Vila’s hands froze over the neutron blasters. The two alien ships coiled through space towards Liberator. Their hulls blazed with light, and a glittering tail of luminescence curled in their wake. It was almost hypnotic.
Jenna was yelling something at him. Or someone else. Or everyone. Or maybe just yelling. He felt like screaming himself. Instead, he grabbed hold of the console before him, just as the alien ships smashed into the flare shield.
A deep vibration struck up throughout the flight deck, juddering and shaking him to his core. It was disorienting, slightly nauseating. Vila slammed back in his seat, and gripped the console even more tightly in a desperate attempt to stay upright. Distant alarms blared. A rattle of debris on the outer hull echoed throughout the room.
There was fresh yelling in his ear. Too close for Jenna. It had to be Avon.
‘You have them, Vila. Fire!’
Vila risked letting go of the console with one hand, and prodded hopefully at the activation control for the neutron blasters. It loosed off a fusillade of shots. Two, three, more…
The lights on the view screen flared brilliantly, blindingly. The flight deck tilted sickeningly to one side, and then just as abruptly to the other. When his eyes recovered, Vila saw only sparkling debris where the two alien ships had been.
‘Got them!’ he shouted, almost delirious with delight. ‘I got them!’
‘Well done,’ said Avon. There was a grudging note in his voice. ‘Stay alert. There’ll be plenty more.’
Vila stared at the back of Avon’s head, visualising a target. ‘It’s only your encouragement that keeps me going, you know.’
But Avon had already crossed the flight deck, and was sliding Orac out from a side cabinet. He swept his hand across a table, scattering onto the floor what few items had not already been thrown there during the violent manoeuvres of the previous few hours. When he had Orac on the table, Avon slotted the activation key into place. A querulous whine indicated that the computer was active.
Avon placed his hands either side of the transparent box. ‘Orac, what have you discovered about the alien fleet’s intentions?’
Orac responded immediately in his familiar irritable fashion. ‘As I have mentioned before, your frequent and impertinent interruptions do not change the situation.’
Avon slapped one palm against the side of the computer. ‘Your regular and predictable evasions aren’t helping, either.’ He tried again. ‘What have you found?’
This time, there was a pause before Avon got a reply. Vila thought that Orac’s tone was now more evasive than aggrieved. ‘The alien technology is too inferior for suitable analysis.’
Avon gave a great laugh of derision, an odd contrast to his coldly imperious command of Liberator so far. ‘Of course! Their systems do not use Tarial Cells. Therefore, you cannot interrogate them.’ Avon’s humour didn’t last as he pondered the implications of this. ‘That doesn’t make them stupid, Orac. It makes them impenetrable.’
‘I thought,’ said Vila, ‘that all computers in the known universe were based on Tarial Cells?’
‘Well, you’re looking at the unknown universe now.’ Avon gestured expansively towards the view screen. In the distance, hundreds of alien ships lurked beyond the satellite defence barrier. ‘Orac, try something else. Assimilate all Zen’s current long-range scan data, and cross-reference it against the known movements of the alien fleet over the past two hours. Extrapolate their next moves, and advise.’
‘If you insist,’ grumbled Orac.
‘Oh, I do.’ Avon snatched at the activation key, and the chattering whine disappeared as he left Orac to complete the assignment. Avon slid the computer back into the side cabinet.
Vila wanted to ask what Avon had actually asked Orac to do, but Jenna was already calling over to him.
‘Watch it. Some of the smaller ships have broken through.’ She studied the display in front of her. ‘Must be…’
‘Half a dozen,’ suggested Cally.
Jenna was already steering Liberator back into a defensive position. ‘Here they come.’
Vila looked wildly at the view screen. A scattered group of gleaming points of light twisted towards him. Two of them executed an eccentric route that followed no logical pattern. The others zoomed larger and larger, aimed unerringly at the Liberator. He stabbed repeatedly at the neutron blasters, unsure whether just to blast away at random in the hope of catching all of the attackers, or to concentrate on fewer, more targeted shots and risk missing some of the others.
‘They’re too fast!’ he wailed. ‘I can’t pick them off.’
Jenna wasn’t making it any easier, he decided. Perhaps as a result of the previous attack, she was shimmying the ship from side to side to make it less obvious which direction they might finally commit to. The engines swooped and boomed. The view screen wobbled in response, and Vila quivered along with it.
