Starship Liberator Read online

  “I sleep light.” He turned to look again. “What should we do?”

  “Hide.”

  “Why? We’re winning.”

  Loco ticked off reasons on his fingers. “One, we don’t know we’re winning. Two, even if we do, we don’t know how long it will take to clear and secure the area. Three, a stray shell could kill us and that would be really stupid.” He grabbed Derek’s elbow. “And four, I’m still hungry. Let’s go back to the basement and wait.”

  Reluctantly, Derek allowed Loco to drag him back down. As he sat in the dark, he tried his phonetab again, as he did every few hours, hoping for a signal. He didn’t know how these things really worked, but maybe he could get something, anything.

  Through the cellar walls they felt and heard the noises of combat build to a crescendo over the next hour, and then fade to nothing.

  “Should we go look?” Loco asked.

  “Yeah. Let’s look.”

  As they climbed the stairs, the locked door at the top rattled.

  “Shit.” Loco began to back slowly down.

  “It’s our guys.”

  “How do you know?” he hissed.

  Derek shrugged. “If not, we’re dead anyway.”

  “We should hide. Maybe they’ll miss us again.”

  His phonetab beeped. He looked at its display. “Huh.”

  “What?”

  “It says, Derek Barnes Straker, stand fast. Johannes Miguel Paloco, stand fast.”

  “That’s weird.”

  Derek poked his friend with his index finger. “Johannes? Really?”

  “Hey, I didn’t pick it. My mom was an astronomer, remember? I’m named after Kepler. Or maybe her first boyfriend, I don’t know.”

  The door abruptly swung open with a shriek of tearing metal and a crash as it was pulled off its hinges. In the light of day, Derek saw the wide faceplate of a Foehammer mechsuit peering down the stairs.

  It spoke in a voice like thunder. “Come on out, boys. We’re here to rescue you. Hurry.”

  In the street an armored bus like the one that had shown up at Derek’s house waited. A mechsuiter squad of four stood guard, facing in all directions as the driver waved frantically for them to run and get on.

  “How did they know where we were?” Loco asked once they’d taken their seats. The bus was otherwise empty. The driver began to steer like a maniac through the shattered city.

  “My phonetab, I guess.”

  “But I didn’t have mine. How did they know I was there too?”

  Derek thought about it. “Our brainchips.”

  “Yeah, that must be it. Why didn’t they tell us they could find us with them?”

  “I’m starting to think there’s a lot they didn’t tell us.”

  Half an hour later, after picking up five more of his former classmates, Fleet ratings strapped them all into a real planetary shuttle, which lifted with a roar, rocketing for orbit. Everyone was in a hurry. There wasn’t even a countdown.

  Derek felt disappointed. There should have been a countdown.

  As soon as the pressure eased, Derek unbuckled and crawled over to take an empty seat next to a viewport. He couldn’t see much from this height. The ground was so far below that Seaburn and other nearby cities looked like glowing rashes connected by tiny strings of light.

  More lights appeared, short-lived ones that glowed brightly for a moment before Inserting; a few at first, and then ten, twenty, a hundred.

  “Explosions,” Loco said from his elbow.

  “Big ones, maybe even nukes,” Derek replied, numbly speaking the first thing that came into his head. He’d seen lots of war vids. “Suicide charges from the Hok battlesuiters and dropped armor. Their usual last stands. Why now all of a sudden?”

  “All us Specials are leaving,” said Loco. “Their targets are gone.”

  Nothing seemed real. Again, the world had been wrapped in a thick blanket and pushed beyond arm’s length.

  “But we’re winning, right? I mean… we got rescued.”

  Derek shrugged. “Fleet came back to pick us up. Hope for the future. Specials. And to take the planet back too.”

  Loco stared out the port. “Specials. I always thought that was just something they told us. You know, to make us try harder.” He turned back to Derek. “What about everyone else on the planet?”

  Derek sat back, suddenly unable to watch. Now he understood his mother’s frantic hug, and his father’s rare emotion. They’d known what was coming. What an attack meant. Not like on the showvids.

