Jeff Kozzi
The Bedross Ambush
This Sivil Galaxi novel sprang from background material in the Renegades to stand as a complete novel that I thought would be an easy sell due to its shorter length. While stiill episodic, this story's scale is much smaller than the Renegades. Unlike the epic omniscient scope of the Renegades, The Bedross Ambush is told in first person by Cosha Kabenta, one of the ensemble from the Renegades. The predominant trait in this character that comes from me is his caustic tone. I actually had a lot of fun writing this novel because I could indulge in more colorful descriptions than I would usually allow myself in a third person story.
from Chapter One...
Starships exploded all around me.
I yanked the throttle and jammed the accelerators, pushing Starcade forward through the firefight. Kajerist reniks pursued, but my wingman cut through space and spread the battle, allowing my pursuit of the Blakkarrion cruiser that had just destroyed Interpild. Debris from the Liberator cruiser’s aftershock shook Starcade, but my baby’s more than the luxury yacht it had been built to be, as we taught the Kajerists, yet again.
Wave after wave of ball reniks dashed through our fleet. We had some advantage in the fact that the Kajerists are rich enough to use uniform fighters throughout the galaxy. Our targeting computers have an easier time against them than theirs do against us. We Liberators are a hodgepodge bunch of folks, throwing together whatever we can to keep the good fight fought. The lack of uniformity of our ships makes it harder for the Kajerist sensors to lock on to us.
But this battle cost us. More than two thousand people died with Interpild. It carried more troops than it did crew, ground forces that never reached their destination.
I can imagine what losses we might have suffered if the Kajerists themselves actually seemed prepared for this fight. Instead, they were disjointed and disorganized, the recurring disadvantage of the political divisions in their rank and file. Judging from the first distress calls to reach us, the Kajerists didn’t instigate the attack; their Blakkarrion allies did. The Kajerist reniks and warships flew in Dipson spaceways, spreading the battle throughout the system. The Blakkarrion ships stuck close to Dipso’s atmosphere, assaulting the surface. What little intelligence reached Starcade indicated that most of the Kajerist ships came to Dipso for the same reason we Liberators did: the Dipson distress call.
A Kajerist attack is one thing. It means they’re on the move, expanding their rule to another world. A sole Blakkarrion attack is something else entirely. Ask a Puyan or a Mijkillo or a Bind or a Marspentin or a Twijen. The New Qualm survivors watched their world die. Maybe they couldn’t say as much, not only because there’s so few people who escaped New Qualm but also because the overall galactic dominance of the Qualmloids made New Qualm’s annihilation more of a political cause than a personal one. But if you find a Twijen, se remembers. Se’ll tell you about hir family, hir neighborhood, hir island or hir continent. Se’ll tell you how the coastlines boiled as the antimatter explosion ripped out from the globular core.
Ask a Marspentin who looked to the horizon as the wave of annihilation overswept Marspen. Se’ll tell you about the yellow-green glow that lit the skies as the planet’s gravity and magnetics hugged the destruction closer and ushered it along in quicksilver lightning.
Ask a Puyan, who’ll tell you how the antimatter took the planet first, then the homeworld moon. Se’ll tell you how the gases of Urtin fogged from the planetside until Puy’s gravity drew enough to choke the Puyans. Ask hir if se thinks those asphyxiated were lucky compared to those who gave their essences to the energy of the matter-antimatter exchange.
You could ask a Bind, but they’ll answer you with a laser or a bullet. The Blakkarrions destroyed Bindikk. We Liberators found three escaped ships, harboring some seven hundred Binds. The survivors accepted our provisions and ate our food and welcomed our escorts to the little world they resettled. Then they told us plainly and succinctly and with more menace than I’ve heard before or since: Leave us alone. They’re vulnerable to another attack. If they could find it, the Blakkarrions could destroy New Bindikk by forcing its star nova or simply launching a long wave antimatter missile attack. The small settlement, barely four years old, could be wiped out even without destroying the planet. The Binds know that, so if they see your ship coming, they’ll blow it out of space. After all, of the five worlds destroyed in the Jeenikouy Kluster, Bindikk had surrendered before the attack, and had pledged loyalty to the empire. Obviously, neither imperial faction is capable of rewarding loyalty. They shatter trust as efficiently as they shatter lives..
Ask a Mijkillo, if you can find one. Maybe se was flying in courtship when the wave came and evaporated hir feathers, then skin, then muscles and organs and bones. Maybe se was one of the lucky ones—I should say one of the lucky three—who escaped.
I figure my subconscious mind started throwing remembrances of the six already dead worlds when I saw some of the Kajerist ships open fire on a Blakkarrion ship. The Blakkarrions retaliated in kind, destroying the Kajerist fighters before they could report back to the larger cruisers and carriers. The quick fight remained an isolated, almost unique incident. Both imperial factions maintained a united front against their common enemy: us Liberators.
