Endurance: The Complete Series Read online

  Thomas cleared his throat. “You okay to do this, Praphasat?”

  “Yes, sir. They won’t see it coming.”

  Ivanokoff reached over to squeeze Areva’s hand. She gave a return squeeze.

  Thomas gripped his armrests. “Then fire.”

  The two officers looked at each other in a silent countdown. Areva fired first. A gleaming cylinder of metal shot from the front of the ship and screamed across the thin barrier of space. Ivanokoff depressed his controls a second later. The EMP wasn’t visible, but the pulse emitter on the front of the Endurance shivered and contracted as it fired.

  Areva’s guided rocket tore into the ventral side of a Haxozin star. The explosion stripped away bulkheads and exposed a mess of circuitry.

  Ivanokoff missed. The star ship executed a minor turn, and the target area rotated out of the EMP’s field of impact. He yelled an incoherent sound of rage and slammed a palm on the console edge. “That was not my fault!”

  Another star closed in, and Thomas ordered, “Evade!” The helmswoman went into a dive, again too fast for gravity plating to completely counteract, and pulled up sharp beneath the damaged hull of the first ship. Each arm of the star was easily as wide as the Endurance was long. The Haxozin ship could swallow a few dozen UELE craft whole.

  Thomas focused on that little point of exposed circuitry. Even a giant could be taken down by a slashed tendon. “Track them,” he said. “Keep that spot in the EMP’s range.”

  Whoever was piloting the star seemed to realize their goal, because the larger vessel went into a spin, rotating one way, then the other, executing jerking movements, then doubling back. Tiny Endurance kept pace. At such close range, they were a fly swarming the head of a bull, too tiny to swat, too rapid to evade.

  Thomas watched the vulnerable point dance in and out of the EMP’s line of fire. “Whenever you can, Ivanokoff.”

  The big man growled.

  There. The melted edges of the weak point drifted across the Endurance’s front, right in range of the EMP cannon.

  Ivanokoff fired.

  This time the shot hit.

  Sparks flew from the Haxozin star’s open hull plating as too much energy entered the system. There wasn’t enough tactical data about Haxozin ships to know if they’d struck a vital series of circuits, but Thomas just had to hope so. “Pull back,” he ordered.

  As they swung back toward the defense grid, he was treated to the sight of lights darkening all along the ventral side of the star’s damaged prong. Its darting movements ceased, and it dragged to a halt before hauling itself back toward its brethren.

  One down, Thomas thought. Ninety-nine to go.

  Endurance swung around and the viewports once more showed rows of UELE defenders, Earth’s cloudy surface looming behind them.

  Half of them were on fire.

  Plasma and atmosphere vented from Earth’s fleet. Scorched hulls and cracked viewports marred the few vessels that held together. Not one was undamaged, and their collective return fire had only managed to cripple a handful of the larger Haxozin ships.

  The imbalance of the fight struck Thomas like a blow to the gut: We are not going to win this.

  As if to underline his realization, Ivanokoff looked up from the scanners station. “Incoming message.”

  “Play it,” said Thomas.

  A grating voice filtered through a Haxozin helmet boomed from the ship’s speakers. “... all surrender immediately. The Haxozin Sovereignty has claimed this planet and will now exact tribute from its population. Cease firing and return to the surface at once, or we will destroy you.”

  At the same time, some of the Haxozin vessels began branching out, going around the minimal grid the UELE was able to form with its remaining defenders. A few of the more functional UELE ships broke formation to chase after them.

  Thomas shouted a series of coordinates. “That one’s ours. Same tactic. Stop his advance.”

  A moment later the Endurance shot after one of the penetrating ships. Areva watched her console, executing minute changes to the targeting system of the rockets. She fired.

  “Up three degrees,” Ivanokoff yelled at the helmswoman. Endurance tilted a fraction.

  Ivanokoff fired.

  Another EMP from the Endurance hit the hull of the Haxozin star just behind Areva’s rocket.

  The star faltered. Its lights dimmed.

