Years in the Dust

Search lights roamed across the pitted and rent surface of the once great Helena. A true monster in its’ day. Borgen practically salivated rubbing his hands together. The wreckage alone would fetch immeasurable wealth amongst the galactic core, there was almost no irradiation either. What was unfortunately irradiated would still turn credits out at some of the less savory places along the rim.

“Captain, we’re coming alongside the carrier bays now!” Growled out a frothy bubbling voice that could only belong to the first mate. Eshka was a melden reliable and malodorous in equal measure. Borgen wrinkled his nose at the stench before responding.

“Eshka! Mask damn you! You’ll overwork the scrubbers with that stink. Cortha bring the dish out and scan for any salvageables before we get to cutting up some of that plating. The mere weight alone will earn for us all a week in the taverns, but a whole ship….Well, that’s the kind of find that makes a captain.” Borgen drawled out. He had no intention of promoting any of his own crew however, but any whole finds would be worth more than a hundred runs of this slag. He grinned as Cortha’s powerful frame began working her rusted control wheels with renewed vigor.

The powerful reactor hummed as the nimble Broken Tusk swung low over the blasted hull. Lights played over the gigantic buckled plating. There was hardly an unmarred surface along the gutted terran battleship. The salvager darted unerringly through the wreckage until it reached the edges of a massive crater that had been burned straight through the ship.

Chirps of static began rapidly increasing in both frequency and amplitude from a bank of scanners.

Borgen spat.

“Pull us away from this blasted crater, it’s so hot in there I can feel my grandchildren dying from the wastes. Worthless this whole charred section.” He flicked his red hands as if casting it away.

This was all ruined. He could sell some irradiated plating out at the rim, but nobody would bother with this kind of molten ruin. Terran ships were known for their ruggedness so Hopefully the containment fields isolated the meltdown to this central portion of the hulk.

“Ffaa, looks like they burned all the way down into the core here eh captain? Vengeful murderous bastards that lot. Eh? Only an idiot picks a fight with the Eradi” Sloshed Eska, some of the ever present refuse splatted down the front of Borgen.

“Mask Eshka MASK! Dammit!” Borgen screamed, wiping at the effluent slime. Eshka grumpily pulled down the bulbous gasketed bladders that recirculated his mouth exhaust.

“Captain! I’ve got something!” Cortha practically mewled with excitement, “It’s live circuitry out there maybe a ship!”

Borgen slapped one slime covered hand over the scaled shoulder to peer at the readouts.

“Corthaaa my girl, Good work! Eshka, bring us up from below it, and let’s active scan the area, it wouldn’t be the first time I seen trapped electrics after a battle like this.”

The nimble salvager darted away from the frozen ripples of mechanical slag and began a cautious approach towards one of the only still active and live signals within a lightyear. A large obelisk still tethered by rippling strands of cabling.

***

Having failed to kill himself, and witnessing the utter loss of life that came with the destruction of a capital ship. James lost his nerve, and later he would realize not a small part of his sanity. He clung to life with a feral intensity that almost always shone through the veneer of polite societal constraints near the end.

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Deep in within the com-relay’s core he had rerouted the rapidly draining power to just this room. Wrapped in an emergency eva suit he’d directly vented into the life support system and having cut power to everything other than what was required to keep him alive and breathing he knew that he wouldn’t die from exposure to vacuum or asphyxiation. No he had traded one fate for another when he’d begun the slow struggle against starvation and dehydration. He had been a coward in the end. It was the same reason he was better stuck out here with the machines than manning a critical post or outright fighting in an assault craft.

Hanging suspended over the decking time had stopped meaning all that much to him. He wasn’t sure when he had begun fading into and out of consciousness. Hallucationations continually plagued him he was certain. Those had just started within the last day or was it days. He couldn’t remember.

Jame’s mouth salivated at the countless rows upon row of immaculately prepared courses that lined the dining hall banquet table. He carefully shrugged the starched white cuffs of his sleeves up and away from the dishes as he turned to pay rapt attention to a chiming of cutlery upon crystal. The universal signal for a toast.

The silvered hair of a living hero framed the face that had brought young recruits like him to serve along the front lines despite the risks. Fleet Admiral Olius Cromwell had been at war with the Eradi for longer than many of the freshly minted officers seated beside him had been alive, himself included. Not only had the veteran survived far more encounters than any other, but the crafty fox had been winning too. To his left and right fanned out the senior bridge officers, many of whom were nearly as legendary in their own rights.

“Ladies and gentlemen, Thank you for joining us. It isn’t easy to ask anyone to take up this kind of life, but I see earthborn nobility before me, which is a sacrifice doubly so. It was easy for me to join when we lost the Ice planets in foren, The war was young then, but I never had a future outside of the processing plants, hell I didn’t want one. The frontier was all I’d ever known. All a simple man like me could have ever known. But for you, it’s different. You didn’t have to be here. And I just wanted to acknowledge that.” He grimaced distastefully, as if the words were leaving an aftertaste. “Hell, I’ve spent more years fighting than I have living. Seeing you here, so young, and the human race where we are, well, it breaks my heart to know that Sol is all we have left out there. Things might have been different, if we hadn’t been so damn optimistic and naive, or perhaps if the endless debates over what needed to be done to stop the menace hadn’t been so political. The truth is our last best chance to win this war was lost the moment we took the time to consider any other option the complete and utter annihilation of the entire Eradi Empire. It could have been different in the beginning but, we gave up too much too fast, we took too long to get on a war footing. And we’ve been sliding downhill ever since.”

The tablecloth bunched in James’ fists as he balled up his hands angrily until all the blood had gone from his knuckles. It was true, that humanity had suffered humiliation and defeat for the better part of a century. The once great and noble ideals of expansion and exploration had been replaced by the stone faced desperation of a race that was doomed to die.

“We can’t win this war. Ladies and Gentlemen, I’m not going to lie to you. I don’t know what those recruitment videos spew, or if they’re still spinning something about glory back home, but out here, on the edge of what’s left we know the truth. I personally haven’t achieved anything better than a stalemate in over a decade, and our sister fleet led by my dearest friend Avrus...Well...Even I wouldn’t have labeled the battle within the belt a victory, but I understand moral... Athena hasn’t made contact in over two years.”

Audible gasps could be heard in the cavernous hall. He ran a hand slowly over the polished table almost fondly and looked up “Helena was part of the greatest feat of engineering humankind will likely ever undertake, but she is the last of her kind. You might have heard that the stellar factories are gearing up for a new push, bigger and better tech, but they aren’t making warships anymore. Those are deep space ships capable of carrying hundreds of thousands of human lives across interstellar distances. The real mission we have been entrusted with is that of buying time. Earth and the colonies won’t be able to complete a single one for at least another year, but there would be another one ready every few months after that. The population we would need to evacuate is in the trillions. That is why only those in this fleet know the truth, we’re not going to be able to save even a fraction of them, but in recognition of your service, each and every one of you has been given the privilidge to save one person back home. The catch is, the Eradi fleet projections put them in system in the next five months time. They need a year, but we can’t even give them half of that time.”

He held up a picture of a smiling young woman.

“This is my daughter Samantha. This is the reason I’m still fighting. I intend to see she makes it.”

Every minute we hold back this enemy is another bolt another rivet in an escape vessel, another soul saved. Each fight is going to be costly, and no, we are not going to win this war. I will spend your lives, each and every one of them, including my own. I will do whatever it takes to buy as much time as possible. Do not doubt that even for a moment. But so long as I am alive and so long as I have this ship so long as blood pumps through these veins I swear to you I will not let a single damn one of those genocidal sons of bitches within jumping distance of earth! And you can be damn sure I’m not going down without a fight! Are you with me!”

Thunderous roaring drowned out everything else when unanimously the young recruits erupted from their places and shouted in agreement. They would die, they had known that almost from the beginning, but they spend their lives dearly in the fights to come.

The months of endless struggle and loss flashed by, forward and backward. He remembered the friends he had lost, nearly everyone was gone by the end of those two years, but he had been part of that remnant skeleton crew that was left he had survived. Hatred and disbelief warred within him. They had held on far longer than anyone thought possible, and he had even begun to hope that maybe, maybe they weren’t destined to lose after all. After fighting for so long, he felt like maybe it was time to rest.

Bright lights swam over the condensation that flowed in rivulets across the front of his EVA visor. Something large and green filled his vision as he collapsed forward. Twin hoses from his mask untethering with a hiss as he was pulled into blackness.