Archer Sector, Centaur System, Battleship Gargantia
The Battleship Gargantia had already been in orbit around the laboring planet of Sagittarion for over a week when the bulletin came in. Commander Gregory Fairlocke could only stare at the data pad he held in his shaking hands.
His XO had a look of deep concern on her elegant face. “What happened?”
“Admiral Gives separated from Command after being court martialed. In absentia, he was tried and found guilty on all charges.” In the span of hours, he’d gone from one of the most feared officers in the fleet to being the most wanted criminal in the worlds. “He managed to invoke Article Seven and Strike Zero aboard the Singularity.”
“Strike Zero?” the Colonel asked, “Can he do that?” Rumor had it the attempt to do so would activate fail safes built into the newer ships, killing everyone involved.
“Apparently,” Fairlocke said, “They’ve put a bounty out, too.” He handed over the data pad, and saw her eyes widen.
“Stars, Gives alone is worth a fortune, with an extra million for any other member of the crew and a fortune for sinking or capturing the ship herself.” It was more money that anyone could spend in a lifetime, more than enough to warrant the personal funding of an army. “But why do they want him alive?”
“Admiral Gives knows secrets that could bring nations to their knees.” It wasn’t unreasonable to assume that Admiral Reeter might desire that knowledge.
“You should volunteer to go after him,” the Colonel said. “You trained under him. You know how he thinks.”
Fairlocke held back a laugh. “Believe me, XO, I never understood him the slightest.” The man was a genuine oddity. “But if we want to live, we’ll stay the hell out of his way.” Wiping out a ship like the Gargantia was child’s play for the Singularity. “Still…”
The XO brushed a strand of hair back behind her ear. “You think he may be right.”
Fairlocke glanced around to the computers, headsets and holographic displays that made up the Gargantia’s bridge controls and lowered his voice, “Can’t you feel it?” Every one of those integrated and advanced controls was an eye, ear or recording device for Command… And something was very wrong with Command.
The XO halfway inclined her head, similarly wary of the cameras and equipment. “We XOs talk.” They traded information and favors for their respective commanding officers. “But lately, some of them have changed.” One day they would be their usual selves, the next, an eerie twin with a foreign personality. “Something’s not right, but those who ask questions, they don’t come back the same.” These days, it was best to follow directions without asking for an explanation.
“Stars,” Fairlocke rubbed at his evenly trimmed beard, “What the hell are we even doing here?” Along with the rest of their squadron, they had been dispatched to Sagittarion, then ordered to maintain absolute radio silence. Another squadron of Keeper-class ships had arrived just two days later, but they too, had been ordered not to communicate.
Six of Command’s battleships idled around Sagittarion in perfect silence. They studied each other, studied the planet, but nothing had changed in over a week. Sagittarion made no call to surrender, and the allied forces were not ordered to open negotiations.
It had been oddly quiet and marginally peaceful as far as they could tell from orbit, but it impossible to know the real conditions on Sagittarion’s surface. Pollution clouded the atmosphere too thickly for sensor or visual data to be viable.
They were blind, but the whole situation reeked. It just felt wrong. Six battleships were left hovering uselessly in orbit, not even prompted to investigate the condition of the fourteen billion potential victims or potential threats on the surface.
It had been illogical for Sagittarion to rebel in the first place and Fairlocke knew it. Located on the edge of the Isolation Gap, it was almost a remote world. Not many colonies still existed on this side of space. Those that had once thrived nearby had been eviscerated during the War.
The territory of the central planets, untouched by the long-ago Hydrian War, lay distant from Sagittarion, and the Frontier, where the younger countries constantly threatened to rebel, was beyond even that. It was on the other side of known space, making it clear that Sagittarion would receive no separatist aid. It was alone out here, and without a standing national guard, it was completely defenseless.
Unchallenged, Command’s ships had formed an orbital blockade. No ship was to be allowed off of or onto Sagittarion. They had been ordered to sink any ship attempting to run the blockade without exception.
A part of Fairlocke had assumed it would never come to that. No ship would be crazy enough to try and run the blockade. But he knew nothing of the conditions on Sagittarion’s surface. He knew nothing of the riots, food shortages or oppressing droid armies. He knew nothing of the brutal cullings that were efficiently eliminating the sick and unfit from the planet’s workforce.
