Stardust

  

  ~ REBEL STARS, BOOK 5 ~

  © 2017

  Edward W. Robertson

  THE COMPLETE

  REBEL STARS

  REBEL (Book 0)

  OUTLAW (Book 1)

  TRAITOR (Book 2)

  RONIN (Book 3)

  FREEFALL (Book 4)

  STARDUST (Book 5)

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  1

  Clouds of missiles raced across the void. The serene beauty of Earth spread beneath them. The unblinking eyes of the stars hung above them. The human vessels they'd been launched from maneuvered behind them as the alien ships stirred to action ahead of them.

  Soundlessly, the swarms of missiles struck the Lurker ships in blinding bursts of light.

  Those vessels, their targets, were the products of almost inconceivable achievement and effort: the culmination of thousands of years of technology and engineering, these things made possible in turn by tens and possibly hundreds of millions of years of evolution. The ships built by the products of this evolution, who had then made these achievements, had then spent many years, possibly generations, crossing no less than 25 trillion miles of empty space.

  As the missiles speared into their sides, erupting in flame, these miraculous products of time and ingenuity were reduced to twisted metal, hot gas, and radiant heat.

  To garbage and entropy.

  Tears stung Rada's eyes. Inside the escape pod, she thrust her fists high and threw back her head. "Glory! Glory and rebellion!"

  The Lurkers were already fighting back, disgorging waves of missiles, the crimson beams of lasers blinking across the darkness. The human ships—the fleet of the Unified Defense League, who had been in the process of surrendering them to the Lurkers—were currently operating on autopilot, executing the attack protocol in the software Rada had uploaded to their system.

  And she still had access to that same software.

  Hands shaking, she took control of a corvette near the fringe of the action, slaving three heavy fighters to it and driving the small squadron toward a pair of Lurker ships that were both somewhat larger than the corvette. The pair was currently engaged in a violent skirmish with two UDL fighters on autopilot, dumping missiles and drones as the enemy did the same.

  Rada maxed out her engines, racing to join the fight. One of the autopilot fighters died in seconds, with the second falling to missile fire just as Rada's team entered engagement range. A red line lanced from one of the Lurker corvettes toward her lead fighter. A chain of small explosions passed through the fighter's hull, breaking it into pebbles and dust.

  The second Lurker ship fired its laser toward the next closest fighter, the beam crackling and stuttering as it plowed into the screen of debris. The nose of the second fighter glowed with heat, but the laser had been too diluted to melt its way through.

  Judging from previous encounters with the Lurkers, they wouldn't have the power to fire their lasers again for several seconds. Rada ordered her ships on full flood, launching three hundred rockets and a dozen drones. The two enemy ships turned about, engines burning hot, but prior to the eruption of the conflict the Lurkers had been in stationary orbit and had no momentum behind them. The missiles closed in seconds.

  The Lurkers let loose a spray of defensive missiles. Too little too late: an advancing tide of rocket bursts snapped toward the nearer ship, consuming it and ripping it in half.

  The surviving Lurker fired its laser, ignoring the closer fighters to carve a hole in the side of the UDL corvette. Atmosphere jetted from the wound, shooting bodies out into space. Rada hadn't thought about it, but all of the UDL ships still had skeleton crews on them. They would be helpless inside, watching in terror as they plunged toward the enemy.

  Two life rafts puffed from the flanks of the corvette just before it broke apart completely. Rada drove her two remaining fighters straight at the lone Lurker. Drones fought like bees, dying so steadily you could set your device's clock to it. The Lurker turned tail. Rada gave chase. Five seconds later, the laser lashed out again, disintegrating another fighter. The Lurker hadn't started running because it was scared: it was kiting them, buying itself more time to power up its laser.

  She launched every last missile in the fighter's banks, leaving it defenseless. Not the kind of thing you'd do if you were on the ship yourself. But it was enough: the converging rockets annihilated the corvette before it could get off another of its red beams.

  Her fighter was now combat-useless. She considered just switching over to a new group, but if she did that, the ship would go back on autopilot and get itself blown up by invaders. No sense wasting a good ship when they already had too few. Rada spent ten seconds charting it a course for a military installation on the moon.

  As she finished, her comm opened up. She drew back instinctively: the face on the screen wasn't human. It wasn't even a face. Instead, two thick black tubes curved toward the camera: one of the two ends of a Lurker.

  "Earth has betrayed its agreement for peace." The alien's voice was smooth and human, largely androgynous but with hints of maleness. Rada had grown up hearing tales of the stilted, overbearing Swimmer speech patterns, and had later spoken with one in person, confirming the stories were true. Swimmers spoke the way you expected an alien to speak.

  But the silky clarity of the Lurkers made your hair stand on end.

  "You will stop your attack immediately," the Lurker continued. "Shut down your weapons and engines and prepare your ships for takeover. Once this message concludes, for every one of us you kill, we will kill a million humans on Earth. For their sake, I hope you understand and comply."

  The message flipped off. To all sides, ships were still lobbing missiles back and forth. Rada didn't check whether she had the ability to pause the attack. Earth had already been betrayed by the Lurkers once, agreeing to surrender, and then being bombed anyway. Anyone who tried to bargain with them again was actively throwing human lives away.

