Our Trachinian friend brings us excellent tidings. If the Medes darken the sun
(with their arrows), we shall have our fight in the shade.
—Dieneces the Spartan, AOEE
Kyrie “Blaize” Saturai wallowed in self-hating disappointment as she helmed her damaged five seat racing corvette back toward her isolated homeworld. She was seated forward of the other four bridge stations, the only seat on the lowest tier of the Flaire’s bridge, half-surrounded by her huge integrated concave view-screen. The bottom quarter of that view-screen was graphically complaining about the Flaire’s damaged systems, calling them out in angry red icons.
Blaize had gruesome images flash through her head of all her crew and friends dying before her eyes, exposed to the vicious vacuum of space as the ship is torn asunder. The race had almost ended all their lives. She had to get over this melancholia, she decided at once.
"Prince Morgan," an announcer’s voice rang from one of the monitors behind Kyrie’s seat with the slightly unrealistic cast that a voice over any electronic devise created.
"Please, Ken," a voice that Kyrie recognized as the Prince answered, "We use our racing monikers here. Call me Blackskull."
"Of course, Prince…er, Blackskull. There was some controversy over whether you had used micro-jumps on several parts of the course."
"Ridiculous! My corvette is even now being examined by the racing officials, who will confirm that there was no wrong-doing. This victory was simply superior House Valori engine design by my Uncle Dyssan Valori, and of course superior piloting."
“PLEASE turn that off, Sammie!” Kyrie felt bile rise to her throat and -she really hated to admit this- a tear forming in her eye. She refused to turn her seat around as she normally would to address her friends and crew. “The very last thing I need right now is to hear Morgan Valori talking about how great he is.”
“But Kyrie,” Sammie, her communications officer, pleaded. “Just because we were eliminated, doesn’t mean we don’t want to see the end of the races.”
“We know how it ends,” Kyrie responded. “With us out of the running, Prince Morgan ‘Blackskull’ sweeps the field, winning the thirty-sixth Alarian Star Gladiator Races. Cheater.”
Kyrie sighed. “I should have killed him. I should have killed him!”
“Kyr?” The sympathetic voice of Kyrie’s best friend, Jean Hays, seemed concerned. “The loss was tough, but something else is eating at you.”
“Jean, you know me too well. Never put friends on your crew, he said, I should have listened…”
“Who, Kyrie?”
“The same man who’s going to disintegrate me when we get back, and disavow my base DNA.”
“Gordon Xycor?”
“Yes, Jean.”
“Kyrie, he’s not just your sponsor, he’s also your uncle. Gordon will understand.”
“Understand?” Kyrie vented, finally spinning her seat to face her friends, “The most powerful and aggressive of all Alaria’s corporate magnates does not accept failure in his investments, or his family. Imagine being both!”
“Kyr,” Jean replied, “Gordon will be glad that you’re okay, and grateful even to Prince Morgan Valori for his part in that.”
“You really don’t know my Uncle X, Jean. He’ll be furious at me for causing him to hold a debt to the Prince. He especially hates the Valoris.”
“Why would he?” Sammie asked.
Gods, can that girl really be that stupid? I am going to replace the Pollyanna as soon as we get home!
“Uncle X believes that the Valori family has been responsible for holding Phoenix Corp back from being elevated to Lordship, full Household status, and a seat on the Parliament of Lords.”
“How could he expect to be made a Household?” Sammie let her mouth run off, as usual, Kyrie thought. “Phoenix is less than fifty years old! I mean, there are corporations that have been around for centuries…”
“Well,” Kyrie answered defensively, “you have to admit that Gordon Xycor, through Phoenix Corp, has done a hell of a lot more for Alaria than the Valori family has over the past five decades. Two out of every ten Alarians have some kind of Phoenix Implant, bio-grown or Nano-built. All the Valoris make are starship engines and playboy princes!” Kyrie vented.
