Starship Eternal (War Eternal Book 1) (17 page)

 
The clear carbonate slid closed over his head, and he felt the pressurization in his ears. Mitchell scanned the cluster for the ignition, finding the switch on the right side of the panel. He flipped it.

Nothing happened.

"Are you kidding?" Mitchell said, staring at the dashboard. He toggled the switch again.
 

Still nothing.

Was the fighter broken? Dead? He searched the panels for the toggle to open the cockpit again. He found it on the left. When he hit it, the clear shell began pulling back. A soft hiss alerted him that the cabin was depressurizing, followed by the clearly audible whine of an engine and the rhythmic echo of a running mech.

They had found him.

"Of course they did, because I can't get this old piece of shit to work," he said, toggling the cockpit closed again. He'd watched similar scenes in movies plenty of times before. It was supposed to be drama, not his actual life.
 

He hit the ignition a few more times. "Come on, you bastard."

The first drone became visible in front of the hanger, still a few miles away. Too far for its laser to do any serious damage. He hit the ignition again.

"Come on, come on, come-"
 

He glanced down at M's helmet in his lap, feeling like an idiot.
 

He lifted it up and over his head.

The entire world around him changed.
 

In an instant, every incoming vehicle was painted in front of his eyes, along with speeds and vectors that flew into his brain faster than he could have consciously processed. A second later, the familiar connection to the ship he was sitting in became obvious to him. Somehow, the old bucket had a CAP-NN link that didn't require a direct contact. The helmet was enough.

Mitchell brought the engines online with a thought. The reactor was silent, but he knew he was up and running.
 

A huge, metal man moved in front of the open hanger door. A Zombie, the military's favorite eighty-ton mech. It was all sharp angles and odd surfaces, meant to reduce its signature on scans. It was humanoid shaped, with articulating hands and feet, burst jets mounted over its shoulder blades, and weapons interspersed at various points along the frame. There were twin missile launchers embedded in the chest, a pulse laser on each wrist, and a heavy machine-gun protruding from its belly. It also carried a massive railgun cradled in its hands. There was no sign of the pilot. The cockpit was positioned at the back of the machine, inside a shell of poly-alloy and nano-composite that could absorb a lot of punishment. It meant Mitchell could fight back against the mech and not have to worry too much about killing one of his own.

If he could fight back.

He thought about the weapons systems and the neural link returned the data on his offensive potential. He nearly lost his focus. The steps hadn't been the only upgrade M had made to the old fighter.

 
The Zombie started raising the railgun. One shot from the heavy slug at this range would go clear through the fighter, shields or not. Right now, he was a sitting duck.

A well-armed sitting duck. He fired at the Zombie, blinded by the flash of blue light that flowed from the front of the ship and blasted into the mech, slicing clean through the right leg as though it were nothing. The mech wobbled for a second, the pilot and the AI both fighting to keep it upright.
 

They failed.

The mech rocked and tumbled away. Mitchell fired the rear thrusters and the smaller vectoring jets, and the S-17 skipped forward and into the air. He launched past the downed mech and out into the sky, urging the fighter into a steep climb, feeling the effects of the G-forces despite the efforts of the negators. A tone in his mind alerted him to the drones readjusting to track him, and he threw the ship into a winding roll.

He couldn't hold back his smile as he pushed the S-17 harder, forcing it into a quick rotation that strained the structure and would have challenged most pilots. He fired on the drones, two of the flat discs shooting out from the launchers in the wings and flying towards them, nearly invisible in the daylight.

Both exploded a moment later.

Another tone sounded. The mech pilot was good, and had managed to get the disabled Zombie into a one-armed kneel. It raised the railgun towards him and fired.
 

The fighter swung left, narrowly avoiding the Shot. Mitchell dove downwards towards the mech, closing the distance so fast his opponent's synthetic musculature couldn't keep up to reposition the gun. Small missiles launched from its chest, and the fighter responded with a series of quick laser bursts that burned through and detonated each one before they could land.
 

The mech turned green in Mitchell's helmet. He had a lock but didn't fire. The shell might protect the pilot from conventional weapons. He wasn't sure about this fighter's ordinance, and he didn't want to kill anyone. Instead, he urged the ship back up, pushing hard against gravity and firing the rear thrusters at full. The S-17 came level a dozen feet above the Zombie's head and rocketed low across the wheat fields, spreading them with the force. Mitchell rolled and flipped, shifting and launching into the air, going straight up towards the outer atmosphere.

 
More targets appeared on the helmet's overlay. Two more Zombies and a full squadron of drones. They had probably expected him to be running to a transport, not a starfighter. By the time they got a few Morays on his tail, he'd be well into orbit and ready to move into FTL.

Assuming the ship had FTL. The original S-17 didn't. No starfighter did. Humanity had made immense progress in reducing the size of the engines over the last four hundred years, but they still couldn't fit them in a package as small as a fighter and provide it with enough power to move into hyperspace.

