"This is Vandal Two, I…<static>….andal One, you have two guardians on your six eight and twelve five, evade!"
Mmh, and now the cold sweat sets in. Funny how vivant that animal place beyond pain, beyond desperation, beyond simply trying to survive can take you. Like you’re the imperatrix of the damned. The continuous sorties, the dead friends. The continuous purges. All of humanity, after centuries of inter-house peace, struck suddenly, desperately, suicidally insane, and you just accept it, pick up a rifle, and murder a crowd of a few hundred because you have to. Because there are no friends anymore, just more bodies and blood. More flesh for the pyre.
The BAF against the entire human race. What was the human race, thrown at us. They were starving their own men, their ships were fuel spent. The Rheinlanders came straight from the occupation of New Tokyo and didn’t even bother to secure the systems before they came steamrolling through the Taus and the Omegas. We thought we could hold them in thirty seven until eighty dreadnaughts flooded into Manchester and started glassing the local defence forces. That was when we knew the reckoning had come. We were all going to die. The combined forces of Kusari, Rheinland and Liberty had been so eager to murder us they didn’t secure their supply lines for the invasion - they would slaughter us in seven weeks, or die trying.
We didn’t expect to hold out for seven days.
"What… I see them, trying to catch them in a turn chase… sh<static>, missile tone, missile tone, counters out, Javelin one just passed starboard bow, danger close, no eyes on two…"
Allah help me.
"Vandal One, you have a third rider, he’s coming in hot… damn, I can’t intercept him. He’s armed with some kind of…<static> …moving to engage."
They fought like dead men, determined to drag down the rest of us. We weren’t a military anymore, we were survivors. We retreated in blind panic, our chain of command gone, our logistic dead, our own planetary defences turned against us. For the first time in history, humanity had united in one, collective, unstoppable avalanche…
That was about to smother us all.
"Refugee liner Wroclaw to acting captain Khan. Captain Khan, we have Rheinland gunboats on an approach vector… Where… where the hell are you captain? There are three thousand civilian lives on the… oh God, where the hell are the shields, please! They’re butchering u<white noise>"
Any time now.
“This is Vandal One, I’m in a turn fight with two guardians and a drake and totally defensive. Scream if you’re not dead.”
"Vandal Two here, Seventeen klicks out captain and in cruise somehow, but I’m carrying half the Chancellor’s finest behind me. I’m not sure you want my help."
You goddam get here Julian or I’ll haunt your surviving relatives. Or anyone else who lives through golgotha.
"Vandal Five here, Three bailed, Four didn’t make it. I’m attempting to clear Two."
My God, Samuels. Be kind to him.
And that was all. Death was an inevitability that wouldn’t wait. All you could do was procrastinate your way through the hours. Only the worst pilots were left - the best had died long ago or vanished into the Omicrons. Only the fools stayed to defend their homeland. Fools like us.
For fools like us, there was no Orillion to swoop us from the black. There was only the war.
“Roger Five, watch your ass. If they catch all of us with our pants down we’re never reaching Dublin”
We had heard a rumour that the fleet - what was left of it - was going to regroup at Graves. The Ark Royal had already crossed the Dublin gap, the Wessex, the Thunderer, the Grimsby, the Derby, were all burning as hard as their fuel starved drives could take them.
“Gotta wipe yours first, Juli.”
The sticks suddenly pulls a seizure between your fingers. You rock them violently, struggling to shake the rippling lines of plasma thrashing the void around you as your shields splutter and your hole plating hiss. Instinctively, you hit the shield battery dump key, only to realise the last remaining shield containers have been cast aside long ago. They are eating you, forcing you to make mistakes, plotting out the scarce few lines of convergence which keep you from their guns. You can see from the confidence of their manoeuvres, the broad, lazy firing angles they rake you from. Shoot back, try for a firing angle, and they will cut your keel out from under you. They dance in your threat axis, playing your instincts against you, taking wild shots. Eventually, they will tire of you, your CMs will run dry, and they will barrage you with ordinance until your inevitable demise. All your most brilliant efforts, all your skill, all your daring, your adrenaline, condense only to insufficiency, a barracks joke on a gun camera, a flight officer’s hazard pay. That will be your legacy.
“This is V…<static> Khan. If you don’t get here in the next sixty seconds Julien I’m going to level out and let them toast us.”
“Bats?”
“Buggered.”
“<Static>!”
You snatch a glance at the synoptic scope. It’s grim. You’d have to scroll to see the red but that’d mean taking your fingers off the nanos. Unergonomic piece of crap - you realise you’re going to be killed by several centimetres of plastic divider as the shield klaxon detonates in your eardrums again.
Then one of the contacts winks out. Then the second one. You've never been happier to see empty nothingness in all your living days.
“Vandal five here, I’ve got the attention of the Valks, but my consumables are dry and my fuel is way past bingo… oh geesh, the gunboats are converging on the hole.”
“Vandal five, jump. Vandal three?”
The hole flared. You wonder if there’s anyone waiting for him. Probably.
“Vandal two here, I’m on your tail captain, but I need you to level out if I’m going to get missile strikes at the one on your six”.
Level out. Level out. Bend over, spread, present.
“Copy. I’ll crap on the one on the rig…”
This is circumflex of the universe, right here, right now. This second, this interval between pulses, you have the joy of choosing if you live to feel the next one.
If you do not toggle the switch, you and Julian are going to die. If you toggle the switch, streams of blue iridescence will be tripping over each over to save you. They will paint aurorae between the command board and the tactical directorate, which will decide within the nanoseconds that yes, you are indeed struggling to drop a seventy kiloton thermonuclear hydrogen bomb into the face of another human being. The light will then snare around eight loops of fifty metre long nano cable providing gunfire hasn’t cut them to the mine dropper, which will cause a seven thousand newton vacuum ram to force an explosive the size of a bowling ball into a magnetic breech barely wider than itself with an acceleration of seventeen gees. By the time the thump from the mine’s loading screams into your eardrums, it will have already been released. If your thumb hits the toggle and slips, you will die. If the pilot behind you detects the mine flare and fires a disruptor missile, you will die. If he disregards his guns completely and discharges his razor, his death will not save you. Your only hope of survival is that he’s stupid enough to go guns at seventy metres.
Sixty, sixty five. You feel your ventricles tensing and, maddeningly, your hot hand has developed a shake. Your’re being betrayed. Your body is going to kill you. Give up, scream your fibres. Eject, cries the adrenaline. You realise you’re flying with your eyes shut.
The mine clangs out of the bay with a deprecatingly unintimidating clonk for one of the most compact weapons of mass destruction a human ever had the savagery to craft flings itself out against the velocity vector, arcing in a slow, tired line towards the streaming guardians. You detect a twitch of an OMS puff against their splendid ordinance wings as the fighters break into a tight, ineffectual dive. It doesn’t save them.
Broken wings that once stood for the Liberty of man span twisted through the penumbra between the stars. When the last man has breathed his last, these wings will be flying still. That’s your little contribution to the destiny of man, a work of art that will last forever.
It's hard to fault the dead, after all.
THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's outlawed trade unions, determined to take the underworld for themselves.)
![[Image: XTF1d6x.png]](https://i.imgur.com/XTF1d6x.png)