Moniquea at the Nav console chimed in, “Though… King Duncan did pretty much create the Alarian Trade Alliance…”
“Which makes about thirty-percent of its profits from exporting Phoenix bio-tech!” Kyrie replied. “And he’s dead now, anyhow.” She became reflective for a moment. “Uncle X is gonna be so mad!”
When the laughter died, the announcer could be heard once more. "In the second heat, Prince…er, Blackskull… there was the incident with Phoenix Corporation’s ship, the Flaire."
Blaize tensed, and the whole crew remained silent.
"When you damaged the Flaire’s engine, knocking them out of the competition…"
"Now, now, Ken,” Morgan ’Blackskull’ interrupted the announcer, “we all know that interaction between ships in the first three heats is strictly forbidden. However, there is no sanction against interacting with the local astrogeology…"
"You mean the asteroid," Ken commented.
"I mean the asteroid. All I did was move a local rock into a strategic position."
"Which the Flaire hit, smashing their primary engine and knocking them out of control. Were you concerned that such tactics could lead to deaths…? Blackskull?"
"This is a dangerous sport, Ken, deaths are by no means uncommon. But, as I’m sure you recall, I then used that same tractor beam to save the lives of Blaize and her Phoenix crew – before going on to win that heat."
“Oh, I am so going to kill him the next time I am within swords’ reach!” Kyrie released.
“You mean if the Steel Duke isn’t around to stop you,” Jeannie teased.
“He did save our lives…” Sammie half whispered as if it were blasphemy. No one seemed to hear her.
A warbling beep got Rajua’s attention. “We’re approaching the nebulae, Kyrie.”
“Rajua, how’s that keed engine holding up?” Kyrie asked as she spun back to her forward-facing piloting position. Kyrie had been fretting over the engine which formed the mass of the Flaire’s top aft section… and normally supplied the vast majority of the ship’s main power.
Rajua was a consummate professional again. “I’ve got keed completely down to warm-up level, Captain, one-percent. She started vibrating at twelve. Dara is taking up the slack perfectly, we should have no problems landing safely at Phoenix Compound.” Dara composed the bottom rear of the corvette; the word meant ‘secondary’ in ancient Gaelic.
“Captain, we’re entering the Alarian system in four, three, two…
“Come out of Pinhole, bring up main screen.” The main view-screen brought up the horizon of a beautiful blue-green globe, covered in energized glowing streaks of magenta, violet, and tealish Borealis effects as the planet’s magnetic field pushed through the planetary nebula’s energized particles. Blaize turned her command chair to face Moniquea and Jean, behind her and to her left. Now facing away from the main screen, with her crew and friends before her, Blaize finally felt some sense of relief and completion. At least now she was home and surrounded by friends; whatever may happen with her uncle was karma now. No use worrying. “Welcome home, folks.”
But the eyes of Blaize’s crew were not upon their captain-friend. Each of her four crew-members were fixated on the screen behind their captain’s back. Several had their mouths agape, staring, almost as if screaming in a vacuum without sound. An unexplainable chill ran up Kyrie’s back, urgent yet denying. Something was terribly wrong, yet something else pleaded for her not to turn around and find out what it was. Then the short silence was broken by Sammy’s screaming, just as Blaize managed to burst out the word, “What…?”
Jean responded, “The view-screen, Kyrie!” Just as the Flaire’s automated targeting systems began adding the ship’s screams to Sammy’s whimpering.
It had been a second at most that seemed phantasmagoric, then Kyrie forced herself to spin her command chair back to facing fore.
What she saw there defied the human mind. Literally. A gigantic void now sat in orbit above her home planet Alaria. A hole in space, as it were. A sphere of pulsating and undulating silvery nothingness which the human eye could register, but the human mind could not quite comprehend. The closest thing Kyrie could compare it to was a chromed soap bubble… the size of a small continent, shimmering in Alaria’s Aurorialis effect.
Then the next instant the sphere of emptiness vanished, but in its place was a sight even more terrifying: a cloud of huge steel warships of crude yet brutal design. Dozens, scores, visible but in an armada so dense that hundreds must have been lurking within what a moment ago had been the shimmering silver sphere.
