Atlantia Series 2: Retaliator (2 page)

She signed the Raython back in to the crew chief’s log and stormed away.

‘Getting angry won’t help you much,’ Andaim said as he caught up with her. ‘You have to get past this if you want to earn your wings.’

‘I had it,’ she snapped. ‘I damn well had it.’

‘You did,’ the commander admitted. ‘If you’d accelerated to attack speed before acquiring your targets you would have neutralised the cannons just in time, clearing the way for a flight of Corsair bombers or your wingman to shoot the plasma lines and finish the job. You know what to do, it’s all just practice.’

Evelyn sighed, shaking her long auburn hair loose.

‘Things happen so fast. It’s like my brain can’t fit everything in quickly enough to keep up.’

‘Like I said,’ Andaim offered reassuringly, ‘it’s all practice. Another few flights and you’ll be pulling it off. Trust me.’

Andaim had an easy going nature that belied his experience as the Commander of the Air Group aboard the Atlantia, something for which Evelyn was eternally grateful. He had flown for the Colonial Forces before the apocalypse in the older Phantom fighters before the introduction of the newer, more advanced Raythons. Tall, with thick black hair and a jaw that was slightly too wide for his features, he oozed a calm confidence in the cockpit that Evelyn lacked.

‘I feel like an amateur,’ she confided as they walked into an elevator that would take them up to the crew rooms.

‘So did I, once,’ Andaim said as the doors closed and the elevator hummed upward. ‘So did every fighter pilot. Flying a Raython is a complex business, and you guys are doing it from scratch without the benefit of a couple of years’ prior flight training on slower craft. Proficiency is not going to just fall into your lap.’

Evelyn had spent six months learning to fly on the Atlantia’s shuttles and in a pair of simulators built from two crashed Raythons, display screens and powerful hydraulics replacing the real sensation of both atmospheric aviation and space flight. Invaluable in preparing the twenty or so students enlisted into the Colonial Forces to fly, the simulators had weeded out those who were simply unable to handle a Raython. Evelyn, along with seven others, had been deemed up to the job and passed on for active flight training.

‘It’s been six months,’ Evelyn complained, ‘and we’re not even battle ready yet.’

‘You’re six months closer to it than you were when you started,’ Andaim replied. ‘Just stay with the plan, okay?’

Evelyn looked at him. ‘Why do you insist on having an answer for everything?’

‘It’s my job,’ he grinned back. ‘Anything else you’d like to know?’

Evelyn opened her mouth to answer, but the elevator doors opened onto the crew room and Andaim walked out. She followed him to where pilots, all wearing flight suits patched with their squadron identities, were variously gearing up for sorties or pulling off their flight gear for debrief. A few of them nodded at her in greeting, but most were too wrapped up in their pre or post–flight thoughts to chat.

The Atlantia was home to two squadrons of Raython fighters: the
Renegades
and the
Reapers
. In addition, she had four shuttles and three functioning Corsair bombers, all of which had been liberated from the hull of a Stellar–Class Colonial battleship, the Avenger, many months before during a battle that had seen many former convicts elevated to the status of junior officers, some of whom were now serving under General Bra’hiv’s command as Marines.

Evelyn shrugged off her flight suit and dressed in her officer’s fatigues as she ran over her latest failure in her mind. Speed of thought. Andaim had once referred to the limits of what a human being could achieve in terms of multi–tasking as their
saturation point
. Too much information, too fast, and the brain momentarily shut down, unable to function until it had a moment to recalibrate everything, to file into memory what it had learned and continue on. That point, if reached in battle, was invariably lethal. If a student routinely reached saturation point in training then the pilot was deemed unable to perform their duties and was removed from the service.

Evelyn had reached saturation point twice in her training: once more and she would be up for review before the captain, a man not known for his tolerance for failure, even now when they were so desperately short of manpower and machines. Back in the day on Ethera, student fighter pilots would have been of a much higher calibre than those training now aboard the Atlantia. Second best was all they had access to, and Evelyn felt sorely aware of her incompetence.

‘You’re dwelling on it,’ Andaim said as though reading her mind. ‘Don’t. Remember your three A’s.’