Starcade’s a relatively big small-crew ship. I can fly hir alone, but for the year prior to the Dipso attack, Skippi had been my copilot and mate on any and all missions, Liberator or independent, replacing my daughter after she married Nast. Skippi’s a hot pilot, and can yank my throttle and stick almost as good as I can myself, even though the paranoid lot that I am won’t let him take Starcade out alone. That doesn’t stop him from asking like some kid in want of Daddi’s keys for a midnight ride. Hell, I only let my Femmer do that once.
But the Liberator response to Dipso was a combat mission. We knew that going in, we knew that when we heard the first bit about the ships being Blakkarrion and the missiles being antimatter. Dipso had held out. The Dipsons had said "no" to a race and politic that didn’t take "no" for an answer. The Dipsons had backed up their words with the actions of cannons and batteries and lasertrons. It had been nearly four and a half years since the Blakkarrions destroyed the Jeenikouy Kluster, seven and a half since they destroyed New Qualm. The Blakkarrions probably figured that the free galaxy needed another lesson on the cost of resistance, that the Kajerists needed another reminder as to who’s boss, and that we Liberators needed another lesson in futility.
One of those worlds that got into the interworld arena because someone contacted them and landed on their homeworld, Dipso was a small, forested world with peaceful little fur-face natives, without a high society or native technology. Successful Dipson mineral mining operations first attracted the imperials. Unfortunately, the minerals and metals available on Dipso are also readily available on plenty of other worlds. By Blakkarrion reckoning, Dipso and the Dipsons were expendable.
In combat situations back in 62194, I usually flew with a crew of six. Me and Skippi piloted Starcade like no one else could, except for that ever-unbeatable team of me and Femmer. I take on two other cockpit crew for the navigator/skantek station and the communicator/co ordinator position. Tarsus, bless his grand admiralty, let me choose out of a rotating roster of teks and navs and comms. Then I had a body in each gunglobe, the best Liberator gunners that Tarsus also let me pick and choose.
My gunners for Dipso were elfin Noshinsis, the man-and-missus duo of Tran and Gora Yundoun. I made a point to get them. Not only did they work well together, but also with the cockpit. I flew Starcade in at a winggroup of reniks that tried to block our path into Dipso’s atmosphere. The Yellin’ Yundouns cut right into them. The first exploded out and above, with debris blowing into the stellar wind clear and away from Starcade. That’s a sign of a superlative gunner, one who thinks enough of what the skantek needs to do to keep hir sights clear. That shot came off the topside gunglobe, Gora’s position.
Her husband wasn’t to be outdone. He cut into the lead renik, severing the starboard wingtube. It’s a great shot, the best against a renik, if you want to capture a lone flier alive. Most of the pilot's navigation equipment is lined into the taloned wingtubes, along with most adjusting and the main thrusters. Losing one wingtube cripples a renik. Tran’s shot missed the tube itself but cut across each and every connector between the wing and the ship. Sparks sprayed everywhere for the briefest of seconds. Then the wingtube separated with a twisting motion as the last thruster commands from the cockpit crossed the front of the tube across the renik. The hooked end scraped the ship while the functioning wing lurched the renik without the benefit of balance from the starboard side. The renik veered out of control.
The lead renik’s four remaining followers scrambled to adjust. Their efforts proved futile. The severed wingtube crashed into the leader’s cockpit oxygen supply. Space’s vacuum almost immediately extinguished the brief flashing ball of fire, but not before the pressurized cockpit jettisoned the pilot like a glob of sour phlegm. The pilot soared into space amidst the battle, a fate I wouldn’t wish on too many people. The fighter rolled out of control and pegged the closest of its wingmen, giving what had started to be Tran’s crippling shot into a double score.
The other three reniks swerved to avoid joining the calamity, opening our path for Dipso. Gora spun her ‘globe, targeting the reniks from behind. She hit two of them with a series of lasers. One of the reniks withstood the hit—not every hit makes a kill same as not every kiss makes a lover. But other shots in her goodbye volley seared along the back of the hindmost renik, burrowing up hir afterburners. Both wingtubes exploded, ripping away all the pilot’s control. Pushed aside slightly by the discharge of the uneven side explosion, the renik’s momentum carried the now-wingless ballship away from Dipso.
Our path looked clear, at least for the next few seconds.
"Good shootin’, Noshinsis!"
"Hear you, Kabenta," Tran’s scratchy voice sparkled over the comm.
"How could you not hear me with those pointy ears? Concentrate on Blakkarrion targets now—they’re the ones doing the real damage."
"Three Blak cruisers off the main continent," Nwigg reported from the skantek’s seat. "One of’m’s discharging antimatter some three kraap1 off the coast." She called up specs on Dipso. Her pointed ears flattened against her skull. The close fur on her brow creased and her muzzle tightened, bearing long teeth. "Right on a crustal plate."
