The Last Stand Read online

  He adjusted his thrust vector with another thought, a realignment his AI automatically transmitted to the rest of his ships. The wing’s formation was crisp, as neat as the Confeds had been, or nearly so. His ships raced across space, zooming in on the beleaguered Rim fighter line, even as the approaching missiles closed. He waited, counting to himself, even as the ship’s AI fed the countdown trough the neural link directly into his mind.

  Ten seconds. He fired a thought through the link, activating his lasers. The weapons were fully charged and ready to fire.

  Five seconds. His eyes scanned the small screen in front of him, even as the same data was projected into his mind. He picked out the closest missile, even as he directed the AI to order all of his people to do the same. His ships were at least a hundred kilometers from their nearest squadron mate, and that meant picking out the nearest target would minimize double targeting. His people were only going to get off a few shots, perhaps half a dozen. The couldn’t afford to waste any of them.

  He could almost hear the last bits of the countdown inside his mind…three, two, one…

  He stared right at his chosen target on the screen as he directed the lasers to fire.

  His shot went wide, missing by perhaps two kilometers.

  He could perceive the rate of his weapon’s recharge, sixty percent, seventy, even as he watched the rest of his ships open fire. His one hundred fighters all discharged their lasers, and when they were done, he guessed they had taken out thirty of the missiles.

  Thirty-two, the AI confirmed with a quick pulse into his mind an instant later.

  His laser was almost ready to fire again, and he redoubled his efforts to lock onto his chosen target. His training had been heavy with evasive maneuver, both how to execute it, and how to target vessels engaging in it. But the enemy missiles were coming on with more or less straight vectors. There was no way he should have missed, no way almost seventy percent of his ships should have.

  Using the neural link to fire was more difficult than employing it to navigate the ship, at least at the current training and experience level of his pilots. He suspected it would become easier, that eventually, it too would be a great superiority of the Hegemony fighter craft.

  But that day is not today.

  “All squadrons, switch to manual fire control.” His hand gripped the controls, and he stared down at the targeting screen. Manual, he knew, was far from an accurate term. The AI was still crunching the numbers, and the computer system would input the selected firing vector. Gelak would simple pull the trigger, choose the instant to fire.

  He did just that, closing his finger around the firing mechanism…and he watched as the pulse ripped across space, and obliterated one of the approaching missiles.

  He took a deep breath, even as he ‘heard’ the recharge gauge in his head, the power flowing into his laser’s capacitors, building a charge for the next shot…forty percent, fifty…

  * * *

  “Evasive maneuvers, now! All power to the engines.” Stockton pulled his own throttle hard back and to the side, even as he shouted the command into the comm. His people had fired hard, blasted a huge gap in the approaching missile barrage, and they’d been aided massively in that effort by Gelak’s squadrons. Stockton still resented the Kriegeri, but he had to admit, the relatively inexperienced Hegemony flyers had done an impressive job, and whatever chance his people had, any of them, to escape, they owed to their enemies turned allies.

  Stockton had taken down ten of the enemy missiles, the most of anyone in the attack force. But all of his people had done well, and fewer than twenty percent of the warheads the enemy had launched remained out there.

  But those were close now, coming in on their final attack runs. And they were still numerous enough to gut his force, if not to wipe it out entirely. His people didn’t have the time to run, or to continue their defensive fire. They had to bet on their evasion tactics, and hope they were enough to counter whatever was driving the approaching warheads.

  Stockton angled his ship hard, repositioning his thrusters to work his vector around. His ship was weaving, his positioning jets whipping the small craft in all directions, re-angling his main thruster for short bursts in seemingly random directions. The enemy missiles were the fastest things Stockton had ever seen, but now he was trying to turn that strength into a weakness. The warheads could counter his moves faster than any ship or weapon he’d ever encountered, but they were coming in screaming hot, their velocities well over two percent of lightspeed. Even at 130g thrust, it took some time to meaningfully change an approach vector at such velocities. If his people could sidestep the initial attacks, they might buy some time. Maybe even enough to get away, to race back to the waiting motherships, and return to Calpharon to report that the Highborn had much more massive ships than any that had been seen before…and another unknown weapon.

  To report that the already unbeatable enemy had just become even more dominant and invincible.

  Chapter Four

  Grand Palais Hotel

  Troyus City

  Megara, Olyus III

  Year 322 AC (After the Cataclysm)

  Andi Lafarge sat quietly, looking at the child sleeping in the small bed, just across the room. Her child. Hers and Tyler’s. It still seemed somehow unreal, an unlikely place and situation for one who’d come from where she’d been born, lived the life she had. She suspected the percentage chance of her surviving all she had would be shockingly low, if it could even be calculated. For her to end up on Megara, vastly wealthy and married to one of the greatest heroes in the Confederation seemed mathematically impossible. But there she was.

  Still, the joy she might have expected to feel had given way to sadness.

  Tyler is at war again, farther away than he has ever been…and he hasn’t even seen his daughter.