He had no idea how desperate people on the surface had become. Far below, civilian ships were taking off in droves, planning to overrun the blockade by sheer numbers alone. The ships were so loaded with cargo and refugees, many could barely escape the gravity well. They were no match for the military fleet suffocating the system.
“Commander,” the sensor officer looked up from his array of readouts. “I’m reading 550 ships incoming from the surface.”
Five hundred and fifty? Fairlocke could feel the adrenaline pour into his veins. That would be thousands of lives. Surely Command would not order all of them to be destroyed?
“Orders from the Gothic, sir,” the communications officer swallowed painfully. “Set Condition One. Fire on any ship that attempts to run the blockade. Civilian craft are no exception.”
“Stars,” the XO shook her head, starting to look weak. “They’re going to do it.” They were going to follow Command’s orders to the letter. “Those are unarmed ships.” The worst they could do was spread rumors if they escaped. “They’re just cargo haulers and transports.”
Commander Fairlocke didn’t know what to do. He stood in the cool light of the Gargantia’s control center, watching the 3-D hologram of the radar readouts. Slowly, the other five ships were obeying the Gothic’s orders, moving into firing position. Rear Admiral Tyler, aboard the Gothic, was the senior-most commanding officer. He had the final say, and his choice was clear: obey Command.
“Comply,” Fairlocke said, trying to ignore the sickened looks of his crew. This is wrong. He knew it was, as he watched the little dots of the civilian ships rise upward, toward their awaiting death. The firing line was marked on the edge of the atmosphere, the data transmitted from the Gothic.
The XO looked at it, horrified. “If they fire there, disabled ships will fall into the gravity well. There will be no chance of survivors.”
“That’s the point, Colonel,” he murmured, feeling the Gargantia shift into her assigned position.
“Raising and priming weapons,” the armory officer announced, the catches in her voice poorly concealed.
Around him, Fairlocke could read the pleas of his crew. Don’t make us do this. They were begging, pleading for him not to give the orders they all knew were next. “How many?” He had to ask. He had to know.
“Roughly 27,000, sir,” the sensor officer answered.
Twenty-seven thousand people. Civilian freight liner crews. Fleeing aristocrats. Refugees. They were all going to die on Command’s unquestioned orders. He felt nauseous.
The first shots of the massacre flew. The tracers of deadly rounds sailed through the night. Explosions, red, white and orange lit up where they made contact with their target, tearing frail hulls open like tin cans. The wreckage spiraled away, careening slowly back into Sagitarrion’s yellow-tinted atmosphere, where it burned away into nothingness.
“Sir, the Gothic is ordering us to fire.”
The communications officer’s distress fell on deaf ears. All Fairlocke could hear was a ringing. It drowned out the klaxons, drowned out the chaos. It was the calm drilled in by the man who had trained him. You panic, you die. But that silence was deafening now.
Fairlocke couldn’t just turn off the human part of himself that wanted to panic, wanted to scream. He couldn’t kill the part of himself that knew this was wrong. He wasn’t like the Steel Prince. He just couldn’t do it. He couldn’t just choose to become callous and order thousands of deaths.
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The second salvo flew from Command’s fleet while the first distress calls hung in the void. The pleas for mercy went unanswered by anything except a main battery round. Sagittarion’s orbit had become a sizzling gauntlet of projectiles, and the civilian ships were being helplessly cut apart.
I can’t do it, Fairlocke realized, the revelation freeing in its own way. He couldn’t fire on those unarmed ships, and he couldn’t just let this happen. There were twenty-seven thousand lives at stake. It was time to make a choice. “Target the Serpentus and fire,” Fairlocke ordered the armory officer.
The crewman nodded, and a moment later, a percussive crack echoed through the ship, the kickback of the Gargantia’s main battery guns firing a full broadside at the battleship nearest to them in orbit.
The impacts lit up on the Serpentus’ flank, shearing off sheets of gray hull armor, and shoving the ship forcibly out of position as her engines flared, trying to compensate.
“Lieutenant,” Fairlocke called to the communications officer, “all channels, all frequencies, broadcast now.” He could not allow this slaughter to continue. This was his choice. “This is Commander Fairlocke of the Battleship Gargantia, I cannot and will not condone this carnage. I urge any fleeing civilian ship with propulsion to alter heading in our direction. We will protect you to the best of our ability!”
