Second Earth (29 page)

 
 
As the Kafaran fighter ahead of him
disintegrated, Shawn knew it was time to act.

  
“All right, team.
Break and attack!”

  
Inadvertently, he
had slipped his fighter behind another Kafaran who was preparing to fire on a
turret of opportunity. Hot its tail, Shawn had a sudden, brief recollection of
the Galactic War. How easy it would have been for him to take out this Kafaran
back then. Now, nearly a decade apart and hundreds of light-years from his last
battle with them, one was sitting directly in his crosshairs, offering no
resistance, practically begging Shawn to open fire. Shawn reached a finger to
the trigger on the control stick, hovering over it, then lightly stroking its
surface beneath his gloved finger. His grip wasn’t tight enough to fire the
destructive missile that was armed and ready, but something in him kept telling
him to do it, that no one would know.
Really
,
his mind told him coldly,
what was one
more dead Kafaran, anyway?

  
Shawn tried to
physically shake the voice aside. He couldn’t kill an innocent being, even if
it were one of those accursed Kafarans. He simply couldn’t shoot him in the
back.

  
Or could he? After
all, it was they who were responsible for the death of his wife. They were the
ones who had invaded, and they were the ones who’d begun indiscriminately
killing the colonists who had ventured out into space in search of a new home.
They’d started the war that claimed billions of human lives and now, after a
protracted amount of silence from their area of space, they were back.
And for what? To help humanity battle the
Meltranians?
Never had Shawn known a Kafaran to be so sentimental. No,
there was something more going on here, something he had yet to put a finger
on.

  
Yet, here was this
Kafaran deck fighter in his sights, a fighter that was opening fire on an enemy
vessel that knowingly and without provocation attacked and destroyed a Unified
Sector Command destroyer. The Kafarans had nothing to lose. They could have
simply stood on the sidelines and watched as the Meltranian vessel picked apart
the useless defenses of the USC’s strongest ships in what would have been a
gloriously useless five-minute battle. But they did intervene—and lost one of
their own destroyers in the process. Even now their pilots were out here, just
as Shawn was, and just as this Kafaran ahead of his fighter was—living,
fighting, and dying in the void.

  
Shawn watched as
the Kafaran craft pitched its nose down, coming even more squarely into his
sights—now at point blank range. He couldn’t miss it if he tried.
      

  
Do it
, the voice said again.
Do it now, before you miss your chance!

  
Shawn’s eyes
squinted, a reflexive move he made to get a better visual on the target in
front of him. He glanced down at the weapon monitor, a faint green wireframe
diagram of the Maelstrom and her weapons outfit. He watched as the image of the
armed and highly lethal missile flashed on the inboard side under his right
wing root. The Azure, a medium-range missile with a highly lethal
armor-piercing warhead, would easily shred the Kafaran fighter in a split
second. It was ready to launch. It was waiting to launch. All that required was
the flick of his finger.

  
Do it,
the voice called out
unrelentingly.
For Sylvia. For Second
Earth. For all of them.

  
Shawn inhaled his
ship’s recycled air slowly deeply, feelings its coolness on the back of his
throat. He then exhaled leisurely, and the almost metallic taste of it wafted
across his tongue. He moved to pull the trigger.

  
It’s been said
that, in the stillness of space, you can sometimes “hear” the most peculiar
things. Sometimes it’s the wind, or air hissing out of some imagined crack in
your canopy. In that brief half-second before Shawn could fire the weapon, a
voice sprang into his mind—one he hadn’t expected to hear at all. Surely, this
is what those perceived noises must have sounded like. It was something just on
the edge of his conscience, vying for temporary control of his faculties.

  
People change, Mister Kestrel.
It was
Melissa’s words, and in her own melodic voice. As if he were succumbing to the
control of them, the words seemed to stop everything around him. His cockpit
filled with a silence he had never known before. Soon even the thought of the
Kafaran in his forward sights disappeared. There was no missile, and no
Maelstrom warship. It was just Shawn, and the soft voice of the woman for whom
he had come to care so much.

  
People change, Mister Kestrel,
the voice
said again.
Was it really true? Could
people really change their inherent nature? Were these the Kafarans that killed
his wife? If they were, would their deaths make any difference in the here and
now? Did they, like most sentient beings, carry their own regrets around like
old luggage that should have been tossed out long ago? Did they have families
and loved ones they’d lost during the war?
Surely
they must
, Shawn thought.
Surely
there must be, or have been, some Kafarans at some point who thought things
needed to be different. They were here, now, dying for the USC personnel.

  
Regardless of their
ulterior motive—if one existed at all—they were helping, and Shawn had to admit
that the
Rhea
and her quickly
dwindling complement of fighters could use it. He could very easily dispatch
this alien, and it was true that no one would probably be any the wiser for it.

  
No one that is,
except for himself.

  
No. Shawn needed
this alien alive, if only to help turn the tide. Whatever the outcome of this
battle, they were on the same side for time being. He had never turned his back
on a comrade before, and he wasn’t about to start now. In that split second of
revelation, Shawn eased the pressure of his finger and moved it safely away
from the trigger.

  
Melissa was right.
People do change. Not in a moment. Not
overnight. Perhaps not even in half a lifetime, but they do all have the same
potential for change.
 

