Kal sneered at me across the empty gap between his mob of angry hab-dwellers and my friends and me. As good as it would feel for me to cave his face in, it wouldn't do me any good. My goal here wasn't to deal out his much-deserved punishment, but to get off this station and escape the Itzli fleet. But it wasn't looking like he was going to give me a choice in the matter with the way things were going.
"Hmph, the Itzli follow the law, unlike you. When they arrive, you'll be handed over to them along with your pathetic ship, and in return, we'll receive enough money that we won't have to worry about anything." I shook my head in disbelief. Were they really so isolated that they ignorantly believed that the Itzli would help?
"The laws of the Itzli weren't made for the Itzli. They were made to control everyone else. The only one an Itzli answers to is another Itzli." I declared.
Behind me, the lift came to rest on the surface of the docking bridge. I could hear my friends quickly loading their few possessions onto the lift as I stared down Kal. I could see the mob growing more agitated as it was clear that we were preparing to leave. Kal was attempting to buy time just as I was, but I needed less than he did.
"Just the words I would expect from an outlaw contract breaker. Oh yes, I looked up your record as soon as I knew you were still alive. I wouldn't have expected any different from the spoiled brat with delusions of glory that left us." Kal gloated.
I was surprised he had looked up my records, but it wasn't a possibility I was unaware of. I had always known there was a chance someone might search the criminal database for my name. The thought my friends might discover I was an outlaw hadn't really bothered me. They knew me well enough to give me the chance to explain myself. He was also blatantly trying to draw me into another argument to distract me.
"You can think whatever you want, Kal. It doesn't matter to me. I've never put much weight in the words of dead men, after all." I stepped back towards the lift, my eyes never leaving Kals.
"Then how about the actions of these 'dead men,' Rama? Get him." Kal hissed.
The mob charged forward, intent on preventing our escape as I continued to back up. My hand came up smoothly, my handgun held firmly in its grip. My body acted automatically on habits instilled from hours spent with Hailey drilling me on weapon safety and use. There was no recoil as I aimed and fired at the charging mob.
Bright blue bursts of light tore into their ranks with a loud, ear-piercing shriek as I fired at full power, penetrating through multiple people at once, their unarmored worksuits providing no protection against the potent particle weapon I wielded. I winced at the screams and cries as their charge faltered, and the stench of burnt meat penetrated my nose. But my fusillade of fire didn't relent until the 'magazine' ran dry.
The acrid smell of ozone joined the stench as steam wafted from the super-heated barrel of my pistol. My hands moved on automatic as I took the final step back onto the lift, removing the expended magazine and slamming a fresh one home. I stared at Kal who looked on in horror and disbelief. Whether it was at the deaths he had caused, the fact that I had actually fought back, or watching his meal ticket slipping through his fingers, I didn't know. His mob turned tail and ran, leaving behind the dead and dying without remorse, leaving Kal standing in a sea of bodies.
It was tempting to shoot him where he stood, to put a final visceral end to our antagonism, but I refrained. I had killed too many people today already, and the thought of the poetic justice that awaited him at the hands of the Itzli was not unappealing to me. Instead, I simply triggered the lift, my eyes never leaving his as we slowly ascended back into the ship.
The tension drained out of me as he vanished from my view as we disappeared into the lift tunnel. I shuddered and held back my urge to vomit as the horror of what I'd just done hit me. Dozens of bodies lying silent and still on the docking bridge with gaping holes blown in them.
This wasn't what I'd wanted. Deep down, I'd wanted to prove them all wrong, show everyone who had ever looked down or sneered at me that I was somebody. I gave a mocking laugh, how childish. What did I expect? To receive a hero's welcome? I'd tried so hard to distance myself, to stop caring about this place and the people here. But it's not that simple, Humans can't just stop feeling things because they want to.
I felt a hand on my shoulder and looked to see Tayle looking at me with concern in her eyes. Past her, I could see the rest of them looking at me with a mix of horror and distress. I couldn't blame them, I don't think I would be any different after watching a friend gun down dozens of people they knew. But what else could I have done? If I hadn't we would all be dead, either at their hands or the Itzli.
"It's not your fault, Rama, you tried." I gave another hollow chuckle as Tayle tried to reassure me.
"That doesn't make me feel any better Tayle. Even if I tell myself that they were already dead anyway, that I just... sped things up a little. I'm still the one who pulled the trigger, and I'm going to have to learn to live with that. My mind knows that they didn't leave me any choice, but my heart... my heart won't listen." My eyes and throat burned as I choked back tears before shaking my head sharply.
There would be time later to deal with my guilt. Right now, I had bigger worries in the form of that Itzli fleet bearing down on us. I rubbed my eyes before giving Tayle a nod as I reigned in my emotions and reclaimed my composure as we passed through the airlock.
"Once we're on the ship things are going to move fast. Everyone needs to just leave their gear in the hall when we arrive and follow me to the bridge. I can pilot the ship myself, but I'm going to need other sets of eyes to help me out. I can't keep track of everything on my own." Hailey and I had run through simulations and training for various scenarios we might end up in with great success. But I didn't have her to back me up now. I check up on her with my NIL, and my heart aches at the sight of her lying still in that medical chair.
Thankfully the ship did have auxiliary and backup systems in case the ship needed to be managed by a crew without a NIL. As the lift arrived, I started bringing those systems online. Sensors and system monitoring along with some basic system controls were the best I could do.
The lift came to a halt, and I received nods from the group as the blast door slowly lifted. As soon as the door was high enough I ducked under it and made for the bridge at a run. Behind me, I could hear the sound of bags being dragged and dropped and then their heavy footsteps as they stormed down the corridor after me.
I added my friends to the crew roster giving them the permissions for the bridge as the doors slid open, and I vaulted over the armrest and into the command chair. Around me, the walls of the bridge dome came alive with a panoramic view of space around us as I brought the backup systems to active status. Several of the bridge terminals lit up as I hastily loaded an Itzli language program to them, belatedly realizing that none of them would know written English even though we all spoke it. Transferring sensor readouts to the stations I fired up the command couch as my friends piled in through the doorway.
"You don't know how to run the ship, and there's no time to teach you, so I need all of you to monitor the sensors and ship systems for me," I ordered as the command chair reclined.
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I vaguely heard their acknowledgments as they took their stations, and I immersed myself in the ship's data-stream. They had attempted to lock the docking ring to keep me from leaving, but I still had access to the admin privileges on my backdoor account. By the time they realized what was happening, it was too late for them to stop the decoupling sequence.
"Approaching Itzli fleet, the wanted criminal Rama Hardmod is attempting to escape, stop him before he finishes undocking!" I shook my head at the arrogant, almost pompous tone of Kal's broadcast to the Itzli fleet. That was the wrong move.
"Be Silent, Human. We are the Arbiter of who is guilty and who is not." The deep booming voice of the Itzli commander echoed over the speakers.
"I was the one who sent you-" Tank began only to be cut off by a scuffle before the breathless voice of the station representative replacing him.
"This is representative Lumir, what is going on?" I listened incredulously as Kal, Tankred, and Sakchai argued on an open channel, their voices overlapping.
"You have proven yourself incapable of following the simplest of directives and are now charged with the willful obstruction of an Imperial Investigation into the presence of an outlaw. Further, the datalogs present in your transmission indicate that you are also guilty of providing safe harbor to the criminal known as Rama Hardmod. The sentence for aiding enemies of the Itzli Empire is death." Silence reigned over the open channel as I watched a detachment of the Itzli fleet move into a wide formation in preparation to bombard the station.
This wasn't the first time I had been witness to 'Imperial Justice,' but it would be the most important one. The blocky Itzli ships disgorged a cloud of fighters as we finished undocking. A chiming alert notified me of multiple target locks on my ship as I broke away from the station, a stream of fighters following us.
I looked behind us as the Itzli opened fire. Hellish red plasma bursts and virulent green maser beams rain down on the station. The channels were filled with the screams and pleading of the dead and dying. I cut the audio feed off, leaving the bridge in horrified silence. I continued to listen over my NIL as they died as we flew further away. That would be my penance for my part in causing this. I would not look away as they died terrified, burning, suffocating as the station around them came apart.
"Prepare for a Subspace crash-dive," I alerted my friends.
Their chairs automatically deployed crash restraints as I brought the Subspace drive to full power. The graviton array power meters increased rapidly on my display. I flipped the mental 'switch' for their activation and triggered singularity formation.
"Crash-dive in three, two, o- what the frag!" A brief wave of particles washed over the ship, and suddenly there was a detachment of Itzli warships in front of us.
A visible pulse of green particles exploded in a sphere from the lead Itzli cruiser, and the William Cody shuddered as I watched the graviton capacitors overload and discharge their stored gravitons in sleeting waves of gravity that sent us spiraling out of control.
"What the hells was that!?" I demanded as I fought to regain control of the ship, the chaotic gravity waves making it almost impossible to correct our course.
"I don't know! There was a strange particle emission in the Itzli fleet, and then suddenly half of them were in front of us!" Tayle replied, panicked and confused.
"Those particle waves they're emitting are disturbing our high-density graviton storage. Every time one of those pulses hits, they cause a complete discharge! We can't gather enough gravitons to power the drive!" Winri reported.
"Son-of-a-Kab!" I cursed as I continued to wrestle with the ship. Every few seconds, there was another wave of particles and graviton discharge.
"Don't we have any weapons?!" Arvin demanded, and I glanced over to see his wife huddled to his side in terror.
