Corbitt swooped back to locate a target, bringing the two behemoths into his canopy’s view. The Fury fired its cannons as if living up to its name, while the Legacy remained dark.
“Why aren’t they fighting back?”
“Who do you mean, Hopeless?”
“Legacy. Her cannons are cold. She’s just limping about like she’s lost in the woods.”
The Vandal crossed briefly into his sights, not long enough for his lasers to make a new friend. It remained a fight just to keep that wily craft ahead of him.
“Petron must be on the bridge.”
“Watch your mouth on this channel,” Delta-2 warned. “You know the bridge listens in.”
“I don’t give a fuck,” Delta-4 snapped. “He can come out here and hand me that Article 13 in person if that coward has a problem. Captain, can you hear me? How about showing a little backbone and fire back at these motherfuckers!”
“Or better yet,” Corbitt interrupted hoping to keep the focus on their true enemies, “how about telling us where our backup is.”
“Flight command, this is Delta-2. Can you read us?”
“Affirmative.” No one could place the voice. Truth be told, there were about three men who worked the tower that sounded alike over the radios. Without a handle, no one was certain who spoke when the voice crackled in their ears. “Captain Petron ordered the fighters grounded. You’re on your own out there. Sorry.”
“Sorry? I should go back there and drag his ass out here. Let him fight these guys by himself.”
“Stow the anger, Delta-4. Remember who the enemy is.” Delta-2 found his target and made contact. “I promise you if we make it back alive, I’ll knock his lights out myself.”
But like the previous kill, the victory over this one too was short-lived. Another Vandal fighter came at him from his starboard side and opened fire the moment his fighter was in the line of fire. Nightstalker would not make good on his promise.
“Shit! Shit!” Corbitt’s anger over another loss caused him to miss the target he had been lining up.
“Keep your wits. For what it’s worth, you’re flight leader now.” The responsibility was easy enough, but with only one fighter left under his sudden command, it hardly seemed necessary.
With renewed fire in his belly, resembling the nuclear furnace of a star rather than that powering Legacy’s sublight engines, he turned his fighter hard, opening fire before he had the target in his sights. He maintained the assault so as not to give any room for evasion. Quickly, the Vandal grew frustrated and nervous. The fighter signaled increasing mistakes, and soon it ventured into the path of one of the oncoming laser blasts.
“At least we’re even now,” his partner offered to keep his spirits up.
But Corbitt misunderstood the comment. “We’re not even close to even,” he spat through his clenched teeth.
He identified the fighter he thought responsible for taking out Delta-2 and pursued it with the same unabridged rage he showed against the first target. To those kids, this was one big game. Corbitt and his fellow pilots were all soulless dots in their canopy screens. Each of his friends killed by their hands was nothing more than a hundred points in their video game war.
He doubted they even saw value in the lives they snuffed out on Earth. No doubt they had parents back there as Corbitt did. Many of them had siblings as Corbitt did. How dark their souls must be, he thought, to bring death upon that family without the slightest consideration. Just as those lives held no value to the pilot ahead of him, this kid meant even less to Corbitt. He opened fire to let him join the dust of his two friends.
Still they were not even. As far as he was concerned, they wouldn’t be even if he could strangle every last Vandal into the grave personally.
Suddenly, he noticed one less transponder transmitting on his canopy.
“Delta-4, what’s your status?”
His calls would go unanswered. The remaining two fighters silenced her voice during his blinding rage. He was alone.
* * *
Hoskins remained in a state of unresponsive panic. All around him, officers called for orders.
“Armory demands orders to engage.”
“Flight wants permission to launch more fighters.”
“Damage control teams need to know what your priorities are.”
It was all too much. As a quartermaster and the supply chief, he didn’t have all these voices to answer. He might have a line of men shouting and cursing him out, but he had the luxury of ignoring everyone until their voices grew hoarse and they left him alone.
“Why did they have to promote me?” he asked himself.
Each strike to the ship sent him further and further into his shell. Each damage report caused him to tune out more and more of the noise.
Lieutenant Commander Martinez, lurking about the bridge and monitoring the men and their progress struggled with the decision to bail out the unfortunate Commander. By all rights the promotion should have been his. He was the one on this ship with the most command experience outside Petron and Sadiq. But the Admiralty held a dim view over his career.
Martinez wasn’t afraid to question orders when necessary. If he spied a more efficient or a safer travel route when sent on a mission, he would defy orders when the bridge was his and take it. If the admiralty expected them to transfer more of their supplies than they could survive with, he wasn’t afraid to hold back what they needed.
They promoted Hoskins over him because the man was a yes-man. The man never once took a chance in his career, skating through his duties and doing the bare minimum required to avoid trouble. While command officers should have been judged on the overall outcome of their collective missions, supply clerks should have been judged on the accuracy of their inventories and the efficiency in their supply usage. But Martinez knew Hoskins never once tried to reduce Legacy’s supply orders. Any attempt to improve efficiency on one’s own volition was a risk that might backfire, and he wouldn’t take the chance. As long as he filled a seat and kept out of trouble, the admiralty loved him more than the third-in-command with a verified record of reducing fuel usage and decreasing the waste in the kitchen. It was Hoskins, and not Martinez, who was their superstar.