  Two down, courtesy of Endurance. Perhaps eight from the rest of the fleet.

  Endurance’s turn back toward the defense grid showed another two UELE craft adrift, lights flickering.

  They’d crippled no more than ten percent of the invading fleet, destroyed none, and by Thomas’s quick count, lost over seventy percent of their own. The worst of the injured ships had retreated back to the surface, but a good number had been destroyed or left limping. They were only putting off the inevitable.

  One of the Haxozin stars finally took notice of the Endurance’s attack runs and spun after them, rotating so that one of its prongs aimed squarely at them. The star’s central spire loomed behind the prong like a skyscraper. Hundreds of weapon emplacements targeted the little vessel.

  “Sharp climb!” Thomas cried, but they were too late to pull out of range. A white line of energy streamed from the prong and struck Endurance’s starboard dorsal wing.

  Thomas was flung against the side of his chair as the entire ship jolted under the impact and went into an uncontrolled roll.

  “Turn it into a dive,” he ordered. “Bring us up right beneath them.”

  “I can’t, sir,” said the helmswoman. “The starboard aileron-thrusters are gone.”

  Thomas checked his computer readouts and saw another thermal buildup in the front of the Haxozin ship’s arm. A glance at their relative position told him the shot would hit. Endurance would not survive a second blast. They would either overload a vital capacitor and explode, or lose more aileron-thrusters and spin off to burn up in the atmosphere.

  He stared at the growing red readout of energy that would soon end his life, and could think of nothing to stop it. At this point they couldn’t even heed the Haxozin warning to retreat to the surface. They were flying straight away from the planet, and their chaotic rolling wouldn’t allow them to correct their trajectory.

  There was only one way left to escape the impending blast. Thomas whacked his intercom. “Bridge paging engineering, activate the D Drive, now!”

  He felt the familiar vibration as the ship began to project into four-dimensional space.

  The ship’s intercom crackled as a new voice broke on the same frequency as the Haxozin. Thomas recognized Commissioner Wen, the UELE officer in charge of the capital city of Median, and also his boss.

  “Median City paging all UELE vessels,” said the commissioner. “We are not going to win this fight. Therefore—”

  Wen’s signature snap was missing from her tone, and Thomas’s heart sank. He knew what she was about to say.

  The D Drive activated. Visible stars and Haxozin ships began to contort.

  The commissioner’s voice came through distorted, drawn out for one word and then jumping to high-pitched speed the next, but Thomas could still make out the message. “—get out of this system and go find help. Bring back hell for these bastards.”

  The last word lingered on the speakers, a deep rumble that faded as the Endurance slipped into D Drive and the twisted view through the ports became impossible to watch.

  * * *

  No one spoke for some time. Four-D travel had taken them out of the solar system almost instantly, and Thomas had no destination in mind. He ordered a halt after several seconds, bringing the ship into an empty region of space. He didn’t know how long the Endurance’s Adkinsium reactor could keep the ship in four-D, and they needed to conserve power output. Damaged stabilizers continue to rotate the ship in place.

  Thomas sat in silence. The commissioner had surprised him by ordering everyone away from the planet. That would leave Earth without any functiona
l defenses, should they wish to stage a counterattack later. But then, the Haxozin ambush had left them without much recourse.

  If the Endurance could find allies to return and fight with them, they might stand a better chance. The Haxozin weren’t invincible, after all. But Thomas’s crew had only encountered one species with technology to rival the enemy’s, and unfortunately they were all dead. No other crew had done much better.

  He finally refocused his eyes and scanned the front of his ship. Ivanokoff sat regarding space, arms folded. The helmswoman and scanners operator were both staring at Thomas. Areva Praphasat had disappeared, though Thomas suspected she was still within earshot.

  They were all waiting for him to decide their next move. To be the captain and come up with a plan.

  For the first time in his career, he didn’t know what to do.

  He heaved a deep breath and looked each of them in the eye. “Everyone okay?”

  Nods.