  Andi was somber, the vaguest hint of a smile on her lips hinting at the love she felt for her child, even as sorrow and loneliness pervaded the rest of her soul, challenging her as a legion of deadly enemies had never done. She was loathe to admit she needed anyone—even Tyler. But the idea that her lover—no, her husband, she reminded herself—might die in battle, hundreds of lightyears away from her, without ever seeing or holding their child…it was more even than a veteran warrior like she could endure, far worse than Sector Nine torture chambers and the pain of wounds in battle.

  Andi didn’t want for anything material, and that was something one who’d come from the deprivation of her early years was incapable of taking for granted. Her adventures had made her one of the richest women in the Confederation, and as the Barron family patriarch, Tyler controlled a fortune even vaster than her own. She could have a hundred servants if she wanted them. A thousand. But the only person she truly wanted near her was out of her reach.

  She’d have followed Tyler, joined him at the front, faced any danger at his side. But she couldn’t. Not this time. She would risk her wealth, her ship, her life, to see Tyler again, even for a short time. Nothing was more important to her, not wealth, not her life…nothing except Cassiopeia.

  She shook her head as she glanced over again toward her sleeping daughter. She was a hypocrite, she knew, if only in a harmless way. She’d long chafed at the name her mother had given her, wondered how something like ‘Andromeda’ had come to be the name of a street rat from the Gut, why her mother had saddled her with such a moniker. Now, she’d done very much the very same thing to her own child.

  Cassiopeia had been born into circumstances almost opposite to those Andi had endured. She was barely six months old, and she was enormously wealthy, loved and already adored by a Confederation population that almost venerated her father. A population that had never even seen her. Tyler Barron had always been uncomfortable with the public side of his life, but Andi was almost pathological in her distrust of those she didn’t know very well…and that iridium-hard caution was on overdrive where Cassiopeia was concerned. She’d turned down every request by the media for photo
s or video of the child, sometimes politely, others less so.

  The child’s name was a mouthful, Andi acknowledged that…but it wasn’t meaningless. She’d taken it from the same book from which she’d pulled the name of her ship. Pegasus had taken her from one end of the Rim to the other and beyond, and the trusty vessel had always brought her back. Andi wasn’t superstitious by nature, but if that wasn’t good luck, she didn’t know what was. Besides, the book had once belonged to the Marine, the broken old warrior who’d saved her from almost certain death alone on the streets of the Gut. It seemed right to her to put that tiny bit of him into her child’s name. She didn’t know where life would take Cassiopeia, but if she traveled half as far from where she’d started as Andi had, she would truly reach the farthest stars.

  Andi turned back toward the small desk next to her. A stack of building progress reports sat there, untouched. She’d begun the reconstruction of the Barron townhouse in Troyus City, more out of a general feeling that her child shouldn’t grow up in a hotel than from any real interest or desire on her part. Building a home to share with Tyler might have been a wonderful enterprise, if he’d been there to share it with her. As things were, it was just one more pointless task, and a constant reminder that the man she loved was far from her, risking his life once again in battle.

  She hadn’t been entirely idle, though, while she’d been ignoring the work reports. She’d been reading over a whole series of dispatches, all the reports of what Tyler and his spacers were facing so far beyond the Badlands. Much of it was highly classified, and she wasn’t technically supposed to see any of it. But she had her ways. Tyler had sent her more information than he should have, though less than she wanted. Her husband still carried some of the stiffness in mannerism his naval training and career—and breeding—had instilled in him. That was an affliction Andi did not suffer, and she rarely troubled herself with justifying what she wanted. It was far more productive to focus on how to get it.

  Gary Holsten, her friend, and the Confederation’s spymaster, had fed her a rather heavier flow of data, and a woman of Andi’s skills and resources had encountered little trouble in getting the rest of what she wanted…from a variety of sources and far more cheaply than she’d imagined at first.

  None of it was good. Even the combined might of the Confederation and the Hegemony, now supplemented by Vian Tulus’s Palatian fleets, seemed far too weak to face the vastly superior technology of the enemy. Andi had almost become used to seemingly hopeless situations and overpowering adversaries, but there was something different about it this time, something that sapped her normal resolve. She’d worried many times about Tyler, about the danger he faced in his wars, but she’d always believed deep down that he’d come back to her. Now, she wasn’t so sure. She didn’t know if it was because she was back home this time, relatively safe…or if this new enemy just seemed unbeatable.

  But it wasn’t enemy technology, nor weapons, nor the prospect of more and deadlier battles that troubled her just then. It was something else, something at the edge of her memory, a hazy, almost forgotten nugget that seemed suddenly relevant. Her mind reached back, to her days in the Badlands, and then she looked down at the report on her screen.

  The Highborn.

  The designation of the enemy seemed unimportant, even random…save for an old memory, almost forgotten.

  Aquellus.

  Her mind filled with images of a world covered by a single vast ocean…and then combat, struggle, a desperate fight to escape. She had lost friends there, but she had come away with something, a trinket really, an item of no great value.

  Or was it?

  She slammed her hand down on the desk, and then she turned suddenly to make sure she hadn’t awakened Cassiopeia.

  Of course…the folio.

