Constitution: Book 1 of the Legacy Fleet Trilogy (25 page)

The doctor shook his head. “No. When it comes to your health and fitness for duty, my authority trumps yours, sir. I hereby remove you from duty and order you to sickbay.” He turned to Proctor. “Commander, you are now acting CO.”

Granger took another step towards the doctor, seething. “You can’t do this,” he whispered through gritted teeth.

The doctor tried to remain emotionless. “Your judgement is impaired, sir. I’d be remiss in my duties and endangering the lives of everyone on board if I allowed you to continue as CO.”

With an aggressive finger jabbing at the viewscreen, Granger yelled: “Those Cumrat bastards out there are the ones endangering our ship, not her captain! Can’t you understand that, you imbecilic quack?” He immediately regretted the words, but there was no taking them back as he was standing toe to toe with the doctor, yelling in his face, as the rest of the bridge crew stared tensely in silence, collectively holding their breath.

“Captain,” the doctor whispered, “don’t make me escort you off the bridge by force.”

“If Haws were up here, he’d beat the snot out of you, you know that?” Granger spat.

“Captain,” the doctor sighed heavily. “Commander Haws is dead.”

Chapter Sixty-One

Low Earth Orbit

Bridge, ISS Constitution

Granger stumbled backward, stunned. He’d been preparing himself mentally for that eventuality, of course, but he hadn’t expected it to happen so fast. So soon. There just wasn’t enough time. No time.

The doctor continued, “And unless you want the same fate for us all, I suggest you follow me to sickbay.”

Still too stunned for words, Granger speechlessly nodded. The doctor turned and made for the bridge’s sliding doors. Granger followed, trying to hide the sway in his step and his eroding sense of balance from the bridge crew.

“Commander,” he said to Proctor as he walked out the door. He wanted to save his ship. He wanted to give one last piece of advice, one more insight or strategic move she could make that would shift the odds of the battle, but nothing came.
 

“Beat the shit out of them.”

Her face was like stone, but she straightened her back and saluted. “Aye, sir.” He turned to leave for good. Her voice followed him out the door. “Thank you, sir.”

The walk to sickbay was the longest he’d ever taken. He knew it was only three minutes away, but since he had to pick his path through debris and wreckage and dodge the occasional damage control team dashing through the hallway, it seemed like it was half an hour later that he sat down on an examination bed in sickbay, right next to another bed with a blanket-draped figure lying on top.

He knew, instinctively, who it was. The doctor said something Granger didn’t pay attention to, then ducked out of the room, leaving Granger alone with his thoughts, and the body of his best friend.

“Damn it all, Abe,” he mumbled, standing next to the bed. “Look where we’ve ended up. I always thought I’d be the one to go first. Thought nothing could take you down. Thought you’d stare death in the face, and that death would shit its pants, turn tail, and run screaming to get away from you, you crazy old bastard.” He stared at the unmoving form, silently listening to the rumble of distant explosions. “Now look at you.”

They were in a small examination room within sickbay, and he could hear the bustle outside in the central care area as the doctors and nurses rushed from patient to critical patient, trying to save the lives of the trauma and severe burn victims. He had a vague sense of the damage from the previous battle—he knew they were hit hard, but he hadn’t yet had time to review the casualties or damage reports, much less tour the most heavily hit areas. The sounds from next door confirmed to him that they were in a bad way.

He turned to the medical station next to the bed, and brought up his charts. Scrolling through the various test results and scan images, he settled on a picture of his lungs. Riddled through with black and mottled-red tumors, the healthy tissue was lost in the sea of cancer and necrotic flesh. It was a wonder he was still alive, much less walking around. “Wyatt said we could have prevented this. But I delayed. I procrastinated. I never came in for my scans. And now, this. Stage ten thousand cancer. And you know why I didn’t get those scans?” He looked back at the blanket-draped figure. “I was scared of dying. Terrified. Didn’t want to face it. Didn’t want to acknowledge it might happen—that I’d be forced to retire, confined to a hospital bed and get bed sores all over my ass. And then, boom. Nothing. No thoughts. No feeling. No existing. Just ... nothing.”