  She made a quick assessment of the available forces, settling on a group of seven fighters in a heavy dogfight with four of the larger alien fighters. The UDL ships had been keeping their distance, which was standard protocol in a missile fight, but being on autopilot, they couldn't see that it wasn't standard protocol to be fighting right next to a planet.

  She directed her ships to press the Lurkers toward Earth, ordering them to roll as hard as they could in the hope that it would spread the lasers' heat out enough to save them. As soon as they were in flight, she switched over to a nearby group of four other fighters, pulling them away from the intercept course they were on and sending them full bore at the Lurkers' flank.

  Her comm pinged again. She let it activate, expecting another Lurker threat. Instead, there was no video at all: just a male and thoroughly human voice.

  "Operative," he said. "You've done your job well."

  Rada leaned forward in her crash chair. "Who am I speaking to?"

  "Your ride home. What say we get you out of here before one of them puts the eye on you?"

  "I'm not sure they even have eyes, but I take your point. Where to?"

  "We've got a ship waiting in lower orbit. Try not to draw any not-eyes on your way down here, okay?"

  A set of coordinates appeared on her device. She punched them into the life boat's nav system. The vessel was little more than a tin can with a set of thrusters, but she'd already built up a little speed and had ducked beneath the worst of the fighting, bringing her relatively close to her rendezvous.

  But she still had several minutes until the pickup. She returned to the skirmish she'd set up. The rolling maneuver seemed to help—so
metimes her fighters could absorb a direct hit before the next laser punched through their hull—and she only lost six of her fighters wiping out the four Lurker craft.

  She drew back her tactical display for a look at the wider situation. The UDL was losing ships at a much faster clip than the invaders, but that was to be expected. What was surprising, even shocking, was that after the initial human sneak attack, the Lurkers were losing any ships at all.

  At the current kill rate, which Rada expected to dwindle as the UDL forces shrank and their odds grew worse, the Lurkers would come out of the action with three to four hundred ships still intact. Most of their ships were bigger, quicker, and more heavily-armed, too, including four behemoths big enough to park a squadron of fighters inside, although Dark Solutions' analysis pegged these as carriers used to shuttle fighters during the interstellar journey which were now obsolete for battle.

  But none of this disheartened her. The point wasn't to win here and now. It was simply to take a big enough bite out of the Lurkers that the hidden fleets of Toman and Kansas could find a way to finish the job.

  Meaning to make the most of the time she had left, Rada regrouped her surviving fighters and joined them to three corvettes with nearly full missile batteries. She sent the squad pell-mell toward one of the Lurker capital ships. The lumbering vessel was easily the size of the human flagship she'd broken into and escaped from minutes earlier to kick off the sneak attack.

  Lasers flicked out, testing range. Rada ordered her team to launch every drone they had at full speed toward the enemy, forcing the aliens to prioritize between the closer but less valuable drones and the more distant but more valuable ships. With missiles flying madly, the carrier hiding behind the capital ship broke hard away.

  Rada narrowed her eyes. The carrier continued to pull away. She typed up a slew of new orders, leaving a screen of drones to harass the capital ship and its fighter escort while diverting two of her corvettes and most of her fighters to zoom after the carrier.

  "Operative," the man said through her comm. "What are you doing?"

  "Following a hunch."

  "You're committing our ships to a worthless objective."

  "I've fought the Lurkers enough to start to know them. When they face real risk, they get spooked. I think there's something more in those ships."

  "Or they're setting a trap for you. Which they also love to do."

  "Could be," Rada said. "But I'm the one with the controls."

  She ordered the drones to fire everything they had at the capital ship, missiles and kinetics alike. One after another vanished in bright blasts of missiles or the searing lances of lasers. Rada diverted three more fighters to hold the line against the Lurkers, who were pressing back just as hard as she was pressing forward, trying to cut off Rada's strike force before it could get through to the carrier.

  A laser cut through the scrum, destroying one of her fighters. A second shot destroyed another moments later. If they kept at it, she'd lose everything before she was in range.

  Heart ramming against her ribs, Rada turned the corvettes on their sides. Blanking out all thoughts of what was about to happen to the helpless crews, she began to vent their atmospheres into the void.

  A laser blinked on, scorching into the wall of gas. Heat registered on the hull of the targeted vessel. Not enough to penetrate.

  She alternated which ship was venting air, the others rolling hard to minimize the lasers' contact point. Understanding what was happening, the Lurkers launched a giant volley of missiles: but then Rada's ships were through, and she opened fire on the fleeing carrier.

  Missiles met each other halfway between the two sides. For a long, long moment, the explosions neither retreated nor advanced, white flashes strobing steadily. Then they began to pulse forward, tracking closer and closer to the carrier until they caught up to its stern. Small plumes of fire shot out from its midline on both port and starboard.

  Then the entire thing went up in flame.

  While the fires of its death were still burning, Rada turned her ships around on the capital ship and its escorts. They seemed stunned, defending themselves sluggishly. On tactical, scores of alien ships changed vector, moving to defend the remaining carriers.

