Chapter 17
Chapter 17
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Day 71: 10 hours to attack
My head banged on the small stool when they threw me into the cramped cell. The others followed, and though I couldn't summon up the strength to look up at him I could hear Merinin say, "You'll wait here until the Landfall. We need you alive to perform the ceremony, but don't be foolish enough to think that we value your lives. If you commit suicide, you'll only shorten the celebrations."
The sound of footsteps faded, replaced by a low humming noise. I turned around with the tangy taste of blood and metal in my mouth, and saw that the open part of our cell was now a shimmering wall, and when Hal reached out to touch it his hand was repelled by some sort of shield.
He looked back at me and said, "I suppose their mastery of gravity is pretty broad."
I grunted. This Goddamn mission. If Tengo were here he'd give me a good verbal thrashing, but at least the mission itself was a tribute to our morality. A Kadeshi officer would have been left for dead; at least we Hiigarans maintained our conscience.
And yet as I looked at Mara, shivering in the corner, obviously having gone through the worst month of her life, I wondered if it was the right thing. After all, we accelerated the process of the invasion of Hiigara considerably, and any kind of information we'd obtained was moot, as we wouldn't get the opportunity to tell it to anyone.
The cell's floor shuddered briefly, and Nolan turned to me. "I guess we're off now."
I nodded. Then another voice, frail and dry, spoke up. Mara said, "Captain?" I looked over at her and she continued, "Thank you. I wish that this could have been avoided, but…" Her face became strained and she closed her troubled eyes. "It was just…when Lara died, I felt a part of me die with her. We'd always had some deep connection with each other; we knew how each other felt and we acted in perfect symbiosis all the time. When that part of me died, I was so shocked that I froze. I didn't even recognize what was happening until the Kadeshi had brought me hours away from the base. And now I've damned the rest of you. I just…"
She didn't finish her sentence. She broke down, tears streaming down her face. She curled up and sobbed violently. Hal went over to comfort her, and Aryl came in close to me, as did the four others.
"Now what do we do?" May asked nervously. "We can't just sit here."
Jacyn began to say something, stopped, and walked over to the imperceptible shield that kept us trapped inside. He punched it several times, leaving him with nothing more than a sore hand and a newfound ability to curse his head off.
He grunted disapprovingly and looked back at us. "I guess we can."
* * *
I woke when the lights went out. It was odd; I'd grown so accustomed to the Kadeshi affinity for bright lights that it was only obscurity that stirred me. We had spent the first hour trying to come up with a plan to escape, but it wasn't easy. The Kadeshi weren't stupid; they didn't allow us to leave for anything. They had fed us a limited meal before locking us up, which gave them no reasonable excuse to deactivate the shielded cell for the whole thirteen hours of the trip. With no new ground being covered, we capitulated and decided that we had better be rested before anything else happened.
So, I slept. But not for long, it seemed. The lights in the cell did not completely shut off, but they flickered noticeably. I lied there for a while, watching the garish lights dim and brighten, until another thing happened.
The room shook violently, and that was when the room became truly dark. The others woke up with a start, and shrieked with momentary fear for their lives. This was getting stranger and stranger, and I stumbled around in the dark trying to find the others, who, by the sounds of the room, seemed to be all around me.
"Jake," called Jacyn in the darkness, "where are you?"
I turned to the direction of the noise and said, "I'm right-"
The lights came on. I took a while to adjust to the brightness, but even through squinted eyes I could see that something was awry. I could clearly see Jacyn in front of me, but what amazed me was how far away he was. He was about ten meters away, and I remembered that our cell was not more than about nine square meters in floor space. I looked around and saw that the rest of my companions were easily as far away, if not further, and from the looks on their faces they had realized it, too. When my vision was fully restored, and my mind had caught up with it, I understood what had happened.
I was out of the cell.
I approached the depression in the room's wall that was our cell, and my theories were vindicated when I found that I was pushed back by the very same shield. Only this time, I was on the other side.
Hal exclaimed, "What the hell, sir!"
I grinned. "I suppose the shield was deactivated during that little brown-out. Whatever is draining power from the ship, it's taking a toll on the grav-shields as well."
The room shook again, but I rose steadily on my feet. I looked the room and found a small panel on one of the walls. I hadn't fully deciphered the Kadeshi written language, but by experimenting with the different controls I managed to cut power from every cell in the room (ours was the only occupied one,) and my friends came rushing out.
I gestured them to come over, and we hurled ourselves at the locked door of the room until it gave way, spilling us into the corridors of the Krekkin-Na. We looked around frantically, and arbitrarily picked a hallway to rush down. It wasn't long before we encountered some soldiers, but with the element of surprise on our side we swiftly disabled them. We donned their armor and grav-beam weapons and raced down the shuddering hall.
We found a room that looked like an Engineering complex, and we barged in and attacked the occupants. Most of them, fortunately, were unarmed, and we made quick work of them by clumsily firing the alien weapons on our hands. The room was too small, too ill-equipped to be any kind of central control station, but Hal did manage to patch us into the ship's external sensors through one of the terminals. A holographic display rose up from the ground and showed us the Kadeshi fleet. It was no longer in hyperspace, we noticed immediately. In fact, as I checked its position against the relative position of the neighboring stars, I saw that it was still a good two hundred light-years away from Hiigara.
But was even more interesting was the fact that they were under attack. The holographic display revealed the location of hundreds of ships, all firing on the Arkship and its contingent of protecting ships, and…all our allies.