  “We’re going to get them for this.” He didn’t know how, but it seemed the right thing to say.

  “How?” asked the helmswoman.

  Leave it to his crew to ruin his rousing moment. “I’m open to ideas.”

  “We must destroy them,” said Ivanokoff, finally swiveling to face Thomas. “This insult cannot go unanswered.”

  “I agree,” said Thomas, “but the question is how. Unless you’ve got a starship-killing gun in that collection in your berth.”

  Ivanokoff grunted. “I do not.”

  “I didn’t think so. Which means—”

  “Yet.”

  “Which means we need to find some sort of weakness. Some way to drive the Haxozin away from Earth.”

  The rear hatch to the bridge banged open, and a blond man with a hawk-like nose stormed in. “I knew this day would come!”

  Thomas squeezed his temples. “Not now, Fish.”

  Chris Fish, lead scanners operator and head of the various scientists performing experiments on the ship, charged forward, gesticulating wildly. “Alien invasion, Captain. I’ve been predicting this since—”

  “Since birth,” said Ivanokoff. “Add something useful or leave.”

  Chris folded his arms. “I’m just saying. It finally happened. People will have to pay more attention to my other theories now.”

  A moment later, Matthias Habassa appeared on the bridge as well. Though the bounce had left his step, an attempt at an encouraging smile played at the corners of his mouth. “We can fix the ailerons,” he said, “and the starboard oxygen filters are fine. No permanent damage. So there’s some good news.”

  “We needed some,” said Thomas. “Now let’s try to generate some more. Is there any way to tell how many other ships made it out of the system?”

  “No,” said Chris. “Not unless we go back to check.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said Matthias. “We can’t handle any more Hax attacks.”

  Despite everything, the engineer’s face brightened at the rhyme. God help him, he still could find his optimism. Thomas fixated on that fact, that point of stability, and used it to ground his thoughts. He had his ship. He had his crew, among them some brilliant, if eccentric, minds. He had a functional D Drive and an engineer who could manage the reactor’s power output to give him the maximum four-D travel each day.

  And he had orders. Bring back hell for these bastards.

  For publicly issuing that order, Commissioner Wen would likely be killed when the Haxozin landed. Thomas had had his differences with her, but he would not let her final command go unanswered.

  “All right,” he said. “We need a good strategy for taking down the Haxozin ships. We know they have limited manpower, which means there aren’t too many soldiers on each one—”

  “We think,” said Areva’s voice from somewhere in the back of the bridge. “We don’t know.”

  “We think,” said Thomas. “And that means if we can destroy their fleet, they’ll be far outnumbered on the ground. Without the ability to threaten cities from orbit, they won’t hold the planet for long.” He pointed at Matthias. “Habassa, you understand their technology better than the rest of us. Can we overload their engines, anything like that?”

  Matthias straddled a spare chair and tapped his chin. “Maybe. They use the gravity on a stick method of interstellar travel. Each star prong has a generator that produces a gravity well, pulling the space ahead of the ship toward itself. They use that to propel themselves forward. Technically they’re not going faster than light, they’re going around it.”

  “Gravity well,” said Thomas. “How does that work?”

  “It’s not that different than D Drive,” said Matthias. He produced a folded piece of paper from his uniform pocket, unfolded it, and held it out before him like a tray. “Think of this paper as three-dimensional space. Viktor, put a bullet on the center of the paper.”

  “On, not through,” Thomas said with more than a little alarm as his first officer went for his gun.

  Ivanokoff’s eyes narrowed, but he retrieved a projectile from one of his weapons and set it on the paper Matthias held in the air. It rolled to the center and bent the paper where it settled. Matthias nodded to it. “The bullet represents something with a lot of mass. Mass causes space to bend around things, like how the paper is bending around the bullet. This bending makes other things roll toward the massive object. If I put something tiny, like a microfilament, on the edge of this paper, it would slide down to the bullet. The more mass something has, the more it distorts space, and the more gravity it has. This part’s theoretical, but I suspect mass is a four-dimensional property, and that’s why it causes gravity.”