Watching this superstar fail on his first turn in the big chair was all the vindication he needed. He didn’t want to see the Legacy lost over a personal slight. Yet he knew if he jumped in and rescued the new Commander, all credit for the battle would go to Hoskins instead. The man had to fail spectacularly if he was to be exposed. His compromise was to continue around the bridge, whispering in everyone’s ears to keep up the pressure until the Commander either stepped up or stepped out.
* * *
Several decks below, just outside crew quarters in the kitchen behind the mess hall, the cooks remained as busy as everyone else. In times of crisis they expected to serve, not a mess hall full of hungry troops, but the men and women holding down their stations all throughout Legacy. Sometimes they had to make due with a meal already half-cooked. Other times they received enough notice to alter the menu before setting the pots to the flame.
Turkey and ham sandwiches replaced the usual warm fare, a simple meal which could maintain quality in the time it took the stewards and servers to deliver throughout the ship.
“Thanks, mate,” the lowly seamen usually received for their troubles followed by some joke they heard a thousand times before and would surely hear several more times before the shift was finished.
“Next time, think you could deliver me a pizza?”
“Could you fetch my slippers while you’re at it?”
And other such unoriginal jokes flowed with the food. The mess staff was so low on the proverbial food chain, they had no choice but to pretend the reply was witty and humorous each time they heard it.
When in use, the mess hall provided the troops a view of the space outside. Sometimes when in orbit around a planet, if the Ca
ptain didn’t give orders to the contrary, the Commander would order the ship positioned so as to present the planet to that side of the ship. If the Commander had other things on his mind, the navigator might take it upon him or herself to create the scenery for the hungry troops.
One Seaman pushed through the door into the kitchen, glancing toward those windows over his shoulder before the door shut again killing his view. In the Commander’s miserable attempts to evade the Vorman shot, the moon had vanished from sight and it was the enemy cruiser looming too large in the distance for comfort.
A blast from their guns disappeared over the top of the glass and the ensuing rumble told the kitchen staff it had missed them by less than two decks.
“How can you work with that outside?” he asked the nearest cook.
“I don’t think about it. I have a job to do and I trust everyone else on this boat is doing theirs.”
The confidence in the kitchen didn’t ease his concerns, but he didn’t want to be the one sinking the fight. No matter how low his job was, delivering the food was just as crucial to efficient operations as the man pulling the trigger or keeping the air flowing.
He slung a full pouch of water across his shoulder and took up a fresh tray of sandwiches. As his hand made for the door, he thought how glad he was that at least he didn’t have to spend too much time with that reminder of danger shocking his senses.
But when the door gave way, that danger gave his senses the ultimate shock. A Vandal laser sliced across the vacuum straight for him. It struck the wide windows before his mind could accept it. The sturdy glass vanished in the intense heat of the light. Moving inward in the tiniest fraction of a second, everything in its path melted down and incinerated into nothingness. The chairs, the tables, the serving counters, and even the Seaman and the kitchen behind him surrendered to that nearly white-hot blast before all the obstacles within the mess drained that energy.
Bulkheads in the surrounding corridors sealed automatically to restrict the pressure and atmospheric losses, but it was too late for lunch service.
The maintenance crew received the reports of the strike along with those for other strikes across the ship. In times of crisis such as this one, they donned environmental suits and separated into prearranged teams for their role in damage control. Though sometimes the crew chief would dispatch a team on his own, most of the teams were held back, awaiting orders from the bridge.
From her perch, the Lieutenant Commander overseeing these teams would rightfully see a fire in engineering or a severed power conduit in a battle-damaged section as a top priority. However for those on the bridge, and the commanding officer wrenching victory from the crisis, something as simple as a nonresponsive station might have been more important for the overall survival of the ship. They couldn’t afford to dispatch damage control teams to far flung corners of the ship only to have to redeploy them afterwards, wasting precious travel time in the process.
For all the shaking going on and all the damage reports coming to her terminal, the only thing she didn’t receive were orders.
A couple teams had been dispatched to take care of fires in affected sections. Within the atmosphere of the moon, it wasn’t total vacuum rushing in through broken hull. There was just enough hydrogen sneaking in to keep the fires burning.
Yet most of her people sat idle while all she received from the bridge was uncertainty and indecision. Another report indicated a gun turret had been blasted away. A few meters behind and it might have threatened one of the larger armory stations. Fifty meters back still, and the torpedo tubes would have been threatened. If the artillery went up, it would have taken out as much as five percent of the ship.
For his part, the armorer had given up on the bridge, ordering his teams to man the guns and return fire. “Petron can court-martial me,” he was heard shouting more than once as gunners sealed themselves into the surviving pods and identified their target.
While the bridge didn’t seem to make much of an effort to get out of the way, at least it kept the Vandal cruiser in a somewhat stabile position relative to their own, making it easier to reciprocate the damage.