  Why were his parents killed? Nobody but the Hok ever died on the war vids, except a few Hundred Worlds heroes that had to sacrifice themselves to win the battle sometimes. Never civilians. Why did they lie on the vids? Why did they tell kids things would be all right if it wasn’t true?

  Then he remembered one episode where the Hok had slaughtered everyone in a town, lining them up and shooting them in their heads. It was called an atrocity, he recalled. Something you shouldn’t do. Something evil. The mechsuiters had hunted down the Hok unit and killed them to the last ugly, rough-skinned alien. It was the only time the Hok had seemed rational, when they bowed their heads in shame to be punished with death, only what they deserved. Their strange, scaly faces had almost looked human.

  Well, maybe they did. Or maybe, like Loco said, Mechsuiter Roundup wasn’t really… accurate. Showvids were different from newsvids, after all. Much better. Everything always worked out in showvids, but not in newsvids. Derek was starting to see the fundamental difference.

  “I guess the Hok are scorching what they can, before Fleet drives them off,” Derek said with sudden insight.

  “That’s insane! Good planets are hard to find. You don’t scorch them, you conquer them!”

  “You said it yourself. Maybe they don’t tell us kids everything.” Derek stared out the window. “The Hok are evil. I hate them.”

  He hadn’t hated them before. They’d just been the bad guys, like in a VR game. Now, a dragon stirred in Derek’s guts, making him feel hot and strong.

  “I want to kill them all,” he said in a flat tone.

  Nancy Sinden, one of the brainiacs from his class, looked down her nose at Derek from across the aisle. “The Hok is an inimical alien humanoid species that seeks relentless expansion of its territory. They’re not evil. They simply are the way they are. Like bugs. It’s an instinct.”

  “Yeah, and it’s my instinct to slap you, smartass,” said Loco.

  “Better than being a dumbass like you,” Nancy replied.

  “Shut up. Derek’s right. If they killed our parents, they’re evil,” Loco insisted.

  “You physicals are so retarded.”

  “You brainiacs are so stuck up, like you know everything.”

  Derek pried a pebble from the sole of his shoe and flicked it unerringly at Nancy’s earlobe, drawing a shriek. “You’re no better than us,” he said. “Everybody has their own special enhancements.”

  “Shut up back there!” the shuttle pilot roared. “I ain’t got no time to babysit!”

  “Where do you think we’re going?” Loco whispered.

  “Extraction and evacuation,” Nancy replied.

  “Funny name for a place.”

  Loco must have been joking, but Nancy didn’t get it. Most of the brainiacs didn’t get jokes. “It’s not a place, moron, it’s a process. We’re being evacuated to somewhere safe, so we can grow up to fight the Hok.”

  Derek nodded, accepting the unacceptable. “That means we’re losing.”

  “No shit,” Nancy said, rolling her eyes.

  “What about the rest of the people on Oceanus?” Loco asked her, as if hoping her answer would be different from Derek’s.

  “Sucks to be them. The planet’s gonna be hurting for a while. Good thing my parents are dead.”

  Derek stared at her. “Why is that a good thing?”

  “I never liked them anyway.”

  Loco and Derek exchanged glances. “She always was
a loony,” Loco whispered.

  “My hearing is excellent, and I’m not a loony,” Nancy said. “I’m a high-functioning sociopath. That means I can kill you and not feel any remorse.”

  The dragon of anger inside Derek reared up, and his eyes bored into Nancy’s. “If you do, you better get us both, or you’ll die too. Or the Enforcers will get you. I’m a physical, remember? I can snap your neck before you even see it coming. I’m going to be a mechsuiter.”

  “Yeah, me too,” Loco echoed.

  Nancy looked away and shut up.

  That’s good, Derek realized. If she’s afraid—if everyone was afraid—then I’m safer.

  He felt slightly ashamed for bullying the rude girl until he remembered her threats. Was it bullying if you got bullied first, and you bullied back?

  Everything seemed to be changing around him, the ground shifting under his feet. One minute he wanted to hug his classmates, the next, he wanted to strangle them.

  Nancy might be right, though. He digested her assessment of the military situation while they were transferred aboard a fast transport, where the crew treated them like special guests.

