Starlight: No Time To Lose

I locked sights on loose Machi fighter nearest to Charlie and burned tail to get within firing range. Thanks largely to Harrison's persistent mining of the Machi hanger exits, Flight Corps had finally gained the advantage of numbers. I quickly noticed that Harrison herself was not joining in the dogfight, though; her ship drifted sideways through space, nose toward the Machi line.1

I broke off my pursuit of the enemy fighter, content to leave him to a pilot who could use the target practice, and turned to cover Harrison. "Harry, you hit?" I voiced over, keeping an eye out for any impending threat to her presumably crippled fighter.2

"Ha, me?" she scoffed, buzzing like a tin can in a blender. "Just watch, if you can." And then she blinked from sight.3

I had to search my sensor screen to find where she'd gone, and after a relatively considerable time located her ship. It was thousands of kilometers behind the Machi battle line, zipping away well above combat velocity. I immediately was aware of the only explanation, but nevertheless it took me a few moments to wrap my mind around it. A superspace jump from a combat zone! I didn't bother to express my surprise; she would know without my words.4

"I guess you could say I've learned from their mistakes!" Harrison joked, the glee in her tone more than apparent. I traced the line of her maneuver backward to see what she meant, and there saw the purpose: One of the back-line battleships was losing its command bridge to a series of fusion-fueled explosions, precipitated by the torn spacetime around Harrison's near-pass jump. As I watched in admiration for a bit, I caught out the corner of my eye the beginning of a similar chain reaction in the engines of a destroyer nearer the front of the line as Harrison jumped back into the fight zone.5

My old comrade obviously didn't need my help after all, so I returned to my former goal of putting an end to some Machi half-competency. On the way back towards the fray, I scanned through channels on the communicator to get a feel for how things were going with the rest of the force.6

"... repeat, all hands clear the foreship and prepare for ramm..."7

"... taken damage to the fire controls, returning to..."8

"... need a big drink when -- ungh, when we get back..."9

Words were a dime a dozen, even with much of Flight Corps destroyed or disabled. The Machi fighters were retreating, defeated, but their armada had the advantage over ours. We were out of position and losing morale quickly. The crack crew of the Monument had successfully diverted the Machi battleship from its collision course with Neptune 7 at the cost of its operational ability for the next several months, but the station would be overrun soon anyway if the Machi fleet broke through our own. Things were starting to look pretty bad; we didn't have enough fliers left to stage an offensive. Harrison's temporal lancing could only be used against ships whose shields had been depleted. Anything stronger than a weak fuzz would be like a steel shell to her ship in superspace.10

As Admiral Scoggins re-ordered the line to put up whatever fight the remnant could manage, the remainder of Flight Corps mopped up what was left of the enemy fighters, some of the gutsier pilots even following active ships back into the hangers and dropping whatever ordnance they had left. The damage was mostly superficial, though, and we all knew that without some sort of tactical genius or other act of God, our outpost here would be lost.11

"Ultimatum, Requiem, priority task" my headset crackled, as I fired the finishing barrage into the craft I'd been pursuing and looked to my comm screen for the new orders. Tactical genius it would be, then.
"Ultimatum responding," I replied. Harrison confirmed her attention shortly after.
Admiral Scoggins continued with his commands. "Intelligence indicates that last battleship to jump in was the only major capital ship defending Titania. If the reports are correct, there are two corvettes and a small contingent of fighters with the supply dock there. Scout out the area and destroy the fighters."
Harrison's bloodlust leaked into her query: "And the corvettes and supply dock?" she croaked.
"Your primary objective is reconnaissance. If conditions are favorable there, we'll pull a task force to finish the work. Godspeed, pilots."
The admiral's vagueness spoke clearly to us. "Understood, sir," I answered, flying to a safe distance from the battle with Harrison close behind me. She and I discussed our contingencies as our navigational systems synchronized to allow for simultaneous jumps.12

"Recon will take all of, what, fifteen seconds? Five if we just get local scans and jump back to Neptune 7." The tone of her voice indicated that this was definitely not her ambition.
I shook my head at her lack of physical awareness. "It'll be closer to 20 minutes by the time we've made it there, and our scans have made it back," I reminded her. "And another ten at least before any backup comes in. The most likely scenario is that we finish off the fighters and do some nominal damage to the corvettes."
Cypher informed me that pre-jump calculations were complete. All I had to do to initiate the sequence was say the word. But not until we had a plan set, despite it going against my style, and even more so against Harrison's. I'd learned quickly after meeting her, however, that failing to set at least a basic strategy could be suicide whenever she was involved.
"So, cruisers first?" Harrison checked. "If the shields are down when we get there, I mean."
Insanity. "Singe as much as you like of those hulls. I'll go for something we can actually scratch a bit." She said she'd shot down a destroyer, but doubtfully on a near-empty loadout and certainly not all on her lonesome.
Of course, she laughed at me then. "Always thinking in the box, Duncan," she stated. "Did you see the damage to those capitals? The chronospatial wake from a ship the size of yours could damn near smoke a corvette end to end. Even better if you catch the angle lengthwise."
I began to protest. "No way in hell I'm going to set my-"
"And you still owe me for Ganymede," she half-scolded. That was enough to shut me up, because she was right. All these years later, it was finally time for her to be the reckless leader and me to be the willing accomplice. I'm just glad she chose to call it in on a looseleaf assignment like this. I conceded the point and hit the command button on my communication controller.
"One more thing," Harrison cut in. I pulled my finger back for just a moment longer. "Your target is whichever ship is more moonward."
Damn it, Harrison, I thought. Then I issued the command confirmation to Cypher, and our vessels slipped through the continuum.13