“What in the realm of Hell’s freezer…?” Blaize could no longer hear either her ship’s alarms, nor the words or screams of her crew, her mind fixated on trying to comprehend the input from her eyes alone. Then she managed to clarify one detail at least. “Those… those are Terran cruisers!” The Terran fleet began to spread formation into a more disk-like shape, as those ships on the bottom edge began dropping huge iron rods down into the atmosphere of the beautiful world below them. Mere seconds had passed since the ships had appeared over her world, and the brutal attack had already begun. “Terrans… where did they come from?”
Dark iron rods, each a meter across, plummeted through Alaria’s atmosphere, heating to red and white metal, streaking downward, leaving wakes like flares— then slamming to ground. Mass and velocity did as much damage to the areas struck as nuclear warheads could have, without contaminating the air and land for those that followed the attack with what Kyrie assumed to be an invasion.
From some long forgotten history lesson –which all Alarian parents and schools seemed to love to teach more than anything else– Kyrie brought to her mind a time when a Spartan king was told his Medes enemies would darken the sun with their arrows...it seemed to her that the Terrans were darkening Alaria’s skies with ugly whale-like space-ships and their bombardment rods.
...But the Spartans had still fought on...
With sudden decision, Blaize took command. “Combat Alert! Raj, get those engines to max power! Sammie, contact Sentinel Command, let them know we are about to engage. Jean, how many are there?”
Jean flung herself across the bridge and sat at the engagement-Intel station, she nonetheless voiced her doubts. “Kyrie, need I remind you that we’re flying in a racing corvette designed to do no damage in combat; not to mention our own engine damage?”
”JEAN! THEY ARE BOMBARDING OUR HOME!” Blaize shouted, “Raj!”
Rajua came out of her stunned funk. “Keed Engine coming back on line now, Captain. I don’t know how much use she’ll be.”
“Jean… how many…?”
Jean worked her targeting computer controls in disbelief. “The computer’s still counting, Kyrie! Her racing computer’s just not designed to handle more than five hundred targets…”
“Sammie, where’s my link to Sentinel Command?”
“Sentinel Command is not responding.”
“Try the other Houses… anyone down there!” Then a thought struck her. “Why aren’t we being barraged by distress calls?”
“Captain, all channels seem to be actively jammed… every one, except…”
The face of a Phoenix Corp rep came up in a com window within the main view-screen. “Captain Kyrie Saturai, this is Phoenix Command; do not engage. Repeat: you are not to engage Terran ships.”
“Like bloody Hell! Turn that thing off. Mon, I don’t need NAV right now; get to work bringing the lasers back to combat strength.” Instantly, the communications window sputtered off into a disappearing white line, the Phoenix rep. was gone.
Moniquea threw up new sets of interfaces on her screen, showing power relays and transits. “I’ll have to re-route power around sanctioned systems—either that or burn out the racing inhibitors…”
“Just do it!” Kyrie was dimly aware of Jean handing the rarely used helmets around. Kyrie took hers with more annoyance than gratitude. If a small ship like their’s were racked by military grade laser-fire, scores of high-speed Gauss rounds, or struck by a single plasma missile...sealed vac-suits would prove little use. “We’re wasting time, people.”
The young navigator started clicking furiously, “Captain… even if I can do it, I will need time…”
“I’m taking us in there, so hurry it up."
"What the Seven Hells..." Kyrie heard from Moniquea’s quarter. Before the captain could ask, the navigator continued, "There’s an override here that was not on any schematic..." Kyrie noticed a command screen readout indicating combat level power to lasers. "Uhm...Captain...?" Moniquea uttered.
"What, Mon?"
"This combat sub-system I just unlocked also seems to have another weapon available...it reads as Main..."