  
It was in that
moment the Kafaran fired its forward lasers at the incoming turret. The bolts
of red energy hacked out from the Kafaran fighter and severed one of the four
barrels off the Meltranians’ weapon. A split second later, the Kafaran pulled
up sharply, giving Shawn Kestrel complete access to the target. The Maelstrom’s
auto-targeting system locked onto the weapons platform, a glowing green set of
crosshairs now following the target on Shawn’s heads-up display with precision
timing. He didn’t even need to think about the trigger on the control stick, or
the medium-range missile already at his command. He simply squeezed the yellow
trigger and watched as the missile streaked away from his fighter. It struck
the turret dead center and blew it into two large fragments that spiraled away
from one another, with the rest of the assembly sparking and arcing with unconstrained
energy.
 

  
Shawn pulled back
on the control stick of his fighter and sailed over the smoking remains of the
turret. The Kafaran he’d been trailing a moment before was nowhere to be found.
It seemed as though a dozen others had risen up to take his place. They
attacked the Meltranians from every angle, firing their destructive beams of
green energy into every corner of the beast.

  
The undamaged
Kafaran destroyer, now dangerously close to the Meltranian, was trying to stop
the more powerful enemy vessel with everything it had. Shawn watched helplessly
as the large-caliber Kafaran cannons had little to no effect on the seemingly
impenetrable hull of the intruder’s vessel. The telltale signs of the
Meltranians’ isotonic cannon began to form again, and Shawn feared that the
Kafaran vessel wouldn’t stand a chance. By the time the white light again
filled space and the enormous bolt of energy flew from the cannon, the Kafaran
craft had abruptly changed course, causing the isotonic round to fly under the
destroyer. However, several Sector Command pilots—and twice as many
Kafarans—were in the direct line of the blast and were vaporized in seconds.

  
The bolt of energy
continued unfettered until it grazed the underside of the Kafaran carrier some
moments later. Due to the stronger shields of the carrier, and the distance
between the two warships, the round seemed more to bounce off the shields than
to be absorbed by it. The Meltranian ship, seizing its chance to destroy the
Kafaran capital ship, wasted little time in pressing its advantage.

  
On the bridge of
the Kafaran carrier, Admiral William Graves had different plans. He ordered the
carrier to pick up speed and to come alongside the intruder’s vessel at a
distance of eight hundred yards, intent on broadsiding the Meltranians before
the enemy could get off another round from its powerful cannon.

  
Shawn watched his
sensors for a moment as the two ships came near to one another, and it took him
only a moment to realize what Admiral Graves was planning to do. As a species,
a broadside attack was far from what a Kafaran commander would have done in
William’s place. As it was, it might turn out that just such a maneuver would
save all of them in the end.

  
It wasn’t long
after that Shawn noticed five Meltranian Beta fighters coming in from his
port-forward quarter. There didn’t seem to be a single friendly vessel around
to assist him until three Kafaran fighters screamed over his canopy and headed
for the Meltranians’ position. Shawn, never one to be outdone by anyone—friend
or foe—rushed into the fight behind them. Each of the Kafarans took out a
single Meltranian ship, all with their short-range lasers. The last two
belonged to Shawn. He could see that the two enemy fighters were close together
and in a tight formation. He immediately launched two of his fragmentation
missiles and watched as they converged at the center point between the two
enemy vessels, exploding and showering the targets in a spray of white-hot
metal fragments.

  
One of the fighters
seemed to be damaged beyond the pilot’s ability to control it. It screamed out
of the combat zone and Shawn never caught sight of it again. The second fighter
streaked off, presumably to lick his wounds, and then came back around on
Shawn’s tail looking for revenge. The fighter moved faster than Shawn could
turn, and then pelted his fighter in a hail of lasers.
 
A handful of them pierced his wing, severing
his weapons control for that side of the fighter. Luckily for Shawn, a lone
droid fighter took out the Meltranian before it could do any further damage,
and Shawn wondered briefly if it was Trent at the controls of the helpful
little craft.

  
By now, the Kafaran
carrier and the Meltranians were in an all-out slugfest. It looked to Shawn
like the seagoing battles of old Earth. Each ship was firing with every laser
turret at its disposal. The blanket of energy that stretched from one ship to
the other was nearly impenetrable, and none of the fighters from either side of
the conflict dared to venture anywhere near the battling capital ships.
Unfortunately, with Graves now trying to attack the Meltranian on its port
side, it had left the
Rhea
woefully
unprotected—with the Meltranian free to fire at the USC carrier at its leisure.
That Graves and the Kafarans had distracted the Meltranians to this point was
probably the
Rhea
’s only saving
grace.

  
The destroyer
Breckenridge
tried to close the gap
between itself and the Meltranians as well. It raced ahead of the
Rhea
and acted as a shield for the
Unified Government’s largest and proudest carrier.

  
The Kafaran
destroyer, meanwhile, had completed a leisurely turn to port, with the
Meltranians now firmly inside its weapon range. While the Meltranian vessel
fired on the Kafaran carrier on its port side, the Kafaran destroyer began
attacking the intruder’s starboard. And with the
Breckenridge
firing on the Meltranians’ bow, victory seemed only a
few shots away.

  
That’s when the
Meltranian ship, seemingly indifferent to the flanking attacks it was under,
fired its main cannon at the
Breckenridge
.
The shot came with much less warning than with previous iterations, and Shawn
could only speculate that it was a far weaker version of the blasts previously
launched. The salvo, nonetheless, was completely effective. The sparkling blue
isotonic round struck the
Breckenridge
’s
bridge structure, all but severing it from the rest of the hull. Now at
half-speed and still slowly accelerating, it continued straight along its
previous path—heading right for the intruder.

  
The Meltranian
vessel altered course. The movement, however, was too late. The smoldering
wreckage of the
Breckenridge
plowed
into the lower spire-like superstructure of the Meltranian vessel, shearing off
almost a quarter of the intruder’s mass in the process.