Chapter Twelve: Intersection — Part 3
Defueling a spacecraft in flight without blowing it up proved to be incredibly time consuming, and Devon had little personal time in the month it took to accomplish this final, obviously mundane task. The stress of the job was beginning to wear on him. Julia and Stanley were both supportive, and Susan stopped to visit every evening, bringing exotic meals and casual conversation, which was needed far more than anything mentally challenging. The fuel from the ships was drained into space, where it solidified into purple chunks of phosphate/nuclear/petroleum ice. The fuel was placed with the rest of the weapons, at this point, all of it hanging in space, useless to the Antansi and the troopers alike. Devon spoke to himself as he worked on the last step.
“Final stage, gather and destroy all equipment.” Devon ordered the probe to bring all the cargo, plasma cannons, nuclear weaponry, and excess fuel to one point in space, set to coordinates now weeks behind the swiftly traveling armada.
The Drone set the weapons on a course directly opposite the armada, directly into the golden sun of Johnson’s System. He then ordered the probe to return to Antans. It was noon twenty-seven days after he had started his mission, and he walked back to Susan’s private home, his mind aching from the effort. Grumpy curled around his leg, Julia and Stanley, who had followed him home, both gave him a hug before they found their way to a more private patch of outdoor fog. Drake, Laura, Robert, and Loka gave him gifts ranging from kisses to a baby lizard, none of which Devon expected or knew what to do with. For the day, at least, Devon was the hero, and for the first time in his life, everybody smiled and was proud of what he had done.
Even Alex and Sara, who had become part of another family entirely, and whom Devon had never met, had stopped by for a short visit. Sara had kissed him so hard that he thought he would lose his tonsils. Alex laughed at this and slapped Devon on the back on the way out the door. After an hour of celebrating, his mind in a fog, Devon was finally left alone with Susan and his new pet lizard, one of Grumpy’s progeny.
“I love you. I missed you in our home.”
Devon kissed Susan, and made love to her until the sun set and the world went dark. In a few years the armada would arrive, and its actions would determine theirs. On those ships were troops trained to kill, and they would try to kill with or without weapons. He knew better than to worry about it when there was nothing he could do but wait.
Susan shared his philosophy. “Do you have a name for your new friend?”
Devon scratched the lizard behind its frills. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to call it. What does it eat anyway? Is it a messy creature? I mean Grumpy is always so well behaved, and apparently house broken.”
“They eat about the same diets as us.” Susan said.
“I think I’ll call him Igor. He kind of reminds me of my brother.”
“Poor lizard.” Susan snuggled close to Devon, closing her eyes.
Within moments, both were asleep.
“Enforcer Alpha, I’m sorry to bring you out of stasis early, and with such bad news. We have a serious emergency on our hands.” The Commander seemed uncomfortable, almost afraid.
“Have we reached the planet?” Charles asked, his throat dry. He stretched as he got out of his sleep chamber, his body aching.
“Yes Sir. But, as I did a preliminary check of my systems I learned that all long-range communications have been wiped out and every ship has its weapons systems crippled. Every ship is helpless sir, and our stored weaponry has also been stolen.”
“Damn Resistance Class. They must have intercepted us and taken what they needed. We’ll need to turn back for Johnson now.”
“We can’t sir.”
“What do you mean we can’t?”
“Our fuel pods were emptied along with everything else. We’re about forty minutes from a collision course with a planet that’s under quarantine. They expected us, want us to arrive on time, and with no means of escape, from the looks of things.”
Charles scanned the data himself. “They don’t want us to leave, and they don’t want us to fight. This was no group of resistors, no disorganized band of pirates. That planet must be highly advanced in space warfare. How many troops can we evacuate using the escape pods?” Charles said, planning a counterstrike.
The Commander typed some information into the computer. “These ships are well beyond standard capacity. We could dispatch maybe a thousand troops from each ship.”
“Will the sleeping caskets survive atmospheric entry? We can’t leave over ninety thousand people to die.”
The Commander’s eyes widened, silence was his only immediate answer.
“I’m waiting. You’re the pilot, after all.”
“We could evacuate the Class One Combatants from the group, and your choice of the Class Two, but you’re crazy if you think I’m going to try to remote land eight cruisers on a quarantined planet with a minimum of fuel and no margin of error.”
Charles let his eyelids tighten to vicious little slits. “We’re going to land these ships if we both have to die doing it. Of course, you could die sooner.” Charles rested a hand on his pistol, and Regus grudgingly took a position at navigation.
The dull metal surfaces and simple gray keyboards were dead under his fingers. The computers were working exclusively on local space gravitational vectoring, making it difficult for him to plot long-range statistics. Making the best guess for a safe reentry angle, Regus cursed and prayed and plugged in the dive, hoping that death, should it chose to come, would be quick. The lights dimmed and sputtered, the ship shook violently, but not from impact with upper atmosphere. Commander Regus just about jumped out of his skin. The entire ship was engulfed in cold, ion displacing plasma. Within moments his hastily calculated guess at a safe descent proved futile.
“An electrostatic pulse just hit us. Every computer on board is destroyed. Blew right through our EMP circuits.” Commander Regus tried to bring the computers online, clinging to the hope that maybe the auxiliary systems had somehow survived.
Despite the damage, despite the impossibility of it, the ship lurched and hummed violently, spiraling in on one side, then each ship fell into a stable descent of its own accord, trailing the lead ship. Commander Regus stared dead into the storm, unable, momentarily, to grasp how his ship had gained such composure upon descent.