* * *
Corbitt felt a bit of relief when he spied Legacy’s cannons finally returning fire, but he still had two hostiles dogging him and no hope of reinforcements. One of the fighters maneuvered behind him, forcing him to throw all his energy into evading their target lock.
He pulled up sharply with the Vandal anticipating the maneuver. Then he veered sharply to port, before shifting to starboard hoping to confuse his shadow. It worked only briefly before the ship circled abruptly around to find him once more.
Corbitt barely had time to get a bearing on the second ship to make sure it wasn’t using his distraction as an ambush. It was nowhere to be found, and he couldn’t put too much effort into trying before he had to worry about its partner once more.
He spied the cruiser growing ever closer to Legacy, and he formulated an idea. With as much speed as he could wring from his fighter, he set a course. The Vandal kept up and Corbitt decided to mimic their highly erratic flying style to evade the target lock.
He had hoped with their ship in the line of fire, it might make his opponent think twice before letting loose with the guns, but that wasn’t the case. The lasers came at him as freely as before, their pilot oblivious to the danger he created for that Vandal crew.
Corbitt opened fire himself, hoping to annoy the larger ship ahead and give his friend a new worry to fluster him. He even launched his missiles figuring he wouldn’t find any better time to use them. Then, when the Vandal’s fire increased in intensity, he tried a new gambit.
He hit the brakes briefly to alert his adversary to his intention. The Vandal was ready and hit his own before overshooting Corbitt, but that wasn’t the plan. With the Vandal committed to a full stop, Corbitt accelerated once more putting space between them before the Vandal realized the ruse. It wouldn’t be long before the other ship was again in pursuit, but for the moment, the trick had flustered him enough to remove his finger from the trigger.
Corbitt grew closer to the cruiser, using his brief reprieve to locate the second fighter. As he feared, the one behind him was a decoy. If it couldn’t destroy him, it meant to distract him long enough for the second fighter to reach the Legacy. It wasn’t there yet, but that Vandal was only minutes away from joining its parent with a more precise strike against the carrier.
Corbitt kept his fighter moving at top speed. He would have to bypass the cruiser now. Legacy’s gunners could take her on. For now, that second fighter was his responsibility.
* * *
Petron hovered within the flight command center watching down through the glass at the crew below painting the flight deck. In his mind it took them too long to get the paint, and he suspected the moment he left them alone, Park would pull them from the deck and return to business as usual. Sometimes with these men, micromanagement was the only way to get them to follow orders.
Park for his part, simply tried to ignore the man. He studied the channels coming from the bridge waiting for any order and judging the progress of the disastrous battle. It was clear no one up there had control of the situation. Petron needed to get up there and take control, but no one called down for him and Park himself knew it was a waste of time to suggest it. As far as the Captain was concerned, watching the paint dry was a more valuable use of his time.
All of a sudden, the chatter from the bridge ceased. Even the sudden crackling vanished as cries for instruction no longer received an indecisive “stand by.” Confusion only grew on the ship-wide channels, to be fueled by a panicked call from maintenance.
“I need a damage control team to the bridge!”
“This is Lieutenant Lyman. Should I dispatch a medical team?”
“Don’t bother. You won’t find anyone left alive. If anyone knows where the Captain is, tell him to get his head out of his ass and do his job!”
Out of everything, it was the insult Petron heard above all else. He snapped around with all the force of a tornado, knocking Park and another technician out of his way to respond.
“This is Captain Petron,” he spat furiously back to the insubordinate from maintenance. “I want to know who I have to write up for insubordination and conduct unbecoming!”
His answer would not come quickly enough. A Vandal blast tore through the outer door of the hangar, weakened considerably by the inner door. But damage to the inner door had been done. When a subsequent shot followed behind, the barrier didn’t hold. The laser pushed inward, incinerating the painting crew before dangerously heating the fighters parked nearby.
One exploded, triggering a chain reaction down the line. The flight deck was consumed as one explosion after another added to the drama. A troop transport went up next, sending a metal beam up and into the glass protecting the officers in the command center. Like that of the exterior windows, the glass was strong and designed to survive most situations like this, but it wasn’t impervious. The beam struck at just the right point and angle to crack the pane.
Petron looked on with horror, realizing the danger while those around him worried about the conditions below and the men in more immediate danger outside the hangar bay. He raced for the door in all the confusion, keeping his eye on that widening crack. There was barely enough time for him to get outside the room before the breach opened.
The cargo shuttle blew at the instant of breech, expanding the already confused atmosphere of the flight deck. Rather than the air from the command center rushing out, the blowback from the latest explosion followed the air up and into the control room.
Petron tried to shut the door on everyone to keep the fire from lashing out further, but he was not fast enough. The heat and the flames pushed the hatch back against him. The Captain was incinerated only a half second after Park and his crew.
* * *
Corbitt watched on stunned, aware of the consequences of the explosions he witnessed. The men and women of that flight deck were more than friends, they were his family. He was tighter with them than with the family he lost back on Earth. In many ways, watching the flight deck burn was harder than watching that poison spread through the sky.