’re dry.
Metatron
carries two pods, just like
Gabriel
?”
“Yes, Captain,” Ikenna said. “Eight missiles.”
“But she’s only fired four so far,” Elena said. “Porque? Is she afraid of wasting ammunition?”
“Maybe she has less than we think,” Demyan said.
Elena saw a black tunnel, boiling with smoke, Pascal Arnaud’s lifeless body at the bottom.
“Countermeasures, now!”
Infrared flares exploded from
Gabriel
in every direction. The canisters of chaff burst, and clouds of burning magnesium bloomed around her and clothed
Gabriel
in the sun.
Metatron
had nudged her gently to port, and into the pair of missiles that she had lain there, before the rendezvous. They ignited and gave chase.
The first was transfixed by the trail of flares
Gabriel
had left behind, and broke off the pursuit to hunt ghosts. The second wasn’t fooled at all, and homed in.
Gabriel’s
guns knocked it out of the sky, but they couldn’t hold back the wave of shrapnel that broke upon her. Their impacts punched craters into the armor and rose from the hull like geysers.
“I can’t fucking believe that worked twice,” Elena said.
“T-5, T-6, T-7, T-8, P-8, all breached,” Hassoun said. “The core is undamaged. A few more locked down, but hull intact. Casualties coming in.”
“Get Marco down there to fix my damn ship.”
Hassoun clicked his keysticks, and swallowed. He didn’t look up.
“Montessori is dead, Captain,” he said.
The bridge was quiet for a moment. Rivkah touched her hand, and Elena turned. She had almost forgotten the doctor was there beside her. Black spots ringed her vision.
“There are other casualties,” the doctor said.
“Go, bueno.”
Rivkah let her hand linger for a second, then nodded and scooped up her bag. There were still three other people left on the bridge when the door closed behind her, but Elena suddenly felt very alone.
“Maintain course, Captain?”
Gabriel
had swung hard to starboard, away from Jupiter, and
Metatron
had once more moved to cut off her
path. Her ballista
fired, and
Gabriel
dodged.
Metatron
was herding her again, out to empty space where only the outsiders would find her.
“Delta-v?”
“The tanks are low. Five minutes of hard burn left,” Demyan said. “Rounding up.”
Gabriel
didn’t carry enough propellant to sprint for long. She was nearly exhausted, and when the tanks ran dry, she would fly wherever she was pointed last. By now the first faint inklings of radio noise would have reached the asteroid Pallas. It might be another forty years before humanity sent another ship to Jupiter.
“Captain?” Demyan looked up for the first time in nearly half an hour. “Should I maintain course?”
The horizon was only a few thousand kilometers away. Soon enough,
Gabriel
would be able to transmit to the Belt. But she wanted to go home, not just talk to it. She didn’t want to die out here.
Metatron
knew that, and waited for her return.
“No. Bring us about, as hard as you can.”
Every thruster fired out along the beam, and
Gabriel
swept through a turn to port. Anything and anyone not tied down was pinned to the starboard bulkheads for a full minute, and then she had pulled through and was flying straight for Earth. Across the gap,
Metatron
mirrored her movements precisely, and threw herself between
Gabriel
and home.
Gabriel
and
Metatron
faced each other head on, lowered their lances, and charged.
Eight guns opened up and filled the world with fire.
Metatron
and
Gabriel
cut one another with all the grace and dignity of a knife fight. Torrents of bullets danced along the hull and carved channels in the armor. Solar panels shattered by the score and spouted clouds of ceramic dust. Both ships had closed their ballista doors to protect the barrels, and the sprinters inside the bows listened to a gentle patter on the roof.
Metatron
fired her ballista first, and fell to one side.
Gabriel
held steady and countered. The steel cannonballs met and collided. There was a flash of light, and a ring of fire exploded and raced outwards.
Gabriel
rocketed through the bullseye and into empty space.
Metatron
cut her engines and fired her thrusters, and threw herself into a slow and lazy turn. The
Archangels
were already over a hundred kilometers apart and growing more distant by the second.
Gabriel
had nothing but black sky before her. She had won.
“Flash, vampire inbound.” Hassoun’s calm voice had steel beneath it. Ikenna was busy with fire control, and saw it half a second late. “Taking the helm, hard to port, full thrust.”
Hassoun threw
Gabriel
into the turn, and suddenly the starboard bulkhead became the floor once more.
“Helm, confirmed.” Elena checked the vampire’s coordinates, and almost smiled.