Fairlocke turned to his helmsman, “Get us into a lower orbit. Give the civilians space enough to clear the thermosphere and jump. Use our mass to shield them.”
No sooner than those words had left his lips, the Gargantia’s bridge was thrown into chaos. It was a violent jolt, the inertial dampeners unexpecting, and failing to fully compensate. Crew were thrown from where they sat or stood, and tossed into the floor, bulkheads or consoles.
Fairlocke slammed into the radar console, and the air was forcibly expelled from his lungs before he fell to the floor. His XO crashed down beside him, blood leaking from her head, brained by the same console. “Colonel!” Fairlocke scrambled over to her, peeling her dark, bloodied hair away from where it had wrapped around her face like a vice. He clutched his own cracked ribs, seeing her brown eyes staring widely, but blankly up at him. Her neck was at an odd angle, a look of surprise upon her face. Dead. Dead in his hands.
Regrets will only get you killed. Another of his mentor’s harsh lessons, it had been drilled into his head, as if that would make him able to turn off his emotions, his humanity.
“The Parallax and the Serpentus are readying another broadside.” The weapons officer said, “We’ve got missiles incoming and the Gothic is just out of firing range, inbound. What are your orders, sir?”
Fairlocke released his XO, and her head lolled limply to the side as he struggled to his feet. The ship rattled around him, shaken to the core. Combat is hell, his mentor had said, make sure you’re the demon.
Fairlocke steeled his resolve, turning to the armory officer. He had made his choice. “Weapons free, Lieutenant. Give them hell.”
“Yes, sir.” The officer replied, sweeping her hand across the controls and priming the Gargantia’s missile launch grid.
“If we’ve got pilots crazy enough to fly through this debris, get our fighters in the air,” Fairlocke commanded, watching a cone of fleeing ships gather beneath the Gargantia and an attack formation of battleships gather above. On the radar displays, the holographic Gargantia seemed so small and so lonely. It’ll be a one-way ticket. They’d likely not be able to recover their support craft, if any survived the combat. “Have them cover any missiles targeted at the ships below. And nav., get those civvies some coordinates. Get them out of here.” The Gargantia could calculate and distribute FTL coordinates twice as fast as the civilian ships themselves.
Another explosion tossed him into the radar console, but he caught himself this time, barely managing to stay upright. “Engineering! Where are our inertial dampeners?” They shouldn’t be getting tossed around to this extent, not this early in the battle.
“Offline, sir. I have the CCTO on the line. The central computer’s been compromised, sir. It’s sabotaging our own systems.”
For the chief computer technical officer to be on the line himself, the computer had been more than compromised. “Shut it down,” Fairlocke ordered. “Just shut it down.” The computer network was just another back door that could be used to infiltrate the ship, another weakness to be exploited. It may effectively be the Gargantia’s brain, but they could fire the guns without it. “I want it purged before it’s brought back online. It’s too much of a risk,” he said, riding out another round of violent shakes.
The engineer’s confirmation was lost under the screech of twisted metal, the bulkheads wrenched slightly apart by the growing strain of battle damage as more shells pounded into the hull.
The Gargantia was moderately sized by military standards. Dwarfing the fleeing civilian ships, she was still less than half the Singularity’s full length. Her build, a modest Keeper-class battleship, was the most numerous within the fleet, evidenced by the fact that the other five ships Command had dispatched to Sagittarion were also Keeper-class. They were capable ships, but not warships, not compared to the likes of the Olympia or Singularity. They had been designed to police humanity’s territory in a time of relative peace. As such, they were smaller and less aggressive builds. At the moment however, her size was sufficient.
Hanging in Sagittarion’s exosphere, the Gargantia sat defiantly in front of Command’s battleships, shielding the fleeing civilians with her own mass. The opening rounds of the battle had destroyed more than a hundred ships, and still more of the refugees tried to escape on their own, darting out of the atmosphere and straight into missiles. The explosions and hull ruptures blew them outward in white puffs of quickly dispersing gasses. It was instant, like popcorn popping in the night, the violence of it lost in the silence and distance of space.
The debris field around Sagittarion had grown and grown, now ruining ships on its own. It peppered their flanks with holes, damaging sensor arrays, comms antennas and engine thrust control systems. Afflicted ships careened into one another in the Gargantia’s shadow, occasionally spiraling outward to be immediately destroyed.