My mate Skippi’s a Qualmloid, raised in a Relk hostel on Gardova. I don’t think he ever stepped foot on New Qualm—these charity-case kids don’t get much opportunity to travel, and are generally left to make their wayward paths on their own. He was a bitter little Qualmloid boy and a righteously angry young man. The Blakkarrion destruction of New Qualm gave him purpose, infecting him, like it had so many others, with a racial unity that Qualmloids otherwise hadn’t possessed for centuries. There’s no way Skippi could’ve missed the implications of Nwigg’s reference. The Blakkarrions destroyed Bindikk and Marspen and Twije and Puy and Mijkillo and a few hundred uninhabited worlds in one fell sweep with an overload of antimatter to the black star that held the little cluster of stellar systems together. But New Qualm had been an isolated attack directly against the planet. They dropped their antimatter strategically, into the planet’s natural faults, exploiting the planet’s natural weaknesses. We say Blakkarrion antimatter destroyed New Qualm, but that’s not entirely true. The planet destroyed itself when the Blakkarrion antimatter separated its crustal plates, when further missiles boiled the planetary core from within.
Skippi Episine learned to fly in his wayward youth by stealing starships. He fell into Liberator service as much because they had use for ship thieves to bolster their armada as because he’d already stolen enough Kajerist ships to have several death warrants out against him. He’s young and fun-loving when he’s not spouting his gripes or drinking away his problems—he’s a particularly ugly drunk. By Dipso, he’d been with me for almost a year, and I’d never before heard his voice sound so small and frightened, so absolutely like a typical seventeen-year-old. "They’re going to destroy it."
Nwigg’s snout wrinkled. "Blak incoming, thirty-seven point thirteen point one-eighty!"
The Noshinsis spun the gunglobes, opening fire even before the Blakkarrions came into range. They heard our cockpit chatter, and knew the score. By that time no other Liberator ship had gotten this close to Dipso, even though I knew Podwenh had already called in our findings. Not that we meant to annoy the Blaks while they were busy priming a world to blow, but the Yellin’ Yundouns always did like to be the first to say hello.
Nwigg grunted, maybe to hide a gulp. "Another squadron, sixty-two point seventy point forty-seven!"
"I’m calling backup!" Podwenh barked from the communications seat.
"Like anyone else’ll be this far along," Skippi sniped.
"Everyone else follows orders!" Podwenh jabbed.
Skippi opened his mouth to make what surely would have been some disparaging remark, but I shut him up with a glare and a sharp knuckle to his shoulder. After a year, I still wasn’t used to including Skippi’s personality in the factors to my crew rosters. I get so used to people despising me, I don’t easily get used to having to worry about other people not playing well together if they all play well with me. Fact of the matter was, Podwenh was right. Standing orders told us to disjoint the Kajerist forces, and give Nast’s team time to rally ground forces among his troops and the Dipsons. I had flown ahead for my daughter. That mission became more important as I realized that those forces had no ground to fight on if it evaporated beneath their feet.
"I’m still lookin’ for the confirmation that Tarsus or Tibia got the details on the hit!"
"No response!" Podwenh said. "We can’t count on Dipso’s relays. I didn’t even scan one in place on our approach."
"Gee," Skippi sighed, his three fat fingers dancing over the controls, "maybe the Blakkares destroyed’m once the Dipsons got word out. Maybe you telepathic bugs need someone to think it before you catch on."
Skippi made good crew because he worked efficiently and could still be a snot-nosed, smart-mouth little punk. I always found it endearing, but I could tell it annoyed Podwenh, even before the Hemp flashed me telepathic cues to that very effect.
Podwenh made a good communications officer for more than her racial Hemp telepathy. Communicating telepaths always make the best comms, because they can initiate conversations with other ships with or without technology. Like the Kajerists and the Komans and the Interplanpols and the Blakkarrions and any other military group of the past sixty-thousand years, the Liberators always made telepaths the communications personnel. The sheer number of telepathic races always kept this from becoming real advantage, but a good telepath can shield hirself and hir communications from probes as well as initiate those conversations. "Skip, shut it and watch the boards. We’re go—"
"Brace!" Nwigg hissed. "Brace!! Brasssse!!!"
The first Blakkarrion ships weren’t necessarily coming for Starcade. They dropped antimatter bombs among the mountains between the Starcade and the horizon, igniting a chain of Dipso’s volcanoes. Magma burst into the sky, projecting fiery fury in all directions above and beyond the afterglow of the antimatter drop. I pushed Starcade right for it. I had to bank and yawl, quick, without opening us up for the second mass of ships that came for us, and hopefully without messing up the Yundouns’ targeting too much. They hate that.
