The Little Time Allotted Us by Laura Paquette

Author:Laura Paquette [Paquette, Laura]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-03-05T00:00:00+00:00

Official Record

IN A DAY, COLOMA shook as ZAX ships breached the atmosphere, their giant hovering ships so loud that windows broke across the city. Within hours, citizens demanded something be done.

In two days, the Coloma City Senate had voted.

In three days, President Buck Davids had declared war.

On the fourth, bombs rained.

Besieged

YELLOW BLASTS MELTED AGAINST Coloma’s shields. Fissures of light shivered down the dome and fizzled out in the grounded rods outside the city. The streets were silent. Buildings projected a flat gray, with bogus heat and energy signatures.

“The shields have two days left,” Davids said.

Coloma’s guns had been popping ZAX destroyer hulls like bubblewrap, but their jets extinguished the flames as the giant ships patched themselves and shielded their smaller vessels.

“The underground has another month,” Davids said. “But the damage to the arable land will be severe.”

Khair, Taivan, and Sophie sat at a round table on the capital building’s greenhouse roof, with Davids and his cabinet. Jiao led the dogfight above.

From here it looked like rugby, lines of ships forming and spiraling out as they punched through and reformed, spinning and hurdling from chasing missiles.

The cloud of smoke from exploded dogfighters was smaller than the smokestack jettisoned from a scratch on the destroyers. There was no way to tell whose ship exploded or what class it’d been, hot metal hailing and dissolving on the shield.

No way to tell who was winning, either.

“Stuff everyone underground,” Khair said. “Throw down the shield like it failed. Then when they land, we can raise it again, dividing their forces.”

Moore shocked her, little more than a tickle, and only after she had finished. UOD would watch this battle. So, they competed to keep their cover, to keep their feelings docile and avoid a feedback loop. Seven destroyers looming overhead didn’t help. All battles could be deