Project Starfighter (21 page)

The Resistance survivors had
retreated to an underground base that had been constructed in secret,
during the early years of the rebellion’s formation. Hail was a
barren world, and Sid and Chris stumbled across the base almost by
accident. Being notified by the
Artful Dodger
’s AI that they
were being discreetly tracked as they flew over a mountainous region
of Hail’s largest continent, the two had hopped into Sid’s Manx
and descended to the surface. It had almost been their undoing.

“A good job you broadcast your
identities so quickly,” Hugo Webb, the scout that had met the pair,
said. “We only saw the WEAPCO freighter, so would have shot you out
of the sky in seconds.”

Chris looked about himself as they
walked through the base. The place wasn’t quite as glamorous as New
Chile had been (well, parts of it, at any rate). This place had a
real underground feel; it featured cold, dark metal, with serviceable
lighting, and basic accommodation and living standards.

“How long has this place existed?”
Chris asked.

“The past forty years,” Webb
said.

“A lot of people here?”

“Not many,” Hugo said, with a
small shrug. “Of those that survived the assault on the fleet, only
a few returned. Everyone else ran away and hid. I guess they were too
afraid that the Corporation might nuke the planet in their search for
us.”

A reasonable assumption, Chris
thought. The base extended deep underground, with several entire
levels being set aside for hydroponics. Everything else was focused
on constructing weapons and parts for starships, on training
personnel, and gearing up for the push against WEAPCO.

Or it had been, once.

The three came to a large open area,
some sort of communal living space. Men and women were standing
around, settled in chairs and keeping themselves busy with various
tasks. Their attention turned to Sid and Chris as the men entered;
Chris gave them a silent nod.

“And WEAPCO doesn’t know that
this place exists at all?” Chris asked Hugo.

“To be honest, I don’t know,”
Hugo said, sitting down on one of the chairs with a heavy sigh.
“Maybe. I think that since they intercepted the fleet over Ceradse
so soon after we were in place and ready to commence jump that they
have been watching us for quite some time.”

Chris nodded. “They did that with
the mercenaries, too. They decided to herd them all into one place
and then take them all down in one go.”

Hugo nodded. “Yes, we saw the
Grand Vizier
enter the system. God knows how anyone managed to
stop it. Do you know who did?”

“Yes. Me.” Chris kept his tone
even, his expression serious.

“What?” Hugo looked at him
sceptically. “You? How?”

“As the frigate was moving towards
the asteroid group, I targeted its engines. I then had Sid kill its
Hall thrusters so that it couldn’t slow itself down, and let it
smash itself into an asteroid. I figured that since I couldn’t
bring an asteroid to it, I would bring it to the asteroid.” He
shrugged.

Hugo shook his head. “No, that’s
impossible,” he said. “You couldn’t get near a ship that size
without getting blown to pieces. Its defences are too high, for a
start. An ordinary fighter wouldn’t last more than a few seconds
facing off against something like that.”

“I wasn’t using an ordinary
fighter,” Chris said, before elaborating further on the abilities
of the Firefly, and then moving on to discuss his plans for the
future. “If Sid and I could do all that ourselves, imagine what we
could all do together,” he finished.

He glanced once more over the men
and women here. All of them looked defeated, drained, and tired. He
had hoped that his story might give them strength. It didn’t appear
to have done so. Few had bothered to listen, and those that had
didn’t seem to care much for the tale.

Hugo shook his head. “No one wants
to fight anymore,” he said, rising from his seat and starting off
further into the base, Chris and Sid tailing after him. “A war
against WEAPCO isn’t something that any of us want. Not something
we think we can win, either. We’re resigned to that fact, now.”

“What happened over Ceradse was a
minor setback ...” Chris started.

“A
minor setback
?” Hugo
stared at him, quite appalled. “Having a fleet that you have spent
the best part of forty years secretly constructing being blasted to
pieces in a matter of hours is not a
minor setback
. That’s a
goddamn disaster!”

“If—” Chris began.

“We spent the same amount of time
selecting and training crew from the very best of the volunteers,
making sure they weren’t acting against us,” Hugo interrupted.
“We had to live double lives, find funds, work our fingers to the
bone, risk endangering our friends and families every day for four
decades, only to fall at the first hurdle.

“WEAPCO were watching and tracking
the Resistance for years. They knew all the names of the major
players involved. We saw it on the news – they called out everyone
within hours of the fleet going down, declaring them terrorists and
criminals. They got everyone.”

“Almost everyone,” Chris said,
with a sideways glance at Sid.

Hugo studied the skinny,
floppy-haired youth standing before him. It finally clicked. “I
thought you looked familiar. Sid Wilson, the computer expert.”

“Yes,” Sid said. “I was one of
the people charged with breaking into WEAPCO’s systems.”

Hugo sneered. “Didn’t do much
good though, did it? Didn’t know they had so much on us, did you?
Some hacker you turned out to be.” Hugo continued walking.

“Hey!” Chris called, grabbing
hold of the man’s arm, stopping him. “Sid worked just as hard as
anyone else in the Resistance. If he had known about any potential
ambush, he would’ve let us know. Do you think he just decided not
to tell us and let everyone go to their deaths?”

Hugo glared at Chris, opened his
mouth to say something, then closed it again. Chris said nothing, and
simply folded his arms, waiting.

“I’m sorry,” Hugo said. “I’m
sorry. It’s just ...” He looked anywhere but at the two men,
seemingly not knowing how to go on. “How did you escape?” he
finally asked, changing the subject.

Sid told him, detailing his and
Chris’ escape from Tira, their time with the mercenaries, and of
how he had managed to uncover secured WEAPCO data. Despite all this,
Hugo still didn’t appear at all impressed. Perhaps he truly no
longer cared.

“Look, we need only get a few
ships together, and we can start over,” Chris said. “How many do
you have here?”

“A handful,” Hugo said.

“What kind? Fighters?”

“The ones back in the bay,” Hugo
said, indicating the direction they had come from. “What you saw
there is it.”

“That’s it?” Chris asked,
incredulously.

“That’s it.” Hugo shrugged.

Chris glanced back towards the bay.
The only real fighter he recalled seeing there was a Valkyrie.
Powerful craft from what he knew of them, more powerful than the
Firefly, but nothing special. The Firefly could best it with only a
few simple upgrades. The Valkyrie was probably the only offensive
craft left over from the failed Resistance.

“We’ve disconnected the AI
control,” Hugo said. “It’s still in there but can’t interact
with the central system. We didn’t want to try to remove it
completely, as we weren’t sure what effect it might have on the
ship itself.”

“What about the others?” Chris
asked.

“They’re mostly standard
commercial spacecraft,” Hugo said. “Nothing more.”

“Weaponry?”

“A few guns on some, but that’s
it.”

“They could be improved,” Chris
said, but Hugo could only scoff. “Look,” Chris continued. “I
have access to one of the most advanced WEAPCO fighters in existence.
It supports a human-AI interface that allows me to control and talk
to it with my mind. I can increase my perception of the world around
me, effectively slowing time. It also acts as a flight assistant. I
took down over a dozen Talons the first time I was in the seat,
without suffering any damage myself.”

“Good for you,” Hugo said.

“Hugo, I don’t get it,” Chris
tried again. “Do you want to live as a slave forever? For the
Corporation to dictate your life, telling you what you can buy and
sell, where you can live, and what you can own? Where you can and
can’t go, what you can and can’t do? How soon before they tighten
things further?”

Hugo seemed to struggle for words
for a time, before he indicated that the two younger men follow him
once again. “Come, let me show you something.”

“What?” Chris asked.

“What you can have if you choose
to stay here.”

~

Hugo
started his tour in the bay Chris and Sid’s Manx had been brought
to, showing them the vessels docked there.

“These two are scout craft. We use
them for recon work. As I said, they are
lightly weaponized, but possess low-grade particle cannons and
nothing else. The others are general transport vessels that allow
interplanetary travel. As you would expect, none of them have
independent jump drives, and they are reliant on gates.”

