Project Starfighter (22 page)

“I don’t believe this,” Chris
said. “Surely you can’t all think this way here? What about
everyone else, all the others that got back? Where are they?”

“They’ve gone,” Hugo said.
“They’ve seen the light.”

“Can’t beat ’em, join ’em,
eh? Cowards.” Chris wondered if Hugo might rise to that, but the
older man’s expression remained as downbeat as ever.

“I said before I showed you around
that you’re welcome to all of this if you stay,” Hugo said. “The
offer’s still open. There’s no point in going back out there and
attempting to fight the Corporation again when you can build a life
here, instead. WEAPCO might make life difficult—”

“They’re a totalitarian regime,”
Chris said.

“—but they largely leave us
alone and will let us get on with it. We lose some money on what we
mine ...”

“A seventy percent cut is not
‘some’.”

Hugo once again ignored him. “We
won’t do any harm here, and they are sure to ignore us. We’re not
a threat to them or their ideals.”

Flabbergasted, Chris turned to
leave. Hugo grabbed his arm, lightly.

“You can have a good life here,
Chris, the both of you. Why go throwing it away for a cause that no
one believes in anymore? I mean, honestly, what are you going to do?
Take on the entire WEAPCO naval fleet all by yourself?”

“I’m not by myself,” Chris
snapped. “I have Sid, and a Firefly ...”

Hugo stared, incredulous. It was a
look Chris was getting quite used to.

“And I took down the
Grand
Vizier
, a Star Killer-class frigate,” Chris added.

“You had help from a bunch of
rogues and mercenaries,” Hugo said. “You probably won’t find
such support the next time around. It will be you against twenty
dozen fighters. It doesn’t matter how skilled a pilot you might be,
or what your Firefly can do for you, you won’t succeed against such
odds. Please. Don’t throw your life away.”

Chris paused. There seemed to be
more to Hugo’s desires to keep him and Sid here than he was letting
on. Chris went with his first assumption. “You lost someone, didn’t
you? Your brother? Your son? Someone around our age? That’s why you
don’t want us to go, isn’t it?”

Hugo stared at his feet. “My sons,
yes,” he said. “I can see you as a mirror for them – your
fighting spirit, your willingness to go along with it, feeling the
confidence radiating off one another.” He glanced to Sid. “I
wanted them to stay, but they wanted to fight in memory of their
mother. They were two of the first to die in that battle over
Ceradse.”

“I’m sorry,” Chris said.

“Some days, I wish I hadn’t
bothered signing up for this whole damn business. I might have lost
my wife, but at least I would have my two boys here with me.”

Chris was sure he could see a tear
forming in the man’s eye. Hugo raised his head and Chris saw a
trickle running down his face, clear in the light.

“It’s simply not worth it,”
Hugo finished. “One man doesn’t stand a chance.”

“That didn’t stop William
Benedict,” Chris said.

“Ha!” Hugo said, sniffing and
wiping away the tears. “William Benedict’s story has been told so
many times that it’s starting to become impossible to separate fact
from fiction. Some will tell you that he took on the entire WEAPCO
naval fleet all by himself, while others say that he raised an army
to fight them. Whatever it is, he barely got as far as Murdar before
he was taken down. He was overwhelmed by the sheer weight of power
that met him there. And he never even made it to Sol. If that was the
level of opposition that hit him at Murdar, imagine what WEAPCO’s
home would be like.

“You ask me, the story’s all
bull. There’s a good chance that the man didn’t actually exist
and it was just some rogue AI system that WEAPCO lost control of.”

“Does anyone know why he did it?”
Sid asked. He had been rather quiet ever since Hugo had started to
walk him and Chris around the base, and Chris had wondered if Sid was
okay. Perhaps there was something on the hacker’s mind.

“No one knows for certain why he
did it,” Hugo was saying. “The reasons vary as much as the tale
itself – that he was tired of living under WEAPCO’s rule, that he
did it because he was feeling suicidal, that he was bored and did it
just because ... The most popular one seems to be that it was revenge
for the Corporation killing his brother. Not that the reason
matters.”

“But he
did
manage to find
a way to take on WEAPCO, by himself,” Chris pressed.

