Stolen Glory

Nobody can hear you scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. Barron wasn't sure who they were, but the sound of what he hoped would be his final battle cry reverberated loudly in the helmet of his spacesuit. Collision alarms blared through a haze of smoke, and sparks and lights erupted in a chaotic dance in the cockpit of his starfighter. His ragged breath fogged the glass of his helmet but not nearly enough to obscure the giant railgun of a rapidly approaching enemy cruiser.

Barron was ready to die. He had trained his entire life to fight the enemy, and his opportunity for eternal glory was within his grasp. He pictured his starfighter colliding with the enemy railgun and the resulting explosion that would cause a chain reaction with the cruiser's weapons array. Thousands of aliens would die in an instant, and the name Barron would forever strike fear in the hearts of the enemy fleet.

The enemy cruiser filled his entire field of view, and he closed his eyes in total acceptance of his fate.

"Barron!" A voice crackled to life in his ears, drowning out his now ragged battle cry. Barron kept his eyes closed, ignoring the voice.

"Barron, abort! Incoming fire from our capital ship. I repeat, friendly fire incoming," the same voice shrilled in his ears.

Barron's eyes snapped open, and he swore hoarsely. His moment of glory was about to be stolen by heavy rail gun fire from his own fleet. His gloved fingers worked quickly to manipulate the controls that would bring him out of his suicidal collision with the enemy ship. The engines of his starfighter groaned in protest as he grabbed the flight stick and pulled on it with all his strength. He could feel the vibration as the engines of his starfighter dumped a massive burst of energy into space, and the starfighter inched slowly towards the starboard side.

Suddenly, a beam of white energy flashed, bathing the cockpit in harsh light. Barron squinted and held up his hand against its intensity. The beam lasted only a moment, and he blinked his eyes rapidly to try and dispel the dancing fragments that littered his vision. A proximity alarm blared, and his starfighter tumbled into the twisted and glowing debris of what remained of the enemy cruiser.

Barron released the flight stick and sighed. The auto defense system of his craft would do a good enough job avoiding the worst of the wreckage. He needed time to think. The radiation and rapidly expanding debris field would make communication with his battle group impossible for a time.

I should be dead, he thought.

It would have been a glorious death. Barron clenched one of his hands into a fist and barred his teeth. Sharith had robbed him of his glory with her voice, urging him to turn away at the last moment. Why had the capital ship targeted his cruiser? It didn't make any sense with the hundreds of vessels engaged in the pitched battle. Surely an enemy cruiser would be much lower on the list of potential targets with several confirmed battleships deployed by the enemy.

He allowed himself to drift amongst the debris for a while, feeling sorry for himself. He stared at his blinking control panel and the large orange button labeled "return." His gloved finger hovered over the button when a thought occurred to him. He looked frantically out of the top of his cockpit and quickly found what he was looking for, weapons fire, and explosions, not that far away.

His scanners were inoperable this close to a breached enemy's power core, but he was sure, judging by the visual, that he had enough fuel to make the journey. A grin split his face with a sudden realization; perhaps he would get to die today after all.

Barron grabbed the flight stick of his starfighter with one hand and fired up the engines with a series of commands with his other. The starfighter swung effortlessly towards the flashing signs of battle, giving him his first unobstructed view of the enemy cruiser's corpse.

The capital ship had only needed a single shot to scour a deep trench from bow to stern. The strike's impact had split the enemy cruiser into two ragged pieces. Small erratic explosions continued across both sections as pressurized decks met the merciless vacuum of space. Barron frowned as he passed close to one of the pieces of wreckage and noticed the railgun, his original target, undamaged.

"Figures," he said, shaking his head. He slammed his thrusters to maximum and gritted his teeth against the acceleration.

The signs of battle were indeed close, and he let loose a battle cry for the second time. His scanners winked to life and gave him a tactical readout of the situation. Three enemy frigates and a single cruiser had encircled a destroyer from Barron's battle group. A swarm of starfighters from both sides engaged each other in a chaotic dance.

The destroyer was holding its own surprisingly well under the enemy cruiser's railgun fire and the frigate's smaller cannon. If there was one thing about human engineering that anyone could agree on, it was that it held up well under fire. However, judging by the scans on Barron's screen, the destroyer wouldn't last forever.

Short of another suicide run, the onboard weapons of his starfighter would do little to the cruiser. He knew the frigates would rip him to shreds before getting close to the cruiser. On the other hand, the frigates were prime targets for his torpedo launcher. Only a select few of the battle group starfighters had launchers. Barron counted himself among the lucky few.

It came down to the fact that he was highly gifted at killing the enemy.