Then Hugo walked them to a lift and
began to show them various other aspects of the base. The living
quarters were tatty and unflattering, but they were at least warm,
spacious, and offered a fair amount of privacy. They could easily be
modified and extended, too, should one desire that.

They next stopped at the workshops
and monitoring stations. “The workshops give us the means with
which to repair and maintain equipment,” Hugo said, “as well as
providing the tools and systems to enable us to research and build
better ones. We were thinking of trying to rework one of the WEAPCO
drones, to serve as a robotic assistant—”

“You really don’t want to do
that,” Sid interrupted the man.

“Because they explode,” Hugo
said. “Yes. Thankfully we found that out before we brought any in.”

Hugo continued the tour. A level
down, Hugo introduced Chris and Sid to a communications and
entertainment room. Despite being on an otherwise uninhabited planet,
the base was still able to receive television broadcasts. Right now,
the one person here was watching the news about the battle that had
recently been fought around the Alpaca Group. The news channel, being
owned and run by WEAPCO, was reporting that the battle had been a
massive counter-terrorist operation, that being the reason why the
Star Killer-class frigate had been dispatched. The report went on to
say that the battle had become so fierce that the warship had
sacrificed itself in order to protect the peoples of Spirit. The man
watching the channel soon grew bored of listening to the propaganda
and started to cycle through the other channels. All the major
entertainment stations were available – sports, drama, movies,
music, comedy.

“We receive the broadcast
transmissions that come into Spirit as normal,” Hugo explained. “We
decrypt it as necessary and carry on. No problems there, either. All
the rooms and living space here are able to receive broadcasts. News
is generally real time, while everything else is on a delay of a few
hours. No big deal. It gives us a small window into the wider world,
down here below ground.”

Chris gave no comment and allowed
Hugo to show them around the rest of the base. There was a supply of
fresh water, drawn up from a substantial underground reservoir.
Vegetables were grown and tended by volunteers and automated systems,
milk being produced from soy beans. No regular supply of meat,
though. There was no one with the expertise to rear animals, not even
chickens, and no space to do so, anyway. Meat was sometimes shipped
back by people who left the base for a time. They did not bring a lot
back with them, however, and it never lasted long. Most were learning
to go without it, now.

“We are self-sufficient, as you
can see,” Hugo said finally, walking the two back to the bay. “We
have everything we need – food, water, power, company. It’s safe,
secure, and there will never be anyone to bother us. We have mostly
done away with money, and if we need anything we can take transports
to the mining stations, or jump to Ceradse and get whatever. We trade
minerals and raw materials that we are able to mine from around the
planet. It’s not a lot, but it’s more than enough to get us by.”

Chris looked about himself once
more, and then at Sid, who only shrugged. “So, this is it?” he
asked Hugo. “This is the end of the war?”

“There never was a war, Chris,
that was always a pipe dream,” Hugo said with a sigh. “You want
to know why we aren’t fighting. What I want to know is, why are you
continuing to do so? You can try to fight WEAPCO all you like, but
you’ll never win.”

“Not with that attitude,” Chris
said.

Hugo looked at the floor, but said
nothing.

“So, you’re just giving up?”
Chris said.

Hugo shook his head. “We did the
best we could with the time and resources we had. I’ve sacrificed
much of my life to a futile cause. I was just like you when all this
started – in my twenties, thinking I had the world at my feet, that
I was invincible. I’m pushing sixty now, and I just want to live
out the rest of my life in peace.” He looked about himself. “And
you know, this isn’t such a bad place to do it.”

“But what about everyone else?”
Chris demanded. “What about the people that you were fighting for?”

“They’re not my problem anymore.
This is my home, now. The people here – they are my family.”

“That’s very selfish of you,”
Chris blurted out, unable to help himself.

“Chris, please try to understand,”
Hugo said. “We dislike the Corporation as much as anyone. But
there’s just no point in continuing to fight them. They have a
stranglehold, and we’ll never defeat them, no matter how hard we
push.”