M had said the enemy technology was much more advanced. Whoever they were? M was a replica of him. Were they all clones? Replicas? Copies? Were they some kind of other human? Or something else entirely? If the modifications done to the S-17 were any indication of their capabilities, there was one thing he was certain of:

Humankind was in a lot of trouble.

Mitchell kept climbing, pushing easily into the upper atmosphere and then finally out into space. He was able to let off the thrusters then, allowing his momentum to keep him moving further from the planet. The neural link continued feeding him information, showing him the positions of the other starships resting in Liberty's orbit. One of them was moving in his direction, a Navy frigate. It wouldn't waste its heavy ordinance on him and would only be carrying two squadrons of fighters.

He asked the CAP-NN for FTL. A moment later a star map appeared inside his helmet as a three-dimensional rendering of the galaxy. A sphere appeared around the fighter, showing him what the ship had the power to reach.
 

He stared at the map. He had no idea where to go. No idea where to start looking for the Goliath. What he did know was that he needed to shake the frigate. He would get himself somewhere relatively safe, and then he would worry about the rest.

He zoomed in on the map, moving to the outer edge of the sphere. It would deplete the reactor to dangerous levels to make the trip, but he had to risk it. It was the only place in the galaxy where a man whose likeness as well known as his could disappear.

He set a course for the Rim and vanished from the universe.

Hyperspace was a lot more fun on a battle cruiser.
 

That was the thought that kept cycling through Mitchell's mind as the ship traversed hyperspace, leaving him staring at a wall of solid black for what felt like an eternity.

In truth, it was twenty-seven hours. Twenty-seven very long hours.
 

Long enough that he had been reduced to closing his eyes and trying to recall scenes from his favorite streams in a futile effort to fall asleep.
 

Long enough that he had to empty his bladder into the flight suit four times, letting the material soak up the urine and distribute it for storage. It kept him dry, but it didn't do much for the smell of the cockpit.

Long enough that he was running out of air.

The ship had calculated the circle based on its power capabilities, not his ability to continue breathing. Or, perhaps M had been much more accomplished at slowing his heart rate and using less oxygen. Or, maybe M hadn't actually needed to breathe at all.

Either way, after twenty-seven hours the fighter fell out of hyperspace, a warning beep sounding in his mind and alerting him to the decreasing levels of oxygen that remained in the system. A fighter pilot was intended to spend a maximum of eight hours on sortie, with a decent backup air supply in case the ship became disabled and needed to wait for a tow. Twenty-seven hours was well beyond the planned use-case and it was a small miracle of its own that he had stretched it as far as he did.

He checked the star map as soon as the ship dropped, noting that it had cut him short of his initial destination in the Rim, and instead left him near a large, barren planetoid. There was no settlement, no refueling station, and no atmosphere to skim for a reload of air. As near as he could tell, he was in the middle of nowhere with about two hours of oxygen left in the tank and no way to replenish it.

"It figures," he said. "Why did you drop me here?"

The ship answered by cutting the main thrusters and using the smaller ones to bring him into a short orbit with the planetoid. He considered overriding it and forcing it back to FTL, but he knew he was still too far away from anything that could help him.
 

He really was going to die here.

He put his head back and closed his eyes, keeping his breathing as light as he could manage. He was going to die. It was like a cruel, cold joke. He wondered what M would think if he were still alive? Would he be amused by the outcome of his interdiction in time?

Time. Mitchell thought about what M had said, replaying it in his mind over and over again. Eternal return. The idea that everything in his past before M had shown up had happened before and would happen again. Did that mean there was no such thing as fate? Did it mean that people had no control over any aspect of their lives? That it was all predetermined by the last pass through? It couldn't be, could it? Not when nobody knew that they were reliving an endless cycle. It was all unique to him, and to everyone else.
 

No, not everyone. M said that some people remembered, at least a little. He had remembered the Goliath. Did that mean that he had been on the ship before? That he had found it in a past loop, or a potentially infinite number of past loops? Did it mean that in a different timeline it had never been lost in the first place?
 

Then there was Major Arapo. The way her kiss sat on the edge of his thoughts, when there had been so many other women, when there had been Ella. Was she a bigger part of his past life than he realized? If so, then how?

It was a lot to process. A lot to try to come to some kind of rational coexistence with. He had a million questions and no answers, and now it wouldn't matter. He didn't need answers anymore.
 

He only needed air.

What was the likelihood of that? He was a single speck of dust in a universe of infinite dust. It was over, before it had even begun. He should have died with the Greylock, with Ella, or at least instead of her. He'd been gifted extra time to experience another side of life, and he decided it was better to feel grateful for that than to lament what he was about to lose.

He stopped breathing easy, returning his cycle to normal and putting himself into his familiar meditative state. He cleared his mind of thought and worked at easing the tension from his stiff limbs.
 

He waited to die.

He didn't die.
 

He wasn't sure how long he was meditating for. An hour? Two? He had fallen into a state of calm so deep that he never noticed the dot that appeared on the helmet's overlay. He never saw the ship that moved into position above him.