Simon Hawke - Hammer of Light, Omen of Darkness

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HAMMER OF LIGHT, OMEN OF DARKNESS

by Simon Hawke

A Descent: FreeSpace Story

There was a moment, a brief, incandescent moment, when Creed Harlow could have chosen death.

It would have been so easy.

Instead, he’d hesitated ... just a beat too long ... and now it was too late. By default, he had chosen

life. And now he’d have to live with it.

The Vasudan gunner was damn good. In that fateful moment of Harlow’s crucial hesitation, the

gunner had taken out the Apollo fighter’s entire port weapons bank. One shot. The Banshee cannon

pulse-blast had sheared the entire bank of secondaries clean off their mounting struts, like a laser scalpel

slicing through soft tissue. And now Harlow had nothing left to fight with. The starboard weapons bank

had already been destroyed, along with the primary disruptor pods. The Vasudans knew that; they could

easily see where the GTF Apollo fighter had been crippled, shot to pieces as if some gigantic sledge

hammer had knocked huge chunks right off it.

The amazing thing was that the cabin still maintained integrity. The life support systems were still

functioning, even with the shields gone and over half the ship reduced to slag. And they wanted to

mothball these puppies, Harlow thought. The Apollo was one goddam terrific piece of hardware. He had

been lucky. If anyone could call this luck.

The Vasudan squadron got in close under the pretext of providing escort, which was always

welcome in this sector ever since the Shivans had appeared in the Ikeya system, coming through the node

with some kind of huge, Cruiser-class vessel rumored to be about the size of Rhode Island, capable of

launching somewhere between several hundred and over a thousand fighters. Intelligence was a little

wonky on that score. The reports were mostly secondary sources, panicked subspace frequency

transmissions that sounded hysterical and incoherent ... until they were cut off abruptly. No one who had

actually seen the Shivan Cruiser was ever left alive to tell the tale. So when the Vasudan squadron had

shown up and offered to help fly escort duty for the heavy freighter to the Tombaugh station, Harlow

could almost hear the collective sigh of relief over his com. And that, in itself, felt weird.

For fourteen years, fully half his life, the Galactic Terran Alliance had been at war with the Vasudan

Empire. Harlow had grown up hating the Vasudans. Long before he had ever laid eyes on one, he hated

them with a passion bordering on the pathologic. Among his boyhood friends, there had been no worse

insult than being called Vasudan. Epithets such as "Vasudan slimeball" or "Vasudan scumbucket" were

not just fighting words, they were invitations to mayhem. He had grown up with the daily newscasts

reporting distant space battles, body counts and numbers of ships lost, and colonies destroyed and bases

decimated, and then, when he was seventeen, his older brother’s ship vaporized in an attack upon his

squadron. Harlow had enlisted the very next year, on his eighteenth birthday.

His mother had cried.

His father had been proud. "Go get ‘em, son," he’d said. "Go get those Vasudan bastards."

You spend half of your goddamn life hating the sonsabitches, Harlow thought, and suddenly, one

day, they’re your allies. And not because they wanted to make peace, but because they had no freakin’

choice.

For years, humanity had wondered what would happen if they ever encountered another intelligent

race. As far back as the late 20th century, probes had been sent out with little plaques upon them

showing Earth’s position on a stellar map – not too smart, perhaps – with a little arrow pointing, as if to

say, "We are here." Then one day, after all those years of wondering, the discovery of FreeSpace,

followed by ... contact.

No one could ever seem to agree on what, exactly, started the Terran-Vasudan War. Mutual distrust

was about as good an answer as any. But it went on for fourteen years, with neither side managing to

gain an upper hand ... until the Shivans came.

So far as Harlow knew, no one had ever even seen a Shivan. They just saw their ships. Black and

red fighters, shaped like some kind of space-going arachnids, deadly fast and lethal ... and now the

SuperCruiser, as someone had christened it, which no one could describe, because no one who had

actually seen it had been left alive to give a complete report. What little was known about it was that it

was BIG. Really big. And it was out there ... somewhere.

Fourteen years of warfare with the Vasudan Empire had ended in a treaty and an alliance that could,

at best, be called uneasy, yet rendered necesarry by the simple imperative of survival, because the

Shivans didn’t come to conquer. They came to annihiliate. Pure and simple. If it lived, and it wasn’t

Shivan, it was slated for extinction. It became apparent, very quickly, that the only chance of survival the

Terrans and the Vasudans had was if they made peace and joined forces against this new, implacably

destructive foe that seemed far stronger than either of them ... but maybe, just maybe, not stronger than

both of them together.

So when the Vasudan squadron had shown up on their scanners and made contact, Harlow had

swallowed his natural antipathy, nurtured for over half his life, and accepted their offer to join the freighter

escort conducting the Orion Maru to Tombaugh Station. He had met Vasudans before and though he

couldn’t say he liked the ugly brutes, he was able to put up with them. Just barely. The common good of

the alliance and all that.

He still recalled the first time he had heard about the treaty. It was in the officer’s club back at the

station. "So we’re supposed to trust the bastards now?" he’d said. And he had vowed he never would.

He hadn’t been alone, either. Not by a long shot. But to his surprise, and just about everybody else’s, the

Vasudans had lived up to their end of the treaty. They had shared their resources and technology and, at

least so far as any of the experts could tell, had not held anything back. The results of combined

Terran/Vasudan research and technology had been better ships, better weapons and significant spinoff

from defense-based R&D. Regardless of his personal prejudices, Harlow had been forced to admit that

the alliance was working and the Vasudans were living up to their end of the bargain. So, when the

Vasudans had shown up and offered to join the escort, Harlow had done the one thing he had sworn

he’d never do. He trusted them.

And now he was the only one left.

He didn’t especially want to live. Not now. The entire squadron had been blown apart. At least half

of them were rookies. Kids. They hadn’t stood a chance against the veteran Vasudan fighter pilots. What

was left of their ships drifted in space around him like so much scrap metal. The Orion Maru had been

gutted. Several of the larger Vasudan fighters had made fast to it and sent boarding parties in to loot.

And it was all his responsibility. His blame. He was in command. And after his fighter had been

crippled, and he was drifting, without any ability to navigate at all, there had been that one moment, when

he still had function in his port secondaries, when he could have fired a final shot at the Vasudan fighters

that surrounded him and demanded his surrender. One shot. And then, of course, they would have

finished him. But he had hesitated, and given them the chance to take out those port secondaries before

he could change his mind. With that hesitation, he had chosen. He chose to live.

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