  “This is all fascinating,” said Thomas, “but how do we use that to destroy their ships?”

  “Their ships generate artificial massive objects in their prongs, and that bends space to propel them forward,” said Matthias. “I can’t say for certain without knowing more about their technology, but anything generating artificial mass like that must be using a lot of power. It’s probably not too hard to overload it. The only problem is, doing that might do something weird.”

  “Weird as in ...?”

  “Weird as in create a black hole next to Earth.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah. It’s probably not the safest unless we know what we’re doing. If I saw a schematic, I might be able to come up with more ideas, but for now I’m mostly guessing about the Hax facts.”

  “Habassa ...”

  “Sorry, Cap. Just trying to lighten things up.”

  “This is not a time for lightness.”

  Matthias shrugged. “My mom always told me to be a duck. Sometimes you can’t do anything about the situations that soak you, so you have to just let the water roll off your back.”

  “I will not let an attack on our planet roll off my back!” Thomas realized he was shouting and calmed his tone. “We all have families there. Friends. Our lives are there, or in the lunar domes, or the planetary colonies. For all we know, we’re the only humans who escaped the Haxozin’s control. If we don’t find a way to defeat them, it may never happen. We are the only chance we’ve got.”

  Thomas made eye contact with each of his officers, ensuring they understood the gravity of their dilemma. Then he looked at the ship’s name and serial number engraved over the aft hatch. “You know what this ship is named for? In 1915, a sailing ship called the Endurance got stuck in the ice floes of Antarctica. The captain and his crew survived and set off on foot. No one knew where they were or that they needed help, but they found their way back to civilization and not one person was lost. That’s the fighting spirit that gave our ship its name. So we are going to fight.”

  Chris Fish stuck his hand in the air. “Didn’t the ship sink, though?”

  “And weren’t they lost for a whole year?” asked Matthias.

  “Two,” said Ivanokoff.

  “Seems a little ill-fated,” said Chris.

  Thomas held up his hands, eyes clos
ed, willing himself to stay calm. “The point is, they didn’t give up.”

  “No, not when giving up meant freezing to de—” Chris Fish went silent under Thomas’s glare.

  “The point,” Thomas repeated, “is that they didn’t give up. There’s a way out of this, and we’re going to find it. Now, Habassa, I want you to go over everything we know about Haxozin technology. Find every weakness you can. It may take a while, but we’re going to—”

  Beep beep beep. A light flashed on the scanners station.

  Chris Fish leaned over the console. “Power’s being shunted from the bridge to the lower deck.”

  “What?” Thomas asked. “Why?”

  “I don’t know. It looks like—hang on—oh, that’s clever—somebody’s rigged up the EMP emitter to broadcast a message without having to go through the bridge console’s filters.”

  “Really?” said Matthias, scooting closer to look. “How did they compensate for—”

  Thomas had no time to be fascinated. “Shut it down.”

  “Almost there,” said Chris. A moment later a section of the scanners console went dark. “Outgoing messages are closed down for the whole ship. Once we undo whatever rewiring was done, we can start them back up.”

  Thomas felt the back of his neck prickle. This could not be a coincidence, coming so soon after the attack on Earth. “Who was it?”

  “How should I know?” asked Chris.

  “I’ve got this.” Matthias began pulling up screens on the next console. “There’s a security camera right near the EMP emitter. This rewiring must have been done in the past few minutes. Just one second, and ...”

  Video footage appeared on the console, already in mid-playback. A figure stood over an open panel, adjusting the various light signal sensors and receivers in the EMP’s electronics.

  The figure looked up.

  Thomas’s mouth opened in shock.

  That person was not on his short list of suspects.

  “Where was the message sent?” His voice came out in a harsh hiss.

  Chris Fish looked up, ashen. “Phobos.”

  The larger moon of Mars. The moon from which Okoro had sent his warning. The moon on which the Uprising had a confirmed presence. The Uprising that had just arranged the capture of the entire solar system.