"That crap software glitch again? Main weapon? This is no combat patrol corvette. What the Hells?" Kyrie called up a mirror of what Moniquea was seeing on her Captain’s screen. "Plasma lance? That looks like its emitting from the Tesla Rod array." What else had her uncle secreted in this ’racing’ corvette, Kyrie wondered? "Looks like a maintained long-range plasma projection gun."
"But...Captain, as I read this, it would require an entire engine output to use as a ranged weapon. Using it on the run would employ one engine for maneuvering, the second for the plasma lance all by itself..."
"So," Kyrie said mostly to herself, "that’s why this little she-devil had two main engines, eh? Sure wasn’t for racing, not like it went twice as fast or anything. The only excuse might have been as a back-up, but now I see it...more power than necessary just for flying. That bastard was designing a Phoenix Navy. And just using us as practical beta-testers for the design...”
"And we only have one engine now, Kyr," Jean finished.
"Bring Keed back up to its limit, ten-percent. What kind of effect could you produce as is, Mon?" Kyrie asked.
“A Tesla-rod vortex would have practically no range with the Keed Engine at ten-percent. She’ll have virtually zero projection range, Kyrie…”
“That’s fine; we’ll fly right down their throats!” The fire of Blaize’s hair was now perfectly matched by her attitude. “Mon, plot for the closest cruiser; we’ll ram them!”
Sammie was almost hysterical. “Holy Goddess… they’re… they’re leveling Alaria’s population centers! Adelaide, Taliesin, Avalon… they’re all burning…”
“Jean, engage that Main Gun and fire!”
“Dammit! Tesla-rod not responding, Captain! The subroutine is looking for an unencumbered engine to power it.”
“Captain, should I plot us a course out?”
“NO! Jean: give me that lance! Shunt half of keed’s power over for it.”
“Almost……”
“Jean… JEAN!”
“NOW!” Jean yelled as Flaire’s top-mounted “tuning fork” shaped antenna sparkled and a plasma sphere erupted from it. The view-screen lit up from a plasma sphere larger around than the ship herself which formed just off the bow. The plasma field moved with the Flaire, but would not fire into the enemy as intended.
Like a harpoon being thrust into a whale, the Flaire followed the plasma sphere it was actively projecting, right into and all the way clean through the much larger Terran cruiser, easily a hundred times the mass of the corvette.
“Yes!” Captain Blaize exulted. The plasma sphere died as the power to keep it in place diminished.
“Captain,” Sammie reported, hands on controls, “Dozens of Alarian ships are lifting off from the surface. Sentinels, house destroyers, corporate flagships… they’re coming to fight the Terrans!”
The Flaire banked and turned into combat with other cruisers, dodging return fire, opening fire with the side mounted lasers –now at full combat strength– which sliced apart another large Terran cruiser.
In the Flaire’s view-screen, the ship they first flew through exploded into wreckage that began the slow fall into the planet’s atmosphere.
The Flaire continued to dodge, loop, and twist, come about and attack again, slicing open a third Terran cruiser with her side-mounted lasers. The Tesla cannon was starting to sparkle again when the small corvette was suddenly caught in a hazy energy beam, and stopped cold.
"Tractor!" Mon yelled.
“Tractor beam?” Kyrie shouted. “The Terrans aren’t even supposed to have tractor technology!” Kyrie tried desperately to break free. “I have no helm control. Rajua, I need a power spike, now.”
“There’s nothing more, Dara’s maxed, and if I spike Keed she’ll likely explode.”
“Captain!” Sammie gasped. “The Alarian ships, they’re all being torn to pieces!”
Kyrie could see that they were being pulled through a cloud of ships, ever deeper into the school of steel space whales. Again she had one of those moments of intuition bordering on precognition, telling her that they were about to reach the end of their forced march; this time they were the whale, having been speared, being pulled to their doom. “We’re dead if you don’t.”
Rajua sighed. “Aye, aye.” She began spiking controls, half her interface began glowing red.
The ship lurched forward a moment, then shuddered from a small explosion.
“That’s it, keed’s dead and venting plasma, probably melted her fusion chamber. We only have Dara now.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Kyrie whispered.