Hugo sighed. “Benedict’s story
is a myth, nothing more; the same old claptrap that people make up to
inspire others to do their bidding. Rulers have done it years,
organised religion being the most obvious example.

“So,” Hugo said, composing
himself and folding his arms. “Did any of the living quarters take
your fancy? There would be room for your talents here – you, as a
skilled pilot, you as a techie.” He looked at Chris and Sid in
turn.

“We’re not staying,” Chris
said, starting back towards the Manx. “I don’t believe William
Benedict was a myth; he was a real person, with drive, spirit, and
conviction. He was an inspiration, one that knew that you don’t
overcome injustice by lying down and curling up into a ball.”

Hugo looked as though Chris had just
slapped him in the face. “Fine,” the man said. “I’ll leave
you to your little starfighter project. At least I can say that I
gave you the opportunity to find somewhere safe to settle down.”

“A corner in which to die, you
mean,” Chris said.

Hugo continued to present Chris with
an unimpressed glare but did not contradict the younger man. His
shoulders then slumped in a sort of acceptance of what Chris was
saying. Seeing him that way made Chris suddenly regret his words.
Hugo was only being kind, only trying to help.

“Please don’t think me
ungrateful,” Chris said, “but when I look around here, that’s
what I see – people who have given up the fight. Thank you for the
offer, Hugo, but we’ll be going now. Sid?”

No answer from Sid. The man hadn’t
moved.

Chris paused. “Sid, what gives?”
he asked.

“I don’t know, Chris,” Sid
said. “I think Hugo might have a point.”

Chris’ jaw dropped. Was Sid
serious? “Okay, what’s going on?” Chris asked. “Before you
came here you were all set on helping me to continue and finish this
fight. Now you’re thinking of quitting?”

“I don’t think they can be
beaten that easily, Chris.”

“They can,” Chris said. “We
just have to believe that they can. We’re already seeing WEAPCO’s
influence here starting to wane. They’ve lost their base of
operations on Ceradse, and have incurred the wrath of every mercenary
group in the known galaxy. If the response from the mercenaries is
the same throughout all the major star systems as it is in Spirit, it
gives us an even greater chance of success. We have found ourselves
three unexpected allies – the mercenaries, the Firefly, and that
trade freighter. There will be more. They might not be here on Hail,
but they are out there waiting for us to find them. No offence,
Hugo,” he added to the man.

Hugo nodded, standing back a little
from Sid, as if implying that it was now his choice to make. Sid took
a moment to weigh up the options.

“Can we come back?” Sid asked
Hugo. “If it doesn’t work out, I mean?”

“Of course,” Hugo nodded. “So
long as you don’t endanger us, you two will always be welcome
here.”

“Can I have some time to think
about it?” Sid asked Chris.

“You’re welcome to stay here the
night, if you wish?” Hugo offered.

“Okay,” Chris said. “But I
will be leaving first thing in the morning.”

“No problem,” Hugo said. “Let’s
find you somewhere to sleep. All I ask in return is that one of you
helps me to cook dinner. I’ve got the recipe for a new curry I want
to try out. Could use a hand with the preparation.”

“I can’t,” Sid said. “I
could burn water.”

“I can,” Chris volunteered. “I
used to work in the kitchen of an Italian restaurant.”

“Ah, good,” Hugo said, smiling.
“You’re clearly a man of many hidden talents.”

“Cooking being one of the most
important ones,” Chris said, grinning back at him. “One should
never go into battle on an empty stomach.”

~

The
next morning, as promised, Chris returned to the Manx in the landing
bay to prepare the craft for departure. He was alone. He heard
someone enter the ship as he ran through the craft’s start-up and
safety checks, and looked around the pilot’s seat to see Sid. The
man was walking with a lot more vigour than he had the night before.
He did look quite tired, though.

“What changed your mind?” Chris
asked.

“Well, I thought about it last
night after we turned in,” Sid began, “and I figured that if I
gave up now, I wouldn’t be being true to myself. I would probably
always regret it, too.”

“That’s the spirit,” Chris
said, smiling.

“I think it’s also something to
do with the reason that my dad killed both himself and my mum,” Sid
went on, settling down in the seat next to Chris.