-----------------------------------------------------14

Titania gleamed as well as anything ever did this far from the sun, sillhouetting the half-lit corvettes drifting in orbit. Harrison and I hit full throttle right out of the jump, recognizing the need to use our advantage of surprise to its fullest. I turned nosed up to a trajectory just past the ship closer to icy rock ahead and ordered Cypher to send local scans back to Neptune. Harrison zipped ahead while I watched the sensor sweep on my panels. Her fighter, the Requiem, flashed off through space just as Cypher detailed the back-orbiting corvette, and I noticed that Cypher recorded the ship destruction in her logs. The 'records transmitted' message popped up shortly after. Scoggins would enjoy seeing that, I thought. With the scans finished, I began diverting power to the warp capacitors in preparation to smoke the second corvette. Eighty percent, ninety-five percent, done.
A single second stood between me and the jump: all I had to do was press a button. The Voice returned, unexpected. 'Do it,' it commanded, even as fear gripped me. I forced my thumb down, even as I watched the blue shock of the corvette's shields yawning into their waking state.15

Thoughts squeezed between the impulses in my nerves and ship controls. With an overarching theme of "This Is Me," memories of flight school and service swung through my mind. The kills, mostly, and a few other heartbreakingly intense moments not spent in the expanse. As much as they irked me, all the "I never" regrets took their seats as well: I never fought a Machi hand to hand. I never built a ship with my own hands. I never braved the Earthside wildernesses and tamed them. I never was hard enough on Harrison.
And then, the images of the long, dark subluminal journeys from post to post before the war came to me, as silent in memory as they had been in reality. The hours of cruising with my eyes to the stars, trying to sort myself out. The darkness and solitude were assets to me then, though I never learned to appreciate them until I no longer had time for them. Perhaps, though, death would be just as comfortable?16

A single second.17

"Duncan!" Harrison's voice came loudly (though not as loudly as it seemed) through my headset. "Your power out or what?"
Breaking from my stupor, I answered with an uncertain 'no' and reacquainted myself with the cosmos: I peered down at my instruments, trying to sort out the relevant data through an unfamiliar fog in my mind. After a few seconds, I had come to the conclusion that I was not dead; furthermore, I was flying in an arc past Titania and rounding to a trajectory that would take me straight into the planet if I didn't change course in the next five minutes.
I turned around to return to the vicinity of the supply dock on the other side of the moon, looking for the corpse of the small warship to be sure I hadn't just suffered some sort of mental breakdown and imagined the whole crisis. Sure enough, there were two still-glowing corvette hulls near where Harrison was weaving through the crossfire from nearly a dozen fighters. My faith in my mental capabilities renewed, I sped to the rescue, blasting through three of the Machi defenders before the rest even realized I was back.18

After a moderately long and tedious, though ultimately unchallenging battle, Harrison and I found ourselves with little to do other than fly little circles around the defenseless Machi supply dock. Neptune reported that they had received reinforcements and the Machi fleet had retreated to a secure base of operations beyond reasonable pursuit. Command was calling in for a few warships and freighters to recover the supplies and wanted us to provide eyes and guns until then, in case the Machi beat them to it.
"So," Harrison commed in, "what exactly happened after you lanced that corvette?"
"I was thinking."
Silence.
"You know how people say..." I hesitated at the cliche, "that they saw their life flash before their eyes in the face of death? I didn't think it happened."
She chuckled, without a hint of humor or amusement. "Every time I fly, Duncan."
The stars spun past my cockpit without sound, slowly.
"I'm sorry I didn't warn you, Duncan. I wanted to make sure that you couldn't..." She faded.
That I couldn't what? "That I couldn't turn away? What if I had hesitated? I'd be a dead man, Harrison."
The faintness of her voice startled me. "That you couldn't believe me only halfway." Indeed, it was barely a whisper, at first. "Like at Ganymede."19

She was right, I knew... and it hurt.