  A day later, the transport popped out of sidespace and shuttled the seven boys and girls to a hollow asteroid-moon. The gas giant of Darania glowed above like a minor sun, while the system’s real star hung in the sky nearby, fainter than on Oceanus. Even with the two, the converted asteroid’s surface temperature remained below the freezing point of water, according to Nancy, who rattled off facts and statistics like a robot.

  “Welcome to Academy,” said a stocky, unsmiling man as he met them on the other side of the airlock. “I’m Colonel Oglala. This will be your new home for a while.”

  “How long exactly?” Nancy asked. “We weren’t supposed to come here until we graduated from Secondary.”

  “That’s ‘how long exactly, sir.’”

  “How long exactly, sir?”

  “Until you’re trained.”

  “For what, sir?” Nancy asked.

  “For whatever you were designed to do.”

  Nancy raised her chin and sniffed. “I was designed for intelligence work.”

  “Then no doubt you will be put to good use. This is wartime, Cadet Sinden. You’ll graduate as soon as you’re ready.”

  Loco spoke up. “Me and Derek are going to be a mechsuiters, sir.”

  Oglala stared flatly at Loco. “Perhaps. If you measure up.”

  Derek grabbed Loco’s elbow and pinched, to keep him from running his mouth. He’d seen enough vids about military training to know the instructors were never nice. At least not at first. They were not your friends. They were mean and tough, and they made you mean and tough. Then later, they made you proud. That was the formula for warriors.

  “You’re unmodified, aren’t you, sir?” Nancy said to Oglala with a superior air.

  “Not exactly.”

  “What’s your strain, then?”

  The man’s face turned to stone. “I’m Lakota, from Old Earth.”

  “Hmph. I’m a blend of seven different strains, modified for mental acuity.”

  “I think you’ll find, Cadet Sinden, that Nature has a way of modifying everyone. And that raw intelligence and experience are two very different things. I suggest you judge people not on their genetics, but on their demonstrated abilities. You’re supposed to work in Intelligence, right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Don’t you think it’s wise to gather as much information as possible before making a judgment about an opponent?”

  “Are you my opponent, sir?” she asked.

  “It seems you’re making me into one, Sinden. That demonstrates you may be smart, but you lack wisdom. Now, Sergeant Ryan will get you squared away. Dismissed.”

  “Listen up, recruits,” said a marginally more pleasant woman, waving the flextab in her hand. “Mentals follow Specialist Reynolds to the left. Physicals follow Corporal Feldman to the right. Do it now. Quick-march!”

  Derek elbowed Loco and quick-marched to the right.

  Chapter 4

  Planet Corinth, low orbit. Present day (2817 A.D., Old Earth reckoning).

  Flight Lieutenant Carla Engels experienced a surge of affection for her boys as she released them to fall toward the embattled city of Helios. Though only in her twenty-ninth year, she felt decades older. The grinding schedule of combat wore everyone down.

  The ground fire shifted away from her dropship, focusing on the mechsuiters directly. That gave her a moment to breathe and think. Stretched out below her was a scene that might have been beautiful—all streaks of light, wisps of smoke and sparkling seas—if it hadn’t have been so deadly.

  The war seemed to be accelerating—more missions, less recovery time. That was the norm lately. The mechsuiters didn’t seem to feel it yet. In their physical primes and never defeated, combat fatigue hadn’t started to catch up to most of them. But Engels felt tired all the time, deep in her bones. Professionalism and stims and the battlenet wiped exhaustion away when the time came to fight, but the feeling always lurked in the background, to return when the battle ended.

  Maybe soon they would get a break longer than a week or two of R&R. Unlike his squadmates, Derek Straker had shed his youth and become a man she could respect, maybe even let herself love… though she’d never say it out loud. Not until they had some kind of chance together.

  Not until it was allowed by military protocol—or at least until they knew they’d live past thirty…

  The battle shifted again as the Hok fleet took aim at her ship. Shaking herself out of unproductive thoughts, she hauled the Marksman dropship around in a tight turn, throwing herself out of the way of incoming swarms of microshot. Composed of thousands of tiny metal balls, the clusters had been fired from warship shotguns: cheap, numerous cannon that vomited forth sprays of projectiles.

  While they moved slowly compared to energy weapons or railgun bullets, these had been launched counter-orbitally, adding brutal force to their velocity. If they struck her Marksman they might knock her out immediately. At the least, she’d lose half her sensors and possibly some weapons emplacements.

  Worst of all, it would hurt. As with the mechsuiters, she was linked fully with her dropship, which meant feedback manifested itself as pain. They said it kept pilots sharp. Negative reinforcement, the psychs called it.

  Rolling so her underbelly pointed back along the incoming tracks, she aimed at one of her tormenters, a Hok frigate twenty times her size, now engaged with friendly warships trying to screen the drop.

  Triggering her railgun, she sent a duralloy penetrator slamming into its hull, aiming at the center of mass. Her targeting systems were designed for fire support, and so weren’t good enough to aim any more accurately at orbital distances.

  She registered a hit, but there was no telling how much damage she’d done. Her weapon could obliterate the largest tank on the surface, but a warship had armor thicker than any ground vehicle, strengthened even more by internal and surface-conformal fields.

  Friendly ships engaged the frigate, and the danger faded. She veered off to leave the naval battle to Fleet, who were already counterattacking the enemy from the flank.

  Orienting herself, she tried to see through the flak and countermeasures below, estimating the position of the enemy headquarters by the deployment of the division in the lead. Recharging her capacitors seemed to take forever, as always. The railgun required a lot of juice.

  Loosing a bolt at the enemy mobile HQ made her feel better, even if she couldn’t see through all the mess to get a good target lock. Anything that inconvenienced the Hok would help the Foehammers below.

  As she waited for the recharge again, she fired a couple of her defensive lasers at low power, blinding ascending missile seekers, and once, she launched one of her meager store of antimissiles. A Marksman was, after all, an assault support craft, not an independent gunship, despite her one heavy punch.

  Though it felt like ten long minutes, rec
harging only took ninety-three seconds. By this time her boys were over the city, and she decided to save her big stick for when it was most needed. She’d wait for information relayed from the mechsuits to pinpoint her next target. The battlenet was always spotty on a drop, until the suits hit the ground and the uplinks stabilized.

  In the meantime, she accessed the strategic overlay to update herself on the Fleet battle.

  * * *

  Admiral Lucas Braga picked himself off the deck of the bridge of the Hundred Worlds battlecruiser Vigilant and scrambled back into his chair. He fastened the restraints, though he hated them. Most of the time inertial compensators made such primitive things superfluous, and he believed it damaged his command image to be strapped into his chair like a toddler.

  That said, falling out of it was worse.

  Getting pummeled like this wouldn’t be a problem if he could command from a proper dreadnought or super-dreadnought, but neither of the largest classes possessed the speed he needed, not in sidespace or in normal space. Instead, he’d raced ahead on a converted battlecruiser to get here to Corinth in time, leaving his heaviest assets to follow almost a day behind.

  “Evasive, course ninety mark thirty,” his flag captain, Lydia Verdura, snapped. She commanded the ship itself so Braga could direct the overall battle. “Forty-five degrees port-roll. Beams four through seven, target that Hok bastard’s main gun.”

  “Which Hok bastard?” asked the eight-armed Ruxin weapons officer, but apparently the question was rhetorical, as four pulsed particle beams lashed out, blowing the centerline railgun on one enemy cruiser to scrap. Battlecruisers had no more armor than a heavy cruiser, but they carried double the capital-grade weaponry.

  “That one, yes, Lieutenant Zaxby,” Verdura replied drily. “Helm, get us back into line of battle. Remaining weapons, fire at will.”

  “Poor Will, always taking fire,” Zaxby muttered. Apparently the octopoid alien had a penchant for providing running comic relief.

  Braga restrained himself from issuing a reprimand. He liked a tight, no-nonsense bridge crew, but this wasn’t his usual flagship. Still, Vigilant had the best record among all his battlecruisers, and a ship’s reputation directly reflected her captain: in this case, aggressive, stubborn, highly effective. If Verdura tolerated the chitchat, he could too.