Chris shut down the engines of the
Manx, and turned to give Sid his full attention. “What do you
mean?”

“Like all of us, my mum and dad
were going through some tough times – work, personal life, stress,
and all that. WEAPCO’s regime led to my dad facing the uphill
struggle that was ultimately his life. He had never managed to catch
a break. One day he just snapped and took it out on my mum and
himself. I think he might have shot me, too, had I been there. I
decided then that if WEAPCO had pushed him that hard and had caused
him that much grief, a grief that was later extended onto me through
the loss of my family, that I should do whatever I could to make sure
it never happened to anyone else.” Sid went silent for a moment.
“Do you ... know what I mean?”

“I do, Sid,” Chris said,
squeezing the man’s shoulder. “It’s why I’m here, too. I’m
not in it for the glory or anything like that. I don’t want to be a
hero or be remembered for this. I just want to do what’s right.”

“What about your parents? Do you
see them at all?” Sid asked.

“Haven’t for a few years now,”
Chris said. “We keep in touch, but we don’t really feel like a
family at the moment. They went into hiding shortly after I joined
the Resistance, for their own safety. I’m looking forward to seeing
them again some day.”

“And then you can be a family
again,” Sid said.

“Yes,” Chris said. He could tell
that Sid was thinking again about settling down with a nice girl.
Some of the women here had turned his head, and Chris had thought
that even the small amounts of attention and interest they had given
the pair the previous night might be enough to convince Sid to stay.
Not quite.

“We all set?” Sid asked,
fastening his seatbelt.

“All set,” Chris said. He
restarted the craft’s engines, brought the Manx off the ground and
started down the launch chute, guiding the craft as though he had
been flying it for years, rather than a few hours.

Sid watched him do so for a time,
seeing how Chris was not nearly as skittish about the controls as he
himself often was. “You picked up the handling of the Manx rather
quick,” Sid observed.

“I know,” Chris said, as he
guided the Manx out of the launch chute and headed skyward, back
towards the
Dodger
. “It feels ... familiar. It’s difficult
to describe, but it’s just easier to fly than I was expecting. I
noticed that with the Firefly, too.”

“It’s possible that’s the
Firefly’s influence. Your minds have bonded more than once, so
there’s bound to be some sort of transference going on there.”

“Hmm.” Chris wasn’t so sure,
and wasn’t about to entertain Sid’s theory. It was just a
machine. It wasn’t alive, even if the thing did claim to be
sentient.

“It’s perhaps something simpler
than that,” Chris said. “Without trying to blow my own trumpet,
they did say during my training with the Resistance that I was
something of a natural. Maybe I just pick these things up quicker
than most.”

“We’ll find out soon enough,”
Sid said. “If you and the Firefly continue to share your minds,
you’ll see a sharp increase in your piloting skills. You could end
up gaining full knowledge of the Firefly, its strengths and
weaknesses, and fly as if you were one.”

Chris smiled to him. “And then we
won’t be needing the AI at all.”

He glanced at Sid, but the man met
his comment with silence, and so Chris decided to say no more on the
subject of what to do about the Firefly.

“I was thinking,” Sid said,
closing his eyes. “That WEAPCO freighter might have some spare
parts and stuff that we could use to upgrade the Firefly –
strengthen the shielding, up the power of the plasma cannons and
whatnot.” He was slurring his words a little as he spoke, sounding
as though he was going to drift off.

“We need to upgrade it?” Chris
asked. “That could delay things. I’m doing okay at the moment.”

“Right now you are,” Sid said,
without opening his eyes, “but you’ve got, what,
two
plasma cannons on that crate? That’s not a lot, Chris. We could fit
a new condenser into the cannons, which would up their power. Only if
we can get hold of a cooler, though. You don’t want to be forced to
fire slower, to avoid overheating. Later, we can look into attaching
a third cannon.”

“You make it sound easy.”

“We can get the
Dodger
to
help us,” Sid mumbled. “It has access to a load of maintenance
robots and that. We can just reprogram them to do all the work. But
I’ll tell you later. Right now, I’m too tired.”

“Up all night thinking this over,
eh?” Chris asked.

“That, and you were snoring
something incredible. I could hear you through the wall.”