Opera
Every scifi writer worth their salt had foretold it: once first contact was made, war was just a question of time. Call me naive, but I thought they’d be wrong.
Turns out, they weren’t.
Honestly, I don’t know who’s to blame, and it matters little. We’re human, they’re not, and in the end it’s a question of survival. Or so they say. And believe me, I’ve seen the way they fight and the way we do, and survival it is, all right.
No matter that I may entertain thoughts of peace, I’m no member of the Church of Non-belligerence. There’s no way I could be: what I am is a squad pilot aboard the carrier France. As a member of the military, religion is forbidden for me. Those rumours saying we’re screened? All true. Back in the days when people scrutinized the night with telescopes and binoculars, religion could be a force to rally behind. Not anymore. Religion did not survive first contact.
I don’t regret that loss.
+++
We’re currently on a mission. The battle group of our sister ship, Australia, is approaching the gas nebula from the opposite side to ours, in a by-the-book pincer manoeuvre trying to catch their main fleet between hammer and anvil.
It annoys me no end that we don’t even have a name for them. The enemy just isn’t enough. Some idiot didn’t do their homework back then when we first clashed.
The horn sounds once, twice, three times, and we’re back in realspace. A green light shines in my control panel, and I launch. I align row after row of my drones in formation. I don’t need to look around me; we all squad pilots share a neural link we call the bridge. We know where we are, we know where all our drones are. Thousands of us fly together. We’re the hive that protects the fleet and attacks our enemies.
Something’s wrong. We sense it at all.
We got jamming. Heavy jamming, like the one you use in a real combat situation.
This is a surprise attack. Maybe the enemy practices heavy jamming routinely and we’ve been unlucky to fall in the middle of a practise run. We don’t believe it for an instant: they shouldn’t have known we were coming. Yet they knew.
They knew.
Through the bridge, we share the two possible options: either they can track us when we’re not in realspace, a feat they hadn’t displayed till now, or we’ve been betrayed.
We push the thought aside. It’s useless in battle; the top brass will have to dwell on it, supposing the traitor (or traitors) is not among them. What we have to do is prepare to defend, when we were going to attack. Our weapons are wrong, our configuration is incorrect.
Their jamming blinds our instruments. But we’ve got eyes. We use them. A wall of enemy craft crashes against us before we can even react. They push and we cede. We know Australia is under the same attack. We must protect our carriers. They must not reach them.
We’re decimated.
We’re…
+++
There was no traitor.
It was a ploy.
We were bait.
Their fleet had been assessed. Our two-pronged attack had split their forces in three.
We hadn’t been told four more carrier groups, the rest of our fleet, would launch in after us and onto their center from up and down with respect to us.
They needed us committed.
They wanted us pinning their fighters.
Fighting to the end.
We lost France.
But we won the war.
I am orphaned now.
Floating in space.
~~~~
This is my accompanying entry for the Weekly Writing Exercise: October 24–30, 2016 on the Writer’s Discussion Group in Google+. I am responsible for creating the prompts for the Exercise, so I don’t take part, but I still like to write a story each week.
This week was strange. I had an idea for the exercise, using the Codenames tabletop game as a base, but it didn’t pan out: only one writer took part. Oh well. In the end the exercise was:
Write a story using:
- EITHER the words gas, night, telescope, Australia, church, jam, row and France,
- OR the words penguin, duck, watch, thumb, cliff, pyramid, undertaker, shoe and Tokyo.
- The word poison is forbidden.
And here’s my entry. The title refers to Space Opera, but for once I chose to respect the word limit and my story already was 599 words long, 600 with Opera.
