Authors: Victor Gischler
Cindy looked up at me, mouth open, breathing shallow, face flushed. “Please.” The word leaked out of her barely above a whisper.
“Please.”
I positioned myself over her, but she didn’t want to wait, grabbing me and guiding me in. She bucked her hips, desperately, like she’d been waiting for this all of her life. Meredith held onto her. Cindy arched her back, mouth open, working silently, eyes shut tight.
I leaned down and kissed Meredith over Cindy’s shoulder.
I picked up speed, and Cindy reached around me, latching on, trying to pull me deeper inside of her. The three of us fell into the same rhythm, and moments later Cindy trembled beneath me, the sound of a lost, forlorn animal rising out of her.
* * *
An hour later, I had no trouble sleeping at all.
T
he zip ship squadron had to be in position well ahead of time, so the six of us were parked for over an hour in the shadowed crater of a large asteroid. With the engines off, we didn’t expect to emit an energy signature large enough to be detected. We were nervous anyway. The Coriandon fleet was scheduled to pass right over us.
I looked right and left out of my cockpit’s bubble window. I knew Meredith was parked on my starboard side, but with the running lights off I could only just make out the outline of the vessel in the darkness. I would like to have talked to her, but we were maintaining radio silence.
The stars glittered brightly, space stretching endlessly, vast and silent. That there wasn’t enough room for all the species seemed suddenly ludicrous.
I monitored the feed coming in from the Reich fleet. When the battle started, I’d be able to follow the action. In the meantime, there was nothing to do but wait for my opportunity to fly straight up the asshole of an alien spaceship, so I could torpedo their toilets.
Another hour stretched by.
We felt the Coriandon fleet before I saw it. Vibrations came up through the asteroid and my seat in the zip ship. The vibrations became a rumble, rattling my teeth, and the first Coriandon battleship passed overhead, a massive juggernaut filling the view, another right behind, and more alongside. Not counting the little fighters flitting between the big ships, there were at least a hundred vessels in the fleet. Poppins had been right on target in her prediction of where they would drop out of translight.
The fleet passed, the rumble fading, and then silence descended again. A minute passed.
Two minutes.
Five.
I let out a sigh of relief. Poppins had been wrong. The class five wasn’t the anchor ship of the invading fleet. The other five zip ships and I could rejoin the fight. We’d have a chance.
Then the rumbling started again, growing louder and more acute than the sounds of all the previous ships combined. The zip ship shifted beneath me, and I worried for a panicked second the asteroid was crumbling to pieces.
Then I saw it.
It blotted out the stars. Seeing a 3-D schematic of the class five in no way prepared me for the reality. It seemed as if it took
weeks
for the ship to pass over us, a massive planet-demolishing behemoth. The looming effect stemmed in part from the fact that it was traveling at a much slower speed than the ships which preceded it. This was what Poppins had said about the Coriandon strategy. The class five would hang back, directing their forces and only engaging if it were necessary.
This worked to our advantage. The rest of the fleet would be far ahead. Turning back to assist the class five would take time, and by then our work would be done.
We hoped.
The class five finally passed, and the stars returned. The spaceship lumbered away like some lethargic beast, heedless of the insignificant flies that buzzed around it.
I waited two more minutes. Then I took a mini-light from my belt and flashed it out of my cockpit bubble, first starboard and then port. The adjacent ships relayed the signal to the others. A moment later we all fired engines. I lifted off first, and the other zip ships fell into formation behind me.
We took off after the class five.
A moment later, the fleet feed squawked with the first report. Missiles rose from the surface of Mars, streaking toward the enemy. The alien ships maneuvered into a perfect defensive formation, and picked off each missile as it came. They’d been prepared for just such an attack and retaliated with textbook precision.
Which left them wide open to the unexpected attack from Ashcroft’s fleet. As the first of their ships exploded in brilliant fireballs, the Coriandons scrambled to reconfigure, and that’s when a battle group rose from the planet’s surface. Reich ships slammed into the Coriandon fleet from two directions. The ships moved into point blank range and pounded each other mercilessly. The damage on both sides was staggering.
But that wasn’t my problem.