  It had been years ago, before she’d met Tyler. A mission like so many others.

  No, not like so many others. Far worse…

  The sudden remembrance tore at old wounds inside her, ripping them open, and the faces of those who’d stood beside her, who’d followed her into the Badlands, stared back at her from the shadows.

  Friends and comrades who hadn’t come back.

  Andi brought something back from Aquellus…something she’d almost forgotten.

  A folio full of data chips. She’d hoped it would prove interesting, if not valuable, but radiation from the damage Pegasus had taken in the fight to escape had damaged it beyond . She’d taken it to an expert…at least as close to one as she’d been able to find in Dannith’s Spacer’s District, and he’d told her he couldn’t do anything.

  Nothing beyond translating the imperial dialect stenciled on the cover.

  Chronicle of the Highborn.

  She’d found that vaguely interesting at the time, and then she’d put the thing in storage, and never looked at it again, never even thought about it. Until the day before, when she’d read the name of the new enemy.

  Andi’s mind was racing. The thought of Tyler facing some deadly threat, a hostile first contact with an alien race, perhaps, was upsetting enough, almost more than she could bear. But if the ‘Highborn’ had been a threat to the empire as well, a danger to a far more powerful and advanced humanity?

  Now, questions fired off in her mind, one after another. Was there information on those data chips that could be useful? Data that could help in the war? That might save Tyler’s life?

  She didn’t know…and it wouldn’t matter, not if she didn’t find some way to access the badly damaged data on the chips. She’d never made any further efforts after that first abortive attempt, nor searched for anyone else could do what the District computer expert had failed to do.

  Sy…

  Sylene Merrick had been Andi’s best friend back in her early prospecting days…until a particularly tough mission had prompted the programmer and hacker to retire. Sy was Vig’s sister, but even with that connection added to her friendship, Andi had lost touch with Sy. She tried to tell herself circumstances had intervened, that it had been inevitable that her friend would drift away from her. But she knew that was nonsense. She’d let Sy slip away. She had failed to reach out, to make the effort to stay in contact…and the fact that Sylene had done no more to communicate with her meant exactly nothing in terms of lessening her self-condemnation. Sy had been a friend, and she had deserved better…and Andi knew it.

  Sylene Merrick was also the most gifted programmer Andi had ever known, and more importantly, an expert at sneaking into systems and accessing difficult to reach data.

  Could she pull something from the damaged chips? Andi didn’t know…but she was sure it was the best chance. And if there was any possibility those chips contained information useful to the war effort, she had to try and access it.

  She knew where the folio was, at least. She’d left a pile of things in a storage facility on Dannith. Somewhere there, amid old weapons and equipment, and probably enough contraband to violate a hundred Confederation laws, was a large leather folio with a dozen imperial data chips tucked neatly inside it.

  And just maybe, a way to help from behind the lines, where she was stuck. To aid the war effort. To support the Confederation.

  But mostly, to help Tyler.

  She turned and looked over at Cassiopeia, even as she tried to remember exactly where she’d last heard Sylene was living. She stood up, and walked across the room, looking down at her child.

  “I hadn’t intended for you to see the things I did when I was younger…but I think maybe we have to go to Dannith, my sweet one, to the District.”

  To you mother’s old stomping grounds.

  “I wouldn’t take you there for anything else…anything except to help your father.”

  To help him come back to us.

  * * *

  “Mr. Holsten, we find ourselves deeply involved in a conflict vaster than any we have endured before, and yet we know almost nothing of our enemy. What information we do possess has come almost entirely from our new allie
s, so recently our deadly enemy. I trust my concern, and my reluctance to provide the levels of funding and support Admiral Barron requests, are both understandable to you. Perhaps worst of all, Admiral Barron requests all that he does without a shred of oversight. His headquarters is three months away by the fastest ships we possess, and he is acting almost as a viceroy in the Badlands, even a monarch.” A pause. “No, his forces are now even beyond what we have for so long labeled the ‘Badlands,’ are they not?”

  Gary Holsten stared, his eyes boring right into the politician’s. Emmit Flandry was a pompous fool, and the Speaker’s Philophoran drawl was digging into Holsten’s skull like a set of metal claws. But the Confederation’s most powerful Senator had been an ally of sorts, most of the time, at least. Which only meant he’d been scared enough to put political interests aside when it had been absolutely necessary. Holsten wanted to get angry, but he could tell from Flandry’s expression and his tone, the Speaker was truly worried about controlling the Senate.

  “Mr. Speaker…” The use of the title was more respect than Holsten generally showed to the politician, but as much as he disliked Flandry, he was pretty sure anyone who took the Senator’s place with the gavel would be worse. “…I don’t have to remind you that we are very likely in a fight for our lives here, one unlike anything we have seen before. The Union is destabilized…I have reports now even suggesting that open civil war has erupted between two factions, but of greater concern, we now have an enemy that is almost a total mystery. We do not know what the Highborn are, or where they came from. We certainly have no idea of their total strength, but after six years of war with the Hegemony, the obvious fear the Masters show is sobering. At least in my estimation.”