The ship rumbled. They’d entered battle—he knew.

And he knew there was no chance they’d survive. Zero. None.

And for the first time in decades, staring from the tumor-plagued picture of his lungs to the draped figure of his dead friend, feeling the violent, distant blasts that he knew all too well meant the aliens were hitting them with the unstoppable, deadly, green energy beam, he sobbed, and sat down on his bed, utterly exhausted.

Dammit. What the hell am I doing?
he thought, bitterly.
Get off your ass and stop blubbering like a child, you moron
, he swore at himself. He raked his fingertips across his face and gripped his hair in frustration.

Getting old was a bitch. Dying was a bitch.

He inhaled deeply—
damn the pain!
He jumped off the bed and ripped the blanket off his friend, revealing the cold, blue figure of Abraham Haws. His eyes were closed. His temple dented.
 

“Damn you! Abe! Damn you! Where the hell are you when I need you!” He pounded twice on his friend’s chest, then rested his hand on the stiff shoulder, gripping it tight.

The deck rumbled, even more violently than before, and he heard distant explosions. Without a doubt, he knew, the ship had been breached again by the aliens’ energy beam.

His people were dying. And he was sitting on his ass.

Bent low to his friend’s ear, he whispered hoarsely, “I won’t let them. I promise, you’ll be the last one I’ll bury. You’re the last one they’ll get.”

And without another word, wiping his eyes and squaring his chin, he strode out into the main care area. The doctor intercepted him. “Oh no, you don’t, sir.”

“Doctor,” he said, taking the man by the shoulder and looking him in the eye, “I’m afraid you don’t understand the gravity of our situation—”

“Look, Captain, I’ve already told you, it doesn’t matter how grave it is, you can’t be commanding the ship in your state. I just won’t—”

“Shut your damn mouth and listen to me, Armand. I’m not trying to get command back. I’m trying to save the life of everyone in sickbay. This battle here? This is it. This ship is going down, and it’s going down fast. Minutes, not hours.”

The doctor’s eyes narrowed as he processed what Granger was saying, and he started to shake his head as if in disbelief. Granger continued, “It’s true. We don’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell against that alien fleet. We’re dead in twenty minutes. And there’s no escape—the engines are damaged beyond repair.” He pointed to all the patients lying in beds and on tables. “We’ve got to get these people to escape pods. When the evac order comes from the bridge we won’t have nearly enough time to save them all. But if we start now, we might.”

“You’re sure?”

“Dead sure.” The irony of his reply was not lost on him.

The doctor regarded him once more, then spun around to his staff, who had all paused to eavesdrop. “Get everyone here to the escape pods. Five patients and one medical staff per pod. Move!”

Every doctor and nurse sprang into action, organizing the wounded into groups for the pods—the critical patients were distributed evenly to all the pods such that they could continue receiving more intense care from a doctor or nurse, and the less seriously wounded filled in from there. Doctor Wyatt oversaw the operation, grabbing what supplies he thought he needed for any eventuality—Granger heard him mutter something about surviving in the wild in case all the major cities were destroyed. Would it come to that? Of course it would, he knew, if the
Constitution
failed. If he failed.

And in all the bustle and confusion, Granger quietly slipped out the door.

Chapter Sixty-Two

Low Earth Orbit

X-25 Fighter Cockpit

For the third time that long day, Lieutenant Volz wove in and out, through and under and around the thousands of alien fighters that had come pouring out of the intruding ships, which had seemingly been holding back their swarming hordes until the very end.

And half his squad was gone—Fishtail and Pluck both lost in the previous engagement, and Hotbox in the one before that. “Dogtown, pull up hard. I’ll knock those bogeys off your tail!”

He squeezed off a few shots, and the two alien fighters erupted in a cloud of debris, leaving Dogtown free to swing around and blast his way through a few bogeys angling for one of the laser turrets on the
Constitution.

In spite of the thousands of ships disgorged by the alien cruisers, things didn’t seem quite so hopeless this time, at least in the fighter battle. Hundreds, possibly up to a thousand IDF fighters had risen up from the surface to join them, mobilized to defend Earth. They may have been without capital ship support, but they were making the aliens pay a punishing price for their intrusion into low-Earth orbit.