The class five hove into view—we’d almost caught up. An alarm beeped, drawing my attention to the sensor screen. A dozen lamprey ships—named for the fact that they clung to the bottom of larger vessels until sent into battle—dripped from the bottom of the class five’s hull and spun to meet us.
“Incoming lampreys,” I said over the radio. No point in maintaining silence. “They’re bigger and much less maneuverable than a zip ship, but they’re armored like a motherfucker and armed up the ass. You’ve got to juke and jive. Do that, and you have a chance.”
We only had a few seconds.
“I’m making a run for the class five. You’ve got to keep them off me.” I didn’t say what everyone already knew. The zip ships only had one way to keep the lampreys occupied, and that was to fly around and let themselves get shot at.
“Meredith, stay with me. I want you helping me gun a path all the way in.”
“Roger that, Sloan.”
The next second we were among them. Meredith and I broke one way, the remaining zip ships rolling in the other direction. One of the ships took a pulse blast immediately, and disintegrated into fiery dust. The rest scattered without discipline, the lampreys chasing in groups of twos and threes.
I had my own troubles. A lamprey made a beeline directly for us from the front, trusting to its armor. Instead of breaking away and taking evasive action, I ordered Meredith to hold steady. If I’d ever doubted her courage, I didn’t now. Hot orange blasts from the lamprey’s pulse cannons flashed over, under, and in-between us as we sped down the fucker’s throat.
“On my mark, concentrate fire on the cooling coil below the lamprey’s cockpit,” I said.
“Just hurry,” Meredith said.
“Now!”
We both fired together. The coil glowed hot and exploded, taking the rest of the lamprey with it. We sped through the debris field, nothing now between us and the class five.
“We lost another zip ship,” Meredith’s voice squawked in my earpiece. “They’re catching hell back there.”
“Can’t be helped,” I said. “Stay focused.” We were close enough for me to see the big sphincter in the lower aft section of the Coriandon vessel. “Come on, Poppins,” I muttered to myself. “You’ve been right so far. Be right now.”
I kept flying. Kept waiting.
“Shit.” Meredith’s voice.
“What is it?”
“Two of the lampreys have broken off,” she said.
Fuck.
“Stay with me,” I said.
“That’s not going to work,” she said.
“Meredith.”
“Somebody’s got to keep them off of you, and you know it.”
She was right. Damn it all, she was right.
“I’ll see you on the other side,” I told her.
“Bet your sweet ass.” She hit the brakes, spinning the zip ship around, and pushed full-thrust back toward the lampreys.
Eyes forward. I hit full thrust for the sphincter.
Come on, you giant asshole. Come on
.
And then it spiraled open.
“Yeah! That’s what I’m talking about,” I bellowed. “Poppins, you gorgeous pale ghost!”
The reports had indicated that the sphincter opened and closed on a regimented schedule, sure as magnesium. According to Poppins, once the class five entered the fray, it would make sure to jettison any extra mass.
Including sewage.
I flew toward the sphincter at full speed just as a wall of milk-brown crap came blasting out. The cockpit bubble went all over brown, the shit-storm buffeting the zip ship so fiercely I was afraid I’d lose control. I’d suddenly become the galaxy’s unluckiest salmon, swimming up the worst imaginable stream. My arms ached trying to hold the ship on course.
Abruptly it stopped, and I hit the running lights. I was through the sludge, hauling ass down the class five’s rectum. One thing was an absolute certainty. If I made it through this alive, they were going to have to wash this zip ship for days.
Right on time, I neared the central flushing station, hovering there as I lined up the shot. It was a bulky metallic thing like some ancient boiler, hundreds of pipes feeding in and out of it from every direction. I put it in my crosshairs and fired.
The torpedo pierced the huge boiler, goo spurting back out the hole. The impact started the countdown, and the mechanism started to buckle on every side, metal bending and twisting and shredding. Every pipe and conduit connected to it ruptured and exploded. I spun the ship and hit full thrust back down the tunnel, and after what seemed like far too long, I was in open space again.
A second after that two lampreys were on me. There was no sign of any other zip ships. I banked hard just as a volley of pulse blasts flashed past me. Maneuvering the zip ship in tight near the class five, I skimmed the surface of the hull, figuring the lampreys wouldn’t risk firing and hitting their own ship.