“What?”
“We’re there.” They were indeed, they’d come to a stop, the tractor beam now holding them still in a space without cruisers nearby: they’d reached an empty central hub, like the eye of a storm. Kyrie switched the main screen’s angle to the aft view.
“Oh goddess, no… not...that…” escaped Kyrie’s mouth with utter resignation. And yet...it made everything fall into place. The impossible made perfect sense...though it was a cruel joke indeed. She heard the others gasp or curse in three languages. The screen was filled with a vision from Alarian prophecy: A ship that dwarfed all the hundreds of cruisers surrounding it, because it had brought them all with it casually, like a child might bring a bag of toys to a sleepover, Kyrie thought. It resembled not a ship at all, but more a massive space station; a construct orbiting a black hole not unlike the one that they’d seen the ships emerge from: a sphere of empty blackness which served as its power-supply and engine; an endless source of power.
“Jean, get the Tesla rod reconfigured to send a message again, and prep the pin-drive,” her voice cracked. The Flaire’s sensor alarms began warning about a new threat nearby; a knife-like blade of plasma not unlike the one the Flaire had created but much more powerful, was closing in. “You’d better hurry.”
“Captain,” Rajua interrupted, “attempting to go to pin would surely rip us to shreds while we’re locked in a tractor…”
“We’re not going to pin-space, Raj, our broadcast message is. Can Dara open up a pin-hole?”
“For a moment only, half a minute at best,” Rajua reported.
Kyrie Saturai gazed at each of her friends, sadly. “I’m sorry I didn’t get you home.”
“Tesla rod relay ready, Kyr…” Jean said, resignedly. The blade of plasma seemed to circle the Flaire menacingly.
“Incoming message from…” Sammie couldn’t bring herself to say the name. “...Incoming.”
“Don’t bother with their surrender demand. Bring up the pin-hole, Raj. Jean, target the rod into the singularity’s Event Horizon, get ready to transmit.”
“Who are we sending to?”
“Address the Q-gate station at Miranda… they always monitor pin-space for emergency signals of lost ships. Once the signal is in Pin, it will be receivable all over the system, and shortly all over half the galaxy, anyone with ears or ships in pin-space will hear it.”
Both women nodded ready. Kyrie noticed that Moniquea had begun to sob quietly. She keyed her command chair’s mic. “Attention, this is Kyrie Saturai of Phoe… of the Alarian Trade Alliance. Alaria is under attack by… a massive Terran fleet, their flagship is the Old Earth dreadnought Cantus Nocti…”
Kyrie saw the moment that followed as if in slow motion, as she would see it in nightmares for the rest of her life. A blinding beam of light cut through the Flaire’s hull, slicing into the bridge behind the command chair, passing through and evaporating Moniquea and Sammie. Air pressure was lost in the Flaire: atmosphere vented. A bubble came down over the command chair and Blaize as she screamed. The command chair was ejected out of the bottom of the craft as she watched her ship being torn asunder. Then a blinding flash. The blast wave from the explosion shot her little escape pod right toward the moon’s gravity well.
Quickly Kyrie’s mind flashed over to the little-studied specs on the command escape pod. Designed mostly to keep a pilot alive until race rescue could arrive, it was technically capable of planetary re-entry –technically, if all conditions were perfect– and you were really very lucky. There couldn’t be a single flaw in… Then the Terran cruiser rammed her pod. The crysteel domed top was clearly cracked, and the bottom mushroomed in. Kyrie heard what little air she had in the tiny thing noisily venting. What had been her breath formed ice crystals outside the crack that sealed it for the moment.
The little pod was still headed toward Alaria, now firmly in the moon’s gravity-well...accelerating the closer it came.
Her heart started to race and she started to pant in the thinner air. When I hit atmo, that ice is gonna melt off in a flash… shortly thereafter so will I. She thought of her friends. Guess it won’t be long, now. “See you all… soon.” Kyrie sobbed.