“This is Commander Pierce. All
Constitution
fighter squadrons, join with Eagle Wing from Fort Walton and focus all firepower on the alien ship at twenty mark two.”

Volz muttered under his breath—he saw how badly the
Constitution
was being pounded by the alien fleet and knew if they pulled off to assault the alien cruiser the Old Bird’s time would be even shorter. “Come on, Ballsy,” said Dogtown, “let’s get over there and put the little bastard out of its misery.”

He gunned his thrusters, and darted away from the
Constitution
in a blaze of ion-drive fire. On his port side, he saw another cloud of fighters rise up from the Florida peninsula. Eagle Wing. Just in time to join the assault on the alien cruiser Pierce had indicated. They numbered some five or six dozen Y-52’s, and before he had time to catch his breath, the battle was back on.

“This is Commander Kruger of Eagle Wing. Hello, boys! We’ll tackle the bow if you guys will handle the stern. Let’s take this bitch out!”

They swarmed over the alien cruiser, pelting it with hundreds, thousands of streams of fire, ignoring the hordes of bogeys that had diverted from the main fighter battle to scare them off.

An explosion out his starboard viewport made him wince. Damn—that was one of the
Qantas
’
s
fighters. Caught in a crossfire.

They were being torn apart. By focusing all their attention on the alien cruiser, the fighters were being picked off one by one.

But it was working. Judging by the way the massive ship started to list to starboard, the cumulative effect of all their fire was having a devastating effect on it. “Keep it up, boys!” came Commander Pierce’s voice over his headset.

And in a piercing explosion, it was over. The shockwave of the alien ship blasting into two pieces caught him in its wake, and for a moment he thought it was the end, but his fighter’s containment held, and he darted away out of the blast field before getting punctured by high-velocity debris.

“Oh, no....” Commander Kruger, of Eagle Wing, moaned through the speaker. “No. No. No.”

Ballsy looked around, seeing a swarm of alien fighters on his scopes, but that was normal.

Then he saw it.

The familiar shimmering white globe that had begun to form between the invading ships had disappeared. And judging from the massive brown and black cloud over the southern tip of Florida, he knew exactly where it had gone.

Pierce’s voice shouted over the comm. “All fighters! Get your asses to the ship at forty-two mark five! We can’t let another singularity through!”

Dear lord. The cloud was enormous. It spread and mushroomed higher and higher, looking like the old footage of the first Swarm War, when the aliens struck multiple cities with thermonuclear warheads.
 

But this was far bigger. Far more devastating. Destruction on an unthinkable scale.

It was hell on Earth.

“Roger,” he said. “Let’s get the hell over there, Dogtown.”

How many had just died? How many lives snuffed out in an instant? How many more were screaming, terrified, as the blast zone continued to expand outward, ripping apart neighborhoods and communities and towns?

He shook his head. No. He couldn’t think about that. Not yet.
 

Squeezing off a few shots at some passing bogeys, he veered towards the next alien cruiser. On his status screen, he saw that they’d lost over forty fighters in that last assault, and they were down to less than eighty.

The odds were not in their favor.

Chapter Sixty-Three

Low Earth Orbit

Engineering Section, ISS Constitution

Granger stumbled down the hallway. He’d wanted nothing more than to take Haws with him into one of the soon-to-be departing escape pods, and hopefully arrange for a proper burial once they were on Earth, but it was not to be.

As it was, he was huffing and sputtering for lack of air just to make it down ten decks. The damn Swarm energy beam had cut clear through the main lift. Stopping every deck for a breath, he cursed himself for not getting a secondary lift installed like his XO had demanded five years ago. He thought it unnecessary at the time, but was now regretting his obstinacy. How had Haws put up with him all these years?

Hell, they’d put up with each other—the other man was no picture of perfection himself.

“Are we going to die, Captain?”

Granger nearly stumbled over someone crouched near an open door on a landing. No, he wasn’t crouched, he was just short.

“Cornelius?”

“We’re going to die out here, aren’t we?” His small face looked pained and he spoke softly. A far cry from the incorrigible boy back at Lunar Base.