Metatron
had dropped her final missile right in
Gabriel’s
path, ready to arm and fire as soon as the two ships had passed each other by.
“Ikenna, track and destroy.”
Hassoun’s quick eyes had given
Gabriel
all the space she needed. She swung in a long arc,
her side ablaze with lit thrusters, and presented a broadside to the incoming missile. Her guns fired as one and lit up the sky. Still sliding,
Gabriel
rolled slightly to give the guns a better angle—the last thing she wanted was to shoot her own sails away. Cones of glowing vapor stood out from the hull, the only visible sign of the dozens of rounds fired each second.
The missile read her movements and began to weave to throw the guns off the mark. But there was little margin of error—if it danced too much, it would miss the target completely.
Gabriel
knew this, and kept her fire packed tightly along the only flight path that could have possibly caught her.
The missile was twenty kilometers away when it met the first slug. Dozens of hits tore it apart in the next second, and its self-destruct circuit activated. The missile bore down on
Gabriel
as it died. An electric current surged into the warhead as the body was shredded around it, and into the dragon which slept within.
It awoke, and the nuke detonated at close range.
Falling Into the Sky
Six months earlier
T
he house was just as she remembered it.
Elena hadn’t seen it in two years, but it hadn’t changed a bit. It had stood fallow that whole time while the Agency and the lawyers dithered over whether its co-owner was legally dead, and who would receive her half in the absence of next of kin. They had never made it official, and for a while Elena had feared that the estate would pass to the national government, and the house would be sold so that it could collect its share. But common sense and basic decency had won out, the state had surrendered its rights, and Elena had been made the sole owner just a few months earlier.
The twisting mountain road was treacherous, but her car handled it better than she ever could have. Elena didn’t even remember how to get there from the airport. She had wondered if pulling into the driveway at the top of the hill would feel like coming like home, and discovered that it did not. She had brought only two bags, and when she pulled them out and closed the trunk the car honked twice, and slowly performed a three-point turn and trundled back down the hill.
The few steps from the driveway were enough to bring sweat to her forehead. It was almost summer in the Southern Hemisphere, and it was hot even up here in the mountains. Elena was unused to any temperature that wasn’t climate controlled, let alone the fact that she suddenly weighed over fifty kilos. Her abuelos had told her stories of when the skies would be overcast at noon all year round, and there would be snow on the ground well into spring. They were hard to believe now.
She’d sent ahead to the caretaker, and a brand new key was taped under a potted plant next to the walkway. Anne had never stepped across this threshold—she’d trusted Elena to make the right choice.
The lights came on when she opened the door. Elena had wondered about that, but apparently the caretaker really had been keeping up with the bills. What little furniture she could see in the foyer—what looked like an end table and a wall mirror—had been overlaid with sheets. It was even hotter inside than out, but the thermostat sensed her presence, and she could hear the air conditioning kick in.
Her mother had been telling her to put it up for sale, that it didn’t make sense to keep paying taxes and upkeep on a house that nobody lived in. But all of Elena’s needs were taken care of by the Agency, and if her money didn’t go to the house, it wouldn’t go anywhere. Alejandra, frustrated, had suggested that she at least rent it out, and Elena had slammed the door on that one. As long as this was her house, it wouldn’t be anyone else’s home.
She walked upstairs and down a hardwood hallway. She took the steps carefully, raising one foot after another with real effort, mindful that a fall here would be much more unpleasant than up above. The light from the summer sun filtered in through the blinds that had been pulled over the windows, and cast a blue pall over every room.
Elena dropped her bags in the empty master bedroom. She wondered what she had ever seen in it. She had applied to the Space Agency right out of secondary school, at eighteen years old. Elena spent half her existence as an officer on the move, one posting after another—Phobos, Venus,
Chennai,
Ceres,
Jakarta,
Venus again,
Johannesburg
, Solstice, Gagarin, Solstice again, Glenn. She’d never spent more than two straight years in a single place after leaving home. This was the first time she’d set foot on Earth, and breathed real air, in half a decade.
She’d been nearly out the door once before. Her papers had been signed and ready to go. But then
Archangel
had happened, and she hadn’t been able to bear the thought of walking through that door by herself. Now this was her home, and would be a while. Elena would have to find a new life to live. She didn’t know where to begin.
There was a knock at the door.
“Damn it.”
Her latest comm account had been leaked and overwhelmed, and she’d given up on ever sorting the flood of messages that she’d received over the last few weeks, which now stood at well over six figures. Some enterprising journalist, unsatisfied by her silence, had flown to her country and driven into the middle of nowhere to her front door.