Barron and his starfighter sped dark and silent towards the closest of the three frigates. The engines of the starfighter hummed, and the craft shook violently as he banked hard and circumvented the chaos of the smaller vessels that were killing each other at an alarming pace. He dropped his scanner from active to passive, cut his engines, and powered down all but essential systems.

The enemy frigate quickly filled the forward view of his cockpit, and Barron took a deep breath. The enemy frigate was lightly armored and covered in overlapping scales that shimmered in the light from billions of stars. The scales looked like they could have belonged to fish from the ocean of ancient Earth. Of course, that was when Earth still had oceans.

When Barron felt the distance between his starfighter and the enemy frigate was just right, he flipped the manual torpedo release lever. He felt the vibration of torpedoes loading into the launcher. His systems were still offline, but the torpedoes would need little encouragement to find their target. He clicked open a transparent cover that housed the blinking red button to launch his torpedoes. He breathed out a long breath and felt a building sense of urgency.

He hammered the red button and howled a cry of battle that sounded hoarse but conveyed all of the raw emotions he felt at the moment. Four torpedoes slid silently into the blackness of space and sped unhindered into the enemy fray. Barron quickly powered up his starfighter and banked hard away from the cluster of enemy frigates.

A flash of energy bathed his cockpit in angry red light as his torpedoes impacted the enemy. He flipped on his rear camera and pulled up the visual on his targeting screen. The camera filtered out most of the electromagnetic radiation. Still, when another of his torpedoes hammered into the second and third frigate, he could not look at the resulting explosions for fear of losing his eyesight.

Barron grinned at the carnage. He really was good at his job.

He brought his scanner and communication array back online with rapid precision of his fingers on the controls. He spun his starfighter to get a better look at the enemy cruiser and the destroyer that traded volleys of heavy weapons fire. There was no further engagement from the frigates that drifted in small clouds of debris as they slowly spilled life-giving air and water into the hungry vastness of space.

"Registering three kills to your record, well done," said a voice that crackled to life in his ear.

It was Sharith again.

Barron frowned and took a moment to steady himself before clicking on his transmitter to reply. "Erm, thanks."

"Sorry about that earlier. There is so much interference I couldn't tell if you fully committed to your bombing run on that cruiser," Sharith said.

Barron breathed a small sigh of relief. If Sharith hadn't been able to record his suicide run, it would at least spare him of the shame that would come should anyone discover that he had committed himself to the ultimate sacrifice and failed.

He hadn't failed, he reminded himself. Sharith had taken the opportunity for a glorious death from him.

"That's ok, Sharith. We still got the job done," Barron forced himself to say. "Status of the battle group?"

Sharith paused, and Barron received an updated data stream that showed him the latest on the fleet's position. By the looks of the map, Earth's battle was not going well.

"Where am I most needed?" Barron asked through gritted teeth.

Silence answered him.

"Sharith? I need orders," Barron said, checking his communication diagnostics screen. He was broadcasting, but the return signal was gone.

Barron growled, and it took all of his self-control not to beat his control panel mercilessly. He calmed himself and studied the fleet movement and began to plot trajectory simulations with his remaining fuel. Only two options remained. One, he could hail the destroyer still locked in battle with the enemy cruiser and attempt to dock. With half of his torpedoes gone, a suicide run would be ineffective. The second option would take him with no fuel to spare into the orbit of one of Earth's battleships.

He squinted at the screen, trying to make out the designation of the battleship, but the skirmish between the cruiser and destroyer was spilling into his quiet space surrounded by dead frigates. He couldn't stay. Option one was off the table given the scan data. The destroyer didn't have much time left, and his starfighter wouldn't make a big enough difference. He had given the destroyer its best chance at survival by leveling the playing field.

Barron plotted his course and made the sign of peace and respect at the failing destroyer by placing his hands before him in prayer and bowing until his helmet touched his hands.

"Die well," he said and launched himself into the sector of space that contained the battleship.

He watched his fuel levels with growing concern and kept tapping the screen to ensure the damage he had sustained wasn't causing a glitch. The levels continued to drop, which confirmed his suspicion. He was going to have to go outside. There had to be a physical leak somewhere.

Spacewalking was dangerous even under ideal circumstances but spacewalking in an active combat zone was downright lunacy. Barron shrugged his shoulders and grabbed the repair kit that was tucked neatly under his seat. The day was turning out to be full of surprises.

He would need to bypass several safety protocols in order to open the cockpit and expose himself to hard vacuum. He manipulated the controls and accepted the warning that flashed on his console. A few keystrokes later, the starfighter computer entered maintenance mode, and the hiss of air pumping out of the cockpit alerted him to his success. The cockpit's diamond layer groaned for a moment and then opened upward, leaving the only sound that Barron could hear was his suddenly labored breathing.

Calm yourself, he thought.