‘There are more coming!’ Jenna warned him.
‘Another four,’ Cally confirmed.
Jenna twisted Liberator aside, and the ship rolled abruptly. But it was to no avail. ‘They’ve got us in a pincer formation!’
A coruscating barrage of alien blasts pummelled the Liberator. The flight deck lit up, brilliant light searing from the main screen until the automatic filters cut in to compensate for the painful brightness. The ship’s engines dipped ominously, then re-established their familiar note. Vila wondered if the defences had been breached. Were they holed? Could they still defend themselves from this fresh onslaught?
He examined his readouts worriedly. He wasn’t optimistic at the best of times, but this really didn’t look good. ‘Our neutron blasters are almost exhausted.’ He looked over at Jenna for reassurance.
She had none. ‘The force wall is failing, too. Zen, what’s our status?’
‘DEFENCE FIELD NOW AT TWELVE PERCENT EFFICIENCY. BATTLE COMPUTERS PROJECT THAT CURRENT RATE OF DAMAGE WILL EXHAUST THE AUTO-REPAIR SYSTEMS IN TEN MINUTES.’
‘What was that?’ asked Cally.
Vila saw that she had her head tilted at an angle, as though straining to hear something. ‘That was our last chance of survival!’ he told her.
She didn’t seem to hear him. Or maybe she was concentrating on whatever had caught her attention. Though what she could possibly hear above the cacophony of the alien assault, Vila couldn’t imagine. He returned to his controls, firing the neutron blasters as the alien counter-strike continued. Liberator‘s hull groaned ominously.
‘Can’t you hear it?’ Cally asked. Her voice was insistent, but so quiet that she was barely audible beneath the noise of the attack. ‘It’s a babble of voices… a kind of continuous chattering…’
‘The aliens!’ groaned Vila.
‘Or,’ suggested Avon, ‘she’s been listening to you for too long.’
‘INFORMATION. DETECTORS INDICATE SEVERAL HUNDRED ADDITIONAL SHIPS APROACHING LIBERATOR, VECTOR SEVEN-NINE.’
‘At last!’ A surge of relief flooded through Vila, almost as good as a slug of soma. ‘The Federation fleet! I never thought I’d be glad to see them.’
‘Impossible,’ snapped Avon. ‘They are a long way off. Zen, identify those ships!’
‘THAT INFORMATION IS NOT AVAILABLE.’
Jenna already seemed to be considering other possibilities, but the instrumentation was not helping her. ‘Rear sensors have been knocked out.’
‘I only realigned those the other week,’ grumbled Vila. The emotional rush had well and truly dissipated. ‘I don’t fancy going out there again, Jenna. Those hull suits make me claustrophobic.’
‘Auto-repair should be able to handle it,’ she reassured him.
‘Not at this rate of damage,’ said Avon. Trust him to crush any remaining optimism.
Vila was exasperated. ‘We’re surrounded! Defenceless. Blind. Let me know if I’ve missed any other kind of catastrophe. I’d hate to die misinformed.’
Avon clearly still couldn’t believe the evidence of the readout in front of him. ‘How the hell did so many alien ships get behind us?’
Vila glared at him. ‘You know what they say about “fight or flight”? Well, I’ve always been quite keen on flight. How does that sound to you, Avon? Jenna?’
‘Neutron blasters are depleted,’ she replied. Her choice was clear, at least.
Avon was still searching for straws to clutch at. ‘We’re running out of options.’
‘Running out sounds like a pretty good option to me!’ Vila retorted. ‘So what’s keeping us here?’ He twisted around to appeal directly to the others. ‘You agree with me don’t you, Jenna? And you, Cally?’
Jenna was frowning. But it wasn’t Avon she was worried about. ‘Cally? Are you all right?’ There was no reply.
A fusillade of alien fire raked across Liberator, and a control panel next to Zen exploded in sparks. Everyone ducked instinctively.
Everyone, Vila noted, except Cally. She remained standing by her console, rocked from side to side by the lurching movement of the flight deck, yet otherwise unmoved by the bedlam around her.
Her expression had glazed over. Despite the commotion of the alien bombardment, her attention was somewhere else entirely.