‘Assess, adjust and advance,’ she replied wearily as she opened her locker and rummaged inside.

She felt rather than saw Andaim watch her for a moment.

‘You’re not on your game right now and you haven’t been for weeks. Are you okay?’

Evelyn remained hidden behind her locker door, partly to hide the smile at Andaim’s concern for her welfare and partly to hide the deceit that shadowed her. The captain’s wife and ship’s senior physician, Meyanna Sansin, was busily conducting tests in an attempt to understand Evelyn’s immunity to the Infectors, the minions of the Word responsible for turning humans into living puppets. The constant blood tests, scans and examinations had run her down a fair bit, but nothing like as bad as her incarceration of years before had done. Nobody else knew about her immunity, the better to protect her from any threat of extermination by anybody else infected by the Word aboard the Atlantia. She suspected, unlike everybody else, that there was at least one person carrying Infector bots aboard the ship. To conceal such knowledge from somebody like Andaim, who had protected her and helped her so closely when she had been plucked from the hell of the super–max prison that had once been Atlantia’s charge, was one of the most difficult things she had ever been required to do.

‘I’m fine,’ she replied as she pinned her long hair back, ‘really.’

Evelyn realised during such moments how much she missed home, of how she wished that she did not have to confront these challenges. An image of Caneeron flickered like a phantom in her mind, the cold blue skies and glacial valleys, the deep forests and crystalline lakes that had been her home for most of her childhood, the chilly little world in orbit around Ethera’s parent star. Her parents, long gone, other losses too painful to bear just before the apocalypse struck and…

She forced the memories from her mind.

The steel mirror on the inside of Evelyn’s locker reflected her face. She was young, not yet thirty years of age, and she once again revelled in being able to look at her reflection. Not because she was vain, but because she was alive and her features were not concealed behind the damned metal mask that had hidden her face and her voice for so long.

Her hair was long and flowing, naturally slightly curled, and her skin was clear and lightly tanned from her multiple recent training flights. Her eyes were green, and people had sometimes said to her that they were so wide and open that they felt as though they could see into her soul. A far cry from previous years when people had seen only the mask and had projected onto it their own personal and often fearful view of what Evelyn looked like.

The mask was propped up at the back of her locker, watching her from the shadows. A memento from her past, a reminder of what the Word had reduced her to, of what it had done to her family… She shivered and slammed the locker shut.

‘Let’s go,’ she said.

‘Okay,’ Andaim replied, clearly deciding to cut her a break as he fastened his uniform and hurriedly smoothed down his hair. ‘The captain will want to debrief you on the sortie and…’

Andaim was cut off as a tannoy burst into life in the crew room.

‘All senior personnel report to the bridge, immediately!’

Andaim and Evelyn exchanged a glance and then both turned and dashed for the elevator banks.

***

The Atlantia’s bridge was a hive of activity, tactically darkened and yet illuminated by a galaxy of lights from computer terminals and display screens. Crew stations governing the control and command of tactical, navigation, engineering and other essential roles surrounded the captain’s command platform, upon which sat Captain Idris Sansin.

Sansin was a retirement–age commander who had been presented the captaincy of the Atlantia in the twilight of his career. The frigate, refitted as a prison ship, had been seen as a quiet back–corner command, a place to put a man whose authority and abrasive nature had often been a thorn in the side of the admiralty. Withdrawn from battle–ready status after a career highlighted by several actions against enemy vessels in combat, Sansin had surprised the navy’s hierachy by quietly accepting his last command and the remote location of its posting. Sansin had been too old to fight back against what had once been considered something of an insult; the command of a vessel buried in a dark back–corner of the colonies and charged with protecting the scum of society, its most violent and loathed offenders.

Nearest to the captain sat his Executive Officer, Mikhain, newly promoted from his post as tactical officer in the wake of the victory over the Avenger, although due to a shortage of experienced hands aboard he still maintained his original posting. Older than many of the other hands, Mikhain was a native of Ethera like the captain and a man of the
old school
, suspicious of technology. His dark, short hair and quick, alert eyes matched a short but stocky frame.