"This is a transport, not a warship! If you want to fire back, get out and do it in person!"
"Well, you better figure something out fast then. Because at the rate we're going, the Itzli won't even have to shoot us. We'll kill ourselves by twisting the ship's frame into a knot!"
Damnit! Hailey hadn't run any space combat simulations when we trained. The William Cody didn't have any weapons, and our best defense was not to get caught in the first place. Defense... Even a transport ship should have some kind of defenses, right?
I desperately flung my thoughts at my NIL, and it helpfully brought up a list of defensive systems. If I hadn't been lying in the command chair, I would have sagged in relief as the ship shook from another graviton discharge. There were ECM noise generators, sensor baffles, graviton deflection lenses, and a 'Radiant Electron Barrier' system. I brought them all online, and then shunted the controls to Winri's station.
"Some stuff coming your way, Winri. Do the best you can." I alerted her.
"Got it."
Immediately, I could tell that something in the suite of defense systems was helping as the ship became much easier to control. By now, though, the Itzli warships were practically right on top of us, and I could see several large craft leaving their hangar bays on a direct course toward us. I recognized them as boarding shuttles. My heart rate spiked as I desperately veered the ship away from the squadron of boarding craft, but there was nowhere to go.
The Itzli fleet was closing in from both sides like the mouth of some titanic space monster. Even with the incredible acceleration of the William Cody, we were too far from the edge of the 'mouth' to escape unscathed. I desperately searched for some hole, some minuscule gap in their formation I could exploit, but up or down, left or right, I found nothing wherever I looked.
There was no time for indecision, I had to get us out of this trap. Picking a random axis, I pushed the engines to their maximum, a stream of fighters on my tail as I dove for open space. I could see stunner rounds flying past the cameras as they pursued.
"Rama, that radiant barrier thing is shielding us, but those stunner cannons are chipping away at it. I don't want to know what one of those cruiser batteries will do if they hit us!" Winri warned.
"Noted, but I don't exactly have the room to maneuver as I'd like, so keep a close eye on that barrier. How is the FTL drive doing?" I ground out as my body coiled and tensed in sympathetic reaction to my maneuvers as I sent the ship spiraling between a pair of approaching fighter formations.
"Still no go, Something is still blocking the formation of the singularities. Every time I try to spool up the graviton array, it fizzles out, and the gravitons just disappear!" Arvin reported.
"What the hells do you mean they disappear?!"
"Those assault transports are gaining on us! We need to find a way to gain some distance!" Tayle interrupted.
"Easier said than done, if I straighten out our flight, we'll be target practice for those fighters." The ship groaned as I pushed the inertial compensators to the limits pulling up sharply to avoid an oncoming formation of fighters.
The cruisers so far had held their fire, content to close the jaws of their trap around us. But that also meant their fighters didn't have to keep the firing lanes clear and attacked from every angle. The ship shuddered as somewhere, something exploded.
"Report!" I barked.
"We just lost one of the electron banks for the Radiant Barrier to an overload! Barrier strength is down eight percent!" I could hear a hint of panic beginning to edge into Winri's voice.
"Fragalicious. Alright, if anybody has any bright ideas now's the time to let me know! Otherwise, we're just going to get micro-stormed to death before we can get out of range of that graviton disruptor or whatever the hells it is." Silence greeted me, the only noise was the creaking and bucking of the ship as we weathered the firestorm.
I wondered what Hailey would do in a situation like this. Probably not end up in it in the first place. But if she did she'd probably have some obvious solution that was staring me in the face the whole time. She wasn't here though, so I was going to have to do my best without her.
First, take account of what I have available to me to work with. One unarmed transport ship crewed by a small group of amateurs, myself included. I didn't know half of what I needed to be able to improvise on the fly, but I needed to come up with something. The ECM systems weren't going to work, I didn't have near the bandwidth to overpower an entire cruiser squadron. Whatever the power output of this ship, the sensor array couldn't handle that much energy.
Power, that was something we had a lot of, so what could I do with it? Most of the ship systems that might be remotely useful couldn't handle that much extra power. The only one that could, was the one actually designed for it, the graviton array.
I couldn't use it to generate the singularities needed for an FTL dive, but it appeared to work normally up to that point. It was a long shot, but I didn't really have any other ideas. I pulled up the graviton array controls and aborted the drive initialization.
"Rama, What the hells?!" Arvin demanded.
"Just trust me, and make sure those grav-caps stay charged!"
I widened the focus of the graviton array to a cone in front of us. The safety lockouts tried to stop me when I began upping the power, screaming about the risk of a USE over such a wide range, but I channeled that freezing heat sensation again and forced the lockouts to shut off. I couldn't make an actual singularity without the system discharging, but you didn't need one to be able to warp space.