I figured wrong.
They snugged up right behind me, blazing away. A pulse blast caught one of my foils, and I almost wrenched my shoulder out of my socket trying to keep the ship from smashing into the class five’s hull.
One of the lampreys behind me exploded.
What the fuck…?
“That’s one,” Meredith’s voice crackled in my ear. “Bank left and you’ll lead the other one right in front of my guns.”
I whooped joy and banked left. When we got back to the
Pride of Nuremberg
, I was going to show my gratitude in new and unusual ways.
The second lamprey exploded, and I pulled away from the class five, Meredith joining up on my wing.
“Lady, I can’t even tell you how glad I am to see you.”
“Sweet talker.”
“Where are the other lampreys?”
“We took them out,” she said.
“And the other zip ships?”
A pause. “Just me.”
“Let’s put some distance between us and that class five,” I said, trying not to think about it. “That torpedo’s going to blow soon.”
We took up a position about five miles out and watched. The countdown clicked off on my heads-up display.
“Three…
“Two…
“One!”
Nothing.
Shit!
I hated when things didn’t explode like they were supposed to.
“What now?” she asked.
“Just wait,” I told her. “Sometimes these things don’t happen on cue.”
* * *
Five minutes later it still hadn’t happened. No
kaboom
.
“Oh, no.” Her voice sounded tired, defeated. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
“What is it?”
“Check your sensors,” she said. “The class five is launching more fighters.”
I checked the sensors. Then double-checked. She was right. Dozens more. No,
hundreds
.
I was cursing up a storm when she started laughing.
The poor woman had cracked up.
“They’re not fighters,” she said. “They’re escape pods. Fucking escape pods!”
I checked the sensors again. The Coriandons were abandoning ship. The class five began venting in several places, the enormous vessel listing awkwardly and drifting away. It amused the hell out of me to imagine its corridors filled with alien shit. And the smell…
I decided not to think about it. Not so amusing after all.
Meredith and I turned our zip ships toward Mars to join the battle, but a few minutes later we got the word from Ashcroft. All Coriandon ships were withdrawing. They were turning tail to run.
We’d won.
T
he battle hulk had taken a flabbergasting amount of damage, but miraculously it had survived.
Again.
We parked the zip ships in the hangar bay and an officer told me I was immediately wanted on the bridge.
“The admiral wants me,” I told Meredith. “Back as soon as I can.”
She threw her arms around my neck, kissed me hard. “I’ll be waiting.”
Armed with that incentive, I double-timed it to the bridge, passing repair teams and medics carrying wounded to the sick bay. The crew was tired, but not defeated. There was a stubborn pride in them, something that straightened their postures, brightened their eyes.
We’d won. Against all odds, we’d done it.
When I stepped onto the bridge, Ashcroft came toward me, grinning like a madman. He shook my hand and clasped my shoulder. The first mate and Poppins both stood at their stations, smiling approval.
“Agent Sloan, you crafty son of a bitch!” he said. “Is there anything you can’t do?”
“Thank Poppins, Admiral,” I said. “It was her plan.”
Poppins nodded respect in my direction.
“They’re going crazy on the surface,” Ashcroft said. “It’s like a festival down there, people partying in the streets. The chancellor seems to be missing at the moment, but as soon as he can take the podium, he’s going to address the entire planet. It’s already being called one of the greatest victories in Reich history.”
Admiral Ashcroft could barely contain himself. He was practically giddy. He’d come through it all, taken everything the aliens had thrown at him, and given back double. I wouldn’t be surprised to see him drunk soon with the rest of the revelers. He’d earned it.
We all had.
The door opened behind me, and I smiled wide as Cindy stepped onto the bridge.
My smile wavered as I took a look at her.
She wore a black uniform, brass buttons in a bib formation, the swastika with the dragon perched on it over her heart. Her hair was back in a long braid down her back, eyes darkly lined, black lipstick, grin odd and deranged. She didn’t emit the subliminal power of the clones, but she was no longer the demure girl I’d known a few hours ago either.