Elena considered ignoring it. But they were bound to keep coming, she had to step outside eventually, and a confrontation now could get the local police to set up a barricade on her property line as soon as this evening. She wondered how they’d found her so quickly. She had yet to formally resign, and had taken military flights all the way in. Elena descended the stairs cautiously, eyes on her feet at all times, and opened the door.
She was taller than he was now. That was what Elena noticed first.
“Can I come in?”
“What the fuck are you doing here? Get inside before someone sees you.”
She dragged him across the threshold and peered through the doorway. There was no one in sight. Then she slammed the door and whirled on him.
Ernesto Gonzales was smiling.
“It is nice to see you too, nina.”
“Jesucristo.” Elena ran her hands through her hair, and stopped when she realized she was doing it. “Did anybody see you?”
He shrugged.
“No le se.”
“Goddamnit.”
Elena went back to the window and pulled the up the blind. Still nobody. When she turned, he was holding up a grocery bag.
“I brought lunch,” he said in Spanish.
She nearly slapped him.
“Get in the kitchen.”
A few minutes later he had cleaned and washed a bass, after he’d swept her counter free of dust. He’d brought his own plates and silverware as well, which had been smart, as she had nothing of the kind. Elena sat at the table by the windows and watched.
“Padre.”
Ernesto poured salt into his hands and rubbed the bass. He worked it into the flesh with long steady pulls.
“Padre, why now?”
He shrugged.
“I saw you. On the net.” He looked up. “You kept your hair short.”
She put one hand up to her shoulder, and forced it back down. “Yeah, you know. They make us, at the Academy.”
“The Academy was a long time ago.”
“I haven’t exactly been counting the days, papa,” Elena said.
He smiled, and went back to rubbing down the fish.
“Me gusta, es todo.”
“How did you know I’d be here?”
“I asked around. I know a lot of people, in a lot of places.”
“Yeah, that was always the problem, as I recall.”
Ernesto gave her a look over his nose, the one that said he’d forgive her for her behavior, even if she wouldn’t forgive herself. He switched from salt to pepper.
“Have you seen Alejandra lately?”
“I don’t really think that’s any of your business, and she’d say the same.”
“That’s no, then.”
“For fuck’s sake, papa. I saw her a few weeks ago. We write every few days. I’m there for her. I haven’t abandoned her.”
Ernesto took a bottle of olive oil from his bag.
“That’s good. I never wanted her to be alone.”
“I’m sure she appreciates that.”
“I was glad that she found work. I would have liked to try her food but…you know, the embargo.”
“Yeah, she’s real happy on the Moon.”
“Is she seeing anyone?” Ernesto asked.
“That,” Elena said, “is definitely none of your fucking business.”
“Just asking. I don’t remember you swearing this much.”
“There’s probably a lot of things you don’t remember. Fifteen years will do that.”
“I bet Alejandra loves it,” Ernesto said.
“She loves me just fine.”
“I know. Start the pan, nina.”
Elena started to snap at him again. Instead she pulled the sturdy, heavy bottomed pan from the bag and walked to the stove.
“Medium heat.”
“I know, padre.”
Ernesto had brought his own grill gate as well—he must have found a kitchen supply store somewhere in town—and quickly cooked the fish. He set two plates, and sat down across from her.
Elena pushed hers away.
“You’re not hungry?”
“I was,” she said. “Somehow I lost my appetite.”
Ernesto ate quietly, and she listened to his knife and fork scraping across the plate. His hair was still as dark as hers, but it had pulled back at his temples and looked thinner at his crown. His face and arms were deeply tanned from the Australian sun. He was short—everyone in his generation was short, from childhood malnutrition—but she didn’t remember him being so thin. Living standards in the independent countries were less than half of the Global Union average.
“You could have let me know you were coming.”
“I tried. I sent messages. You didn’t answer.”
“How did you even get here?”
“Plane.”
“Plane?”
“I certainly wasn’t going to swim,” Ernesto said.
“Papa, your citizenship was revoked. They deported you the second you stepped out of prison. I suppose you just walked right through customs?”
“I did just that,” Ernesto said. He looked at her, and set down his silverware. “Do you read the news often, nina?”
“Don’t call me that. I’m not your little girl.”
“I know.” He smiled. “You’re a captain now.”
“That’s right. No thanks to you.”
“I’m sorry, Elena. Was it hard for you? After I went away?”