He took a deep breath, knowing that he had a full day of air in his spacesuit under less-than-ideal conditions, and unbuckled the safety harness that kept him strapped into the pilot seat. His suit already had a tether attached to the inside of the starfighter secured with a rugged mount. The idea was that under explosive decompression and harness failure, there was one last hope of keeping the pilot from rocketing into the vastness of space.

Barron knew he had enough line to reel out from the starfighter as needed. He pushed off with his feet against the floor of the fighter and tumbled slowly out of the cockpit. He held on to the line and pulled small bits of slack until he had enough. He let himself drift a short distance from the fighter to observe any vapor leaking from the craft. He found it almost immediately. The leak was coming from the underside of the fighter directly below the engine.

The starfighter was shaped like most ancient earth warplanes. It had a cylindrical body, two wings, and a tail section. The front of the ship was more expansive than its terrestrial cousins and contained scanners, weapons, and heavy shielding. There wasn't a great need for aerodynamics in space. Why the craft still had wings was a design choice that didn't make sense to Barron, but he was a fighter pilot regardless.

The large engines to the rear of the starfighter were usually glowing with energy, but with the ship stationary and in maintenance mode, they lay cold and silent. He stared at the cloud of frozen vapor and thought for what was probably the thousandth time that it was amazing that starfighters still used liquid propellant for fuel. Frigates all the way up to capital ships used fusion reactors that powered everything from engines to weapons to flushing toilets. Science hadn't reached a stable core small enough for a starfighter yet.

Barron reeled himself in enough to create the momentum he would need to flip under the fighter to where the leak should be. When he reached the underside of the ship by bouncing off the armored surface a few times, he frowned at what he observed. A large piece of debris had torn a gaping wound into the engine housing. He looked down at his repair kit that hung from his belt and knew instantly he didn't have what he needed to fix the amount of damage.

He looked at the gaping wound for a long while and decided he would do what he could with what he had. He knew that he was reducing the effectiveness of the engine significantly with what he was doing and even if it worked, the amount of fuel loss was alarming. Minutes turned into hours as he welded breached components, clipped and spliced wires, and plugged hoses that sprayed precious fluid into space.

After several sweaty hours with his water reclamation suit alarm blaring in protest, Barron sealed the final conduit he could reach. The ship was still leaking, but its flow had been stymied. His hands were cramped, and his back burned with the strain as he reeled back into the cockpit. When he was safely re-harnessed and the cockpit sealed successfully, he pumped sweet air back into the ship and removed his helmet to rub his soaked shaved head of black hair with a service towel and to clean his salt-crusted face.

Decompression was a common ailment for starfighters. He was breaking protocol again by removing his spacesuit helmet. Once he felt slightly cleaner, he replaced his helmet, sealed it, and inhaled the sweet smell of recycled air. He did like recycled air for some strange reasons.

The starfighter limped its way under partial thrust towards the last known position of the battleship. Barron left his communication channel open, hoping to catch any chatter from the battle. After a time, he wondered if his array had also sustained damage as he heard only static.

After several agonizing minutes, he saw signs of an intense battle ahead. Explosions and weapons fire lit his horizon and caused his scanner to trigger multiple alarms. Barron ignored the alarms. He could see what was happening and knew he was drifting into a war zone.

One alarm that he did pay attention to, however, was the one that flashed fuel critical. He knew he had enough for one or two slight course corrections before he was adrift. He programmed a large burn and tipped his starfighter towards where the largest weapons fire originated. That had to be the battleship.

He closed the distance quickly and observed a severely outnumbered Earth battleship laying waste to alien vessels by the dozens. His breath caught in his throat when he realized the ship that filled his vision was the ES Witch King. Barron knew his mouth was hanging open at the sight of the fleet's most famous and heavily armed battleship.

He manually rotated his communications array, pointed it at the Witch King, and spoke as calmly into his headset as he could, "Barron to Witch King command, please respond."

Static hissed back at him.

"Barron to Witch King command, please respond," he repeated.

Static was his only reply. He was running out of time.

Barron knew the layout of the Witch King well enough to identify where the fighter bay would be, and with the last of his fuel burned towards the hanger doors. Enemy fire and ships were everywhere, and he knew he couldn't take evasive action even if he wanted to. His starfighter was like a leaf in the wind. He took his hand off the flight stick, closed his eyes, and surrendered himself to his fate.

A sudden jolt made his heart skip a beat. He cracked open an eyelid, and tears nearly overwhelmed him. Blue light swirled around his starfighter, cradling it in magnetic energy. The Witch King tractor beam had a hold of him and was pulling him into the waiting fighter bay. He had gone from accepting death to fighting for his life and being saved - all in one day.

He opened both eyes and howled in victory, wondering if they could hear him now.