  Rada reopened the line to her rescue you team. "You seeing that?"

  "I might have noticed," the man said. "Maybe your hunch was right after—"

  The interior of the life raft buzzed, red lights flashing around the ceiling. Its device announced, "Incoming missiles."

  Rada's eyes snapped to tactical, as if the life raft's computer might be playing a joke on her. But the missiles were right there, orange dots flying toward her tin can, which was as defenseless as a snail beneath a stomping boot.

  2

  MacAdams had never been much for running, but as he crossed the darkened park—Webber beside him, the white beam of the Elevator behind him, smoke and fire to all sides—he wanted more than anything to break into a sprint and not stop until he was standing on top of the western mountains overlooking the city.

  Webber was keeping up pretty well, which was a puzzler in itself: last time MacAdams had seen him, he couldn't even walk, let alone run. But there were signs his injury hadn't been magicked away. His gait was stiff and he wasn't lifting his legs very high. He was still wearing his environmental suit, but MacAdams had the impression some mechanical apparatus was helping him walk.

  "Are we going anywhere specific?" Webber said. "Or just 'away'?"

  "Looks to me like Rada turned the UDL fleet against the Lurkers. If so, the enemy's going to be too busy dealing with that to bomb us. I figure that gives us about ten minutes to get to the least bombable place in the area."

  "Which is?"

  "Not sure. Was thinking our mysterious friends could help us with that." He got out his device, meaning to reach the city-side Dark Solutions contact who had been trying to help him find and kill President Cannel, and nearly stumbled on the pavement. "Uh. My device is out."

  "What do you mean it's out?" Webber produced his and turned it on, the screen glowing whitely. "Hey, my device is out!"

  MacAdams glanced up at the sky. With most of the city lights dead, you could see the stars loud and proud—and the flashes of pale lightning sparking between them.

  "Satellites must be down," he said. "Local networks, too."

  "So much for getting hold of our contact. We're screwed!"

  "See those mountains over there? The Lurkers aren't going to start bombing them any more than they're going to start bombing the fish."

  "Mountains. Right. The faraway ones that look like they'll take days to get to?"

  "Only if you don't have enough brains to stop a passing car and convince the owner it's in his best interests to give us a ride."

  "Oh, you want to steal it. Now you're talking my language. Takes me back to the Fourth Down."

  For a second, MacAdams had no idea what Webber was talking about, that's how long gone those days felt. Then he grunted with laughter and jogged onward.

  He hadn't gone fifty yards before a man yelled out from the trees ahead to their right. "Help me! Someone help!"

  MacAdams stopped in his tracks. Through the trees, light flashed from a device screen. A man was holding it up to illuminate another man who'd been knocked on his ass and was currently being kicked and bludgeoned by three others. The man's cries turned to wordless screams.

  "What the hell?" Webber reached for his hip. "Should we go help him?"

  "Nope. We should survive."

  MacAdams turned his back and turned off the path, opening ground between themselves and the assault.

  "Hey! Hey, big fellow!" Footsteps crunched through the leaves behind them. "What's the hurry? We just want to talk!"

  There was enough moonlight for MacAdams to see the bat dangling from the man's hand. He gritted his teeth. The park was nearly deserted and there was little chance of being seen, but the last thing he wanted was to draw the eye of the police—or, as was much mo
re likely given the current chaos, to get caught up in mob violence.

  "There." Webber pointed ahead toward the corner of the park, where a set of steps led down to a u-train station.

  MacAdams nodded and took off at a run.

  "Hey! Come back here, buddy!"

  Footsteps came after them. Two sets? No, make it three.

  "You got a gun?" Webber murmured.

  "Yeah," MacAdams said. "But I'm starting to worry I won't have the ammo."

  They came to the u-train entrance. The steps descended into complete darkness; the lights were out on the platform. Once MacAdams was halfway down, he got out his device and turned on the light.

  The stairwell smelled like urine, reminding MacAdams why he hated Earth cities. They were always dirtier than station cities. Probably because when you were on a station, you knew you were trapped in a little artificial bubble with nowhere to go, and if everyone started shitting it up, it would get knee-deep in a hurry.

  He hit the bottom of the steps, flicked off his light, and whirled around. He kneeled and pressed himself to the wall, aiming his pistol up at the rectangle of starlight at the top of the stairs.

  His breathing was loud. So was Webber's. Sometimes he hated biology. Just as he was able to make himself slow it down, a silhouette appeared against the stars.

  MacAdams kept his aim steady. The man peered into the blackness. Unless he was on the right drugs, there was no way he'd be able to see MacAdams, yet he stared on, as if he could feel the two of them down there.

  The man reached for his pocket. Maybe for a device, maybe for a gun; guns were illegal in Liberation, but weapons laws didn't make much difference to someone who was intending to break so many other laws that they needed a gun to do it with.

  The man hesitated. Shook his head. And walked away.

  For twenty seconds, MacAdams stayed motionless, listening to the wail of distant sirens. At last, he backed up from the stairway, tapped Webber on the shoulder, and led the way toward the train platform, shuffling over the grimy tiles. It was pitch black and he reached out his empty hand to make sure he wasn't about to smash his nose into anything.