“No, papa, the other kids were very nice to me. What do you think? I was ‘the Gonzales woman’ for the next decade. I’m lucky I made it out of the Academy at all.”
“Lucky.” The sunlight had died in the kitchen, and his eyes were black now. “Did they come to you?”
“Oh, yes. I was flattered. It’s not your average cadet that gets to deal with so many departments before she’s even off Phobos. Public Affairs, the Judge Advocate Division, Office of Special Investigations. Yeah, they took a real interest in Elena Gonzales Estrella.”
“What did you say to them?”
“I told them that if I knew that my father was a terrorist, I would have mentioned it on my application.”
Ernesto was quiet for a long time. Then he got up and walked to the suitcase that he had left on the counter. He opened it, and removed a gift-wrapped package and a sheet of paper from inside. He left the sheet on the counter, and placed the package on the table before her and sat down.
“What is this?
“There’s only one way to find out.”
“Two, actually. And one of them doesn’t involve me actually touching it.”
“Elena.” In her memory her father had stood so tall, and his voice had been so deep. Even as a grown woman, returned from Phobos on leave in her white cadet’s uniform, he had seemed so much greater and prouder than herself. She had never heard him beg. “Please.”
Elena pulled the string apart and unwrapped it. Inside were two framed prints: A map, and a star chart. She looked up at him.
“I knew you’d have your own ship one day, and I’ve spent the last couple years looking for these. Once I got out. Those were made 500 years ago, Elena. By explorers, like yourself. If they only knew what you’d find.”
Elena rotated the map to read the writing at the bottom of the map. HC SVNT DRACONES.
“I haven’t found a lot of those, actually,” she said. She threw the prints on the table, and the clatter reverberated throughout the kitchen. “What is this? Papi goes away for a while, and brings his daughter gifts to make up for it? I’m a little too old for you to bribe me into loving you.”
“Elena.” She couldn’t see into his eyes at all anymore, and she was glad. “I just thought that you’d like them. For your cabin.”
“You can’t buy back the blood of five hundred people, padre. And certainly not with trinkets.”
“I didn’t kill those people, Elena.”
She swept the prints off the table. They struck the cabinets on the way down. The glass facings shattered and sprinkled the floor with shards.
“You probably shouldn’t have pleaded guilty to it then.”
“I didn’t kill anyone!”
“Oh that’s right. My apologies. Conspiracy to commit murder. You know, I still hear the judge’s voice when I say those words? My colleagues were very understanding when it came to that distinction. My papi didn’t bomb the Concordia, he got his Sov friends to do it for him.”
“Is that what you told them?”
“Them. When they came to speak to you.”
“I told them the truth.”
“Which is?”
“You couldn’t stand that our country chose the Global Union. You had to punish us.”
“Nina—”
“I said don’t call me that.” She could see the shards of glass glinting on the floor beside her. “Why did you even come back? What possible reason could you have for returning to a country that couldn’t be happier to be rid of you?”
Ernesto got up from his chair, and knelt slowly among the glass. The kitchen was so quiet that she could hear his knees creak, and he grunted. He had turned sixty five years old just a few weeks before. When she had left for Phobos he had been her father, and now he was just another old man. Something else he had taken from her.
He picked up the prints, and poured the last of the glass fragments into the waste can. Then he sat back down.
“I saw you on the news. It was big in Australia, you know. It was big in all the independent countries.” Her father smiled at her. “I was proud of you. I was proud that you were my daughter.”
“It’s not mutual,” she said. “And I didn’t do it for you.”
“I know. But I know the people you did do it for. And I wanted to formally thank you on their behalf—Captain Gonzales.”
“Not anymore.”
“Pardon?”
“No Captain. I’m done. I quit. From now on, it’s just Elena Gonzales.”
Ernesto sat back in his chair.
“Don’t tell me that this was bad for your career?”
“Not as bad as you were. No matter how hard I try to put you behind me, you’re always there. I’ve had to run myself ragged just to keep ahead of my name. I got used to it after a while, and the Agency got used to me. I settled in, I did my job, and no one bothered me. But that’s over. For a week now, people keep…touching me. They force themselves on me. They shake my hand, they slap my back. They call me their hero. And every time they do it, I’m afraid that they’re going to hit me. Curse at me, spit at me, all the things they used to do. I’m afraid that they’re finally going to remember who I am, and who you are. I tried so hard to forget about you. I thought that if I forgot, then everyone else would forget as well.”