Casualties were high. Less than half of the ships that breached the atmosphere were making it away. The rest, with their thousands of dead, were forming a graveyard.
Exposed to the military’s wrath, the Gargantia’s port side was shredded, her third engine failing as the ship’s precious atmosphere poured into space. It’s too late to back out now, Commander Fairlocke told himself, there’s no going back. The battle had become a flurry of confusion as the ship shook, shuddered and trembled around him. Reports of death and damage filled the air.
Unable to maneuver in her defensive placement, the Gargantia was forced to take every weapon fired at her head on. The ship’s starboard half was left mostly untouched, but the rest of the Gargantia could only take so much abuse. Systems were starting to fail in cascades, one after another. Dreadful casualty reports rang in Fairlocke’s ears, but there was nothing he could do for his crew now. He’d condemned them all to this fate.
“We’re near critical, sir,” the crewman at the engineering controls called. As a whole, the ship couldn’t take much more of this. The damage would be totally irreparable soon, even with a full space dock.
The port side of the ship had been mauled beyond compare. The other battleships’ shells no longer did any real damage, emptied into a twisted metal mass. Still, Commander Fairlocke felt the impacts, every hit a jolt to his very bones.
The battle was not entirely one-sided. The Gargantia had disabled the Serpentus, and taken out the Parallax’s weapons systems, rendering both effectively useless to the fighting. That prolonged the fight, but could not change the predetermined outcome.
“The last operational civilian ship is away, sir!” the sensor officer called. “There’s another twenty ships with light damage below us. Given a few more minutes, they might be able to escape.” She was cut off by another impact, throwing everyone sideways, their cries drowned out by the cacophony of twisting metal.
Fairlocke found himself sprawled atop the corpse of his XO. Time’s up. “Prepare for emergency jump.” If they didn’t jump now, they never would.
“Commander, we’re critical,” the engineer called, “jump now and-“
The scream of shearing metal worsened with a new impact. Fairlocke’s head hit the deck painfully, splitting open the skin. Jump now and the Gargantia won’t survive. The damage was too severe. The structural demands of subspace would break the ship’s back at best, and at worst, crush her and everyone aboard to a pulp.
But Fairlocke didn’t have a choice. They would die if they stayed here, eventually crippled in orbit to fall into the atmosphere. The odds of some of the crew surviving were best if they jumped away. On the ground bleeding, Fairlocke could almost hear the cold tone of his mentor, this lesson as harsh as any other. Trust your ship. If you can’t do that, then you’re already dead.
I know, Fairlocke wanted to tell him, why do you think I left? He’d walked away from the chance to command a ship that could have won this fight. He’d turned away because that trust had never been there, because there had been something lingering in the Singularity’s shadow, an unspoken evil that Fairlocke could not ignore.
The Gargantia was free of that, an innocent machine. One that would see them through. “Emergency jump,” he commanded. “All hands should retreat to the core of the ship,”
the part that was most likely to survive a subspace-triggered collapse.
Hauling himself up face-to-face with the flickering and fuzzy hologram of the radar readouts, Fairlocke wiped the stream of blood out of his eye. The enemy battleships were moving, their attack formation parting as if to allow the Gargantia a route out of orbit. But they were still firing, emptying round after round into the Gargantia’s mangled flank. Fairlocke could feel the shuddering impacts, hear the chorus of screams. Why were they moving?
He could sense it. Something’s coming. “Evasive maneuvers!” he ordered, the vision in his right eye turning red again.
The commands of the helm never reached the engines. A single impact broke the Gargantia’s back, driving straight through her heart, demolishing her command center and leaving everyone inside it dead.
The Gargantia, in that second, became a victim of Sagittarion’s legendary orbital mass driver: Heaven’s Ladder. The massive slug crashed into her starboard flank, through her core and out the other side, leaving a gaping hole through which the sight of the stars was only hindered by flailing wires.
In that moment, the battle ended. Power on the Gargantia’s main engines faltered, and slowly, but inevitably, the wounded ship began to fall into the planet’s gravity well. Her enemies never paused, pounding weapon after weapon into the hull until the Gargantia no longer resembled the ship she’d once been.
But, seconds later, the clock ran out. The FTL drive was charged, and the systems automatically carried out the ordered jump.
Barely more than a corpse with a failing electrical current, the Gargantia vanished, and moments later, the evils of subspace spat a contorted wreck out at the base of a lost refugee fleet.