now, crawling over my body and stretching out my skin. Our alarms are blaring about the interdiction, our hull breach in Engineering, the incoming fire from Bellerophon. There’s a lurching in my stomach, a deafening silence as the whole galaxy flips on its head. And then, with the scream of engines and the bone-jarring impact of reality hitting home, we’re through, out into the welcoming colorscape of realspace.
Good news is we made it in one piece.
Bad news is, Bellerophon is still right behind us.
She rips out of the Fold like a bat out of hell, releasing another salvo of nukes. Whatever their earlier plans for getting hold of O’Malley were, it looks like they’ve decided to cut their losses and just flatline us, and the weird thing is, I’ve got no bloody idea why—on my scopes, Octavia seems like a perfectly normal system. There’s nothing I can see that they’d want to hide, or protect at all costs—even at the cost of giving up on taking Aurora.
As we close in on it, I can see Octavia III seems a completely run-of-the-mill M-class rock. A speck of blue-green land masses and blue-green water. Seventy-four percent ocean. Balmy temperatures, four major continents. In other words … boring.
So what the hells about it didn’t they want us to—
“Sir.” Zila glances up from her instruments, first to Aurora, then to Tyler.
“What is it, Legionnaire?” Ty asks.
With a flick of her wrist, Zila throws a scanner sweep of the continent below up onto the main display. And there, nestled in a lush valley beside a ribbon of glittering water, are thirty or forty buildings.
“That’s Butler,” Aurora whispers. “The first settlement of the Octavia colony.”
So, it’s true. There was a settlement here. People lived on this planet. Families. Kids. Something went wrong, and for the past two centuries, the highest branch of the Terran intelligence division has been covering it up.
“Lying bastards,” I whisper.
I look to the image of the Bellerophon behind us, then to Tyler, waiting for orders. His gamble that the GIA weren’t willing to kill us hasn’t paid off, and now we’re left with the unpleasant realities of trying to run from a ship we can’t outrun, or fighting a ship we can’t outfight. We’re close to Octavia III now, but the Bellerophon’s missile systems have us locked; their rail guns are ready for another burst. We’re leaking power, too—looks like that hit to Engineering damaged our reactor core. And good as I am, I honestly don’t know if I’m gonna be good enough to win this for him.
“Bellerophon is hailing us again,” Scarlett reports.
Tyler sighs, looking around the bridge. I can see it in his eyes; his fear for his people, his disappointment in himself. We’re so close to Octavia III now, I can see the swirls of cloud in the atmosphere, the jagged shapes of the continents beneath. Aurora is on her feet, looking at the image of the colony on the central display. This place where she was supposed to spend the rest of her life.
We almost made it. We almost brought her home. But in the end, maybe all Tyler’s faith was misplaced? Maybe this trip is finally over?
“Open a channel,” he orders Scarlett.
The image of Princeps appears on our central display, its white mirrormask featureless, its voice dead and metallic.
“Legionnaire Jones,” the G-man says. “This is your final warning. if you do not power down your engines immediately, you will be—”
The sound of an explosion cuts over the transmission, the feed momentarily dissolving into static. An alarm blares on the Bellerophon’s bridge, another on ours. I look at my scopes, try to make sense of what I’m seeing.
“Cat, report!” Ty barks.
“Bellerophon is … under attack?”
“From who?”
I shake my head. “I’ve got a half-dozen energy sigs out there, but I’m getting almost no profile off LADAR. Scanners can barely see them.”
“Visual?”
Pulling up a display of the Bellerophon, I can see she’s been hit bad in her portside engines, and she’s leaking coolant into space. Swarming around her, barely visible against the darkness, are a dozen slender, crescent-shaped ships. They’re totally black, their pilots keeping them angled with minimal profile, so there’s virtually no surface area to generate a LADAR hit. They’ve struck with surprise, and they’ve struck hard; their plasma cannons are melting the destroyer’s hull to vapor. And I can’t figure out if we’ve just been saved by a last-minute miracle, or if we’re in deeper crap than we were a minute ago.