The Blakkarrion contact detonators hit Dipso. Flashes continued from the volcanoes, new and original, even after they started spraying the sky with magma. In seconds, the entire mountain range disintegrated before my eyes. The sky overcast with fiery reds and oranges as destruction overswept the land. A pool of boiling lava rose to meet the chasm left by the annihilated mountains. New glowing rivers grew, branching to outline the faultlines of Dipso’s surface. Pure energy flashed white into the sky.
The Blakkarrions had become something of old hands at destroying worlds. Dipso would become their seventh. Their pilots and ship crews knew what to expect. Skippi had versed himself in the stories of New Qualm’s destruction. For all my experience, for all the hatred that the footage of prior worldicides I’d seen had fostered and festered, the sheer destruction against this sparsely populated area of this one world was enough to give even me pause. I thought I was a street-wise old man, untouchable in those regards. I was wrong. My codgy old experience only let me recover a little quicker than my crew. The Noshinsis’ gunglobes fell inert for a few moments. Nwigg’s hiss continued for the tenth or twelfth time she’d warned us to brace, an imposing noise escaping her big feline fangs. Podwenh leaned against the communications console; I had no hope that she’d reached any other Liberator T’s. Skippi performed best, maybe better than us all, because he’s so young and all but the very earliest years of his life have been lived in a galaxy of war.
Skippi never lost hold of the throttle. He made me proud, because I think we would have been blown out of the glowing sky without him. I thought I’d seen horrors of war before, and I had, but nothing like this, no destruction so emotionlessly wanton and random, so calculated towards its final effect. Maybe little could surprise or disappoint Skippi. Tears filled his eyes, and surely his vision was all but gone to the blur of salt water; up until that day I was never sure Qualmloids could cry. But Skippi held onto the throttle and righted the last roll I had sent Starcade into. When the second clutch of Blakkarrions sped forward and fired a barrage of missiles and lasers, Skippi ducked us out of harm’s way, at least long enough for me to recover.
"Yundouns! Return fire!!"
Gora reacted first with a quick, unaimed volley. She didn’t make another kill with that first round, but she did manage to break the tight formation of fighters. The Blakkarrions had done this before. They knew how we voluntary soldiers reacted when we’re shown that no matter how hard we fight, we wouldn’t win. They’d learned to press that advantage. Not only had they destroyed New Qualm and an entire galactic cluster with five naturally inhabited worlds, but they’d circled the disintegrating cluster from the outside and picked off ships full of escaping refugees.
"Podwenh!" I screamed, maybe for the first time not using that affectionate nickname she hated so much, "get us some support here!"
The multiple lenses of her eyes glimmered. I knew Hemps couldn’t cry. Her expression scared me, not of her people or her individual capacities, but with a driving fear of just how deeply the Blakkarrions could cut all people with an attack on a world that none of us owed even a scrap of direct allegiance. "I am trying, Kabenta."
"Third flight coming up." Nwigg hadn’t recovered enough to give us direct three-point coordinates, but she added in the defeated whisper that had replaced her hiss, "From the east."
Starcade rocked as the Blakkarrion flight drilled against the hull with lasers and a single, luckily non-antimatter missile. The hull withstood, but the shaking gave us all enough of a scare to dissipate the last of our paralysis.
"Frig these butchers!" Skippi spat, spinning Starcade directly for the Blakkarrion flight that had dropped the bombs. He primed the Starcade’s torpedoes and set the targeting. I didn’t chastise him for his presumption, gumption and rambunction, and let him fire away while I directed the ship into better alignment for his shot.
The missiles soared amidst the Blakkarrion ships. Three missiles, three hits, five kills. The ships bobbed and crashed. The collision differed from the Yundouns’ strikes. In the atmosphere, on a world with plenty of oxygen, the sparks of the crash ignited. Fire spread across the sky, accenting and highlighting the growing ocean of lava and the brushfires through the woodlands below and the continuing streamers and flashes of pure matter-antimatter exchange energy. The Blakkarrions flew in flights of twelve rather than six. They were imposing aliens, almost twice the size of humans, and unadvanced enough to generally equate more with better. I don’t know that they ever realized how vulnerable their larger squadrons and tight formations made them. Sure, when they flew up against sane or cautious pilots their number could and would intimidate. But the one thing Skippi and I never did was run from fights: we’d both taken the lumps to prove that bit. The Blakkarrions’ tight formation all but guaranteed that three missiles fired in a close ark will make at least three kills. The Blakkarrions’ tight formation fully guaranteed that when three hits went up, more would follow.
But that didn’t change the fact that seven of the squadron remained, and that we had two other full squadrons left to contend with.
Nwigg soon corrected me: "Another Blak squad, seventeen point three point forty-two!"
I snorted. "Potti—!"
"I’m talking!" the Hemp said. She still didn’t look too good....