Sansin sat in his chair, his craggy chin cradled on the backs of his interlocked fingers as he scowled up at the massive display screen that dominated the bridge. A vast, dense asteroid field was silhouetted before the dim, lonely glow of a red dwarf star, one of countless billions populating the galaxy. But the captain was not focused on the stunning panorama outside his ship. Rather, his eyes were unfocused as he listened intently along with the rest of his crew to a scratchy, distorted signal being played back through speakers set into the walls of the bridge.

‘…. Adrift…. Supplies low… any call sign…. Beacon… can…. Try new… lost…’

Scattered words broke through like errant thoughts adrift on a sea of static as Sansin tried to establish clearly in his mind what he was listening to.

‘Vector?’ he demanded.

Lael, the Atlantia’s chief communications specialist, was leaning over her console and listening intently, her brow furrowed.

‘Quadrant two–stroke–seven, elevation minus–four–zero,’ she replied. ‘It’s very distant and I can’t accurately triangulate the signal, but it’s broadcasting on all distress frequencies.’

‘Could be anybody,’ Mikhain said, displaying his natural caution, ‘best we don’t rush into this with our eyes shut, captain.’

Sansin listened as the faint message was replayed over and over again on a loop. The language was human, but it was not a human voice speaking: the Atlantia’s digital resonance transformers were automatically translating the dialect for the crew’s benefit. In a cosmos where some species spoke languages that could never be replicated by human vocal chords, or indeed could not even be heard by human ears, such devices had been a standard fit for all stellar–class vessels whether military or merchant.

The species behind the distress signal had used short, terse sentences, deliberate and without cluttered dialogue.

‘They might have been running out of power,’ Sansin surmised, thinking out loud. ‘Either that or they were running out of time.’

‘Or both,’ said a voice.

The captain turned and saw Andaim stride onto the bridge, Evelyn just behind him.

‘About time,’ Mikhain uttered and then glanced at Evelyn. ‘We’ll debrief you on your training sortie later. Right now, we have a situation.’

Andaim slowed as his ear caught on to the transmission, and he listened for a few moments.

‘Distress channel?’ he asked and Sansin rewarded the commander with a nod, then waited to see what else he might deduce. ‘Short transmissions, foreign dialect, distress beacon’s been activated.’ Andaim turned to Lael. ‘Any other signals from it?’

‘No,’ Lael replied. ‘It may have run out of power. Judging by the weakness of the signal it could be weeks or even months old.’

‘Even if we’re too late to save any lives, we should take a look,’ Andaim said to the captain. ‘We need supplies of our own, and that asteroid belt out there doesn’t hold much except a few minerals. Our shuttles have scanned it for days and found no evidence of water ice.’

The captain nodded and he glanced at the viewing screen as he spoke.

‘True, but the stumbling block for us is the species that sent the signal.’

Evelyn felt a ripple of apprehension flutter inside her.

‘Have we identified it?’ she asked.

It was Lael who replied from her station. ‘De–scramblers are sourcing the original signal code right now. Stand by.’

The bridge crew waited as the ship’s computers crunched the translation code and reversed it to reveal the original dialect of the sender. Moments later Lael looked up at the captain, her face stricken.

‘Resonance reversal protocols identify the species as Veng’en.’

The captain continued to stare at the viewing screen, betraying no emotion as he waited for somebody to speak. As captain his word was law aboard the Atlantia, but in such tough times with so few experienced hands available, he wanted his junior and senior officers to become used to acting upon their own initiative as much as possible, even in the face of a possibly fatal encounter.

The Veng’en was a humanoid species that had evolved in an environment very different to mankind’s terrestrial homeworld, Ethera. A reptilian appearance did nothing to mask their war–like spirit, a species whose spacefaring abilities had been borne of endless conflict, the arms race of a thousand wars. Born on the hot, harsh world of Wraiythe where jungles represented the safest habitat, evolution had thus favoured the strongest and fiercest among their kind to prosper, the most intelligent enslaved for the purpose of furthering the art of warfare and refining it into a hymn of wanton destruction unrivalled by any other species mankind had encountered.