I noticed with glee that Hiigaran, Taiidani, and yes, even Corporate ships had started to pummel the Kadeshi ranks. I noticed the culprits-several gravwell generators-ringing the outside of the battlefield perimeter. Obviously, our people had somehow known that the Kadeshi would strike soon, and had set up a gravity well to pull them out of hyperspace. Thousands of starfighters buzzed freely around the battlefield, so I knew that they were at least temporarily offline, but I knew that the Kadeshi had activated the hyperspace inhibitors on their Needleships after they were pulled out. Either way, no one was leaving the fight soon.
It was a three-pronged attack. The Hiigaran ships from the Gemstone fleet (I noticed that the finished Construction Yard was even at the back, churning out more ships from its bowels,) were directly in front of the Krekkin-Na, the Destroyers and Frigates pumping out plasma (what? Where the hell were the mass drivers? I thought about this for a second, but filed it away for later consideration) from afar, and the starfighters and Support Frigates (I could point out both Angel Interceptors and the Angel Base in the melee) right in the Protectors' faces.
The Taiidan Agamemnon fleet directed by General Seljuk cut in from the other side of the Kadeshi formation, and their bombers were making quick work of the less fighter-defended MBFs on that side. I saw several Swarmers flow to that side in response, placing less stress on the Hiigaran starships and thinning their ranks a bit.
That wasn't all, however, as the Corporate taskforce of Admiral Shhar imposed themselves on the undefended topside of the Arkship, and with each barrage of fire we felt another shudder pass through us. Slowly, too slowly, the Kadeshi fighters and frigates undulated upwards to counterattack. The Protectors had a sheer advantage in numbers, but their forces had to divide up too sparsely to react to the attack, and the prototype shields, now installed on every ship in the attacking fleet, absorbed much of the potential destructive force that had devastated less fortunate vessels.
It was a mixed blessing that the Arkship was so thick-hulled. It did prevent our men from killing us accidentally, but if they were able to nuke the ship easily the Kadeshi would scatter, with no real base of operations to report to.
I would have wanted to monitor the battle longer, but when the door of the room smashed inwards under the stress of harnessed gravity, and soldiers poured into the room to take control, I forgot all about the battle being fought outside and focused on our more immediate problem. The hologram dissipated, and I fired my grav-beams at the half dozen grunts that had entered. One went down, but another clipped me on the shoulder. It was an odd sensation; nothing actually hit my arm, but the force of the beam pushing it backwards caused it to flare up in pain, and I lost my balance and fell to the ground. I cringed from the throbbing arm, yet I obligingly stood up and fired back. I hit one guy, who sailed across the room, hitting the wall on his ribcage with a sickening crunch. He became limp and fell to the floor.
With everyone gone, the seven of us stepped out of the room. "Where to now, boss?" Nolan inquired. I thought it over, and realized that I had no plan. With this completely new scenario, I had no idea how to follow through with our orders. I decided that we had to escape, and gestured May and Jacyn back into the Engineering room. "Find a map of this ship," I ordered, "and find out where the Concealed Treasure is being held. I feel like jumping ship."
When they returned, Jacyn handed me a datapad with a floor map of our location. It told us that we were on Level 187, near the very apex of the ship. I looked at my two Intelligence pilots and asked, "And the hangar we're looking for is on Level…"
Jacyn looked at me sheepishly. "Six."
* * *
After passing through who knows how many corridors and fighting wave after wave of Kadeshi troops, we reached the central axis of the ship. The centrifugal effect of the ship's spinning was weakest here, and our bodies seemed to bounce with each step we took. The central hub consisted of a massive ringed room, whose perimeter consisted of about fifty connected turbolift shafts. We ran to one of them as Jacyn explained the layout of the Arkship.
"The Krekkin-Na is composed of two saucer-shaped discs connected by a long shaft. Each saucer has 200 levels to it, ours being the top 200, and the shaft is basically a fifty-level hangar. The pilots and ships reside there, and they fly out of the Arkship through the long tunnel that passes through the entire ship." He pointed up when we got inside the turbolift, and I did see what he meant; the turbolift shafts created the circumference of the exit tunnel, and we even saw ships fly past our lift and out into space.
The ride was momentarily quiet, but then we received company in the form of a Swarmer. It passed us as most of them did, but the pilot must have noticed us in the lift, for it flew back to our position and matched our speed. The ship pivoted around and we could see the Kadeshi pilot widen his eyes in surprise at his revelation. The fighter bared its guns and fired jade darts at us. The first shots missed us, and only the walls next to us were fried.
But then, in a movement too quick to fully grasp, the descending Swarmer supposedly crashed into another fighter which was making its way up the shaft, and the two collided brutally into each other, but not before the first one fired a glancing shot at the transparisteel shield of the turbolift, which shattered and melted before our very eyes. The shock of the attack knocked us backwards, but the lift came to an abrupt stop, clearly a result of the laser attack, and lurched diagonally away from the wall we were resting against. We slid down the steep floor, but we all managed to find a sharp handhold to grab onto to avoid dropping like a stone down the remaining hundred meters of the turbolift shaft.
I looked down into the abyss, watching the last of the Swarmers file away from the hangar floor below us, and held on for dear life. A quick staggering motion of the decrepit lift, however, shook us off of our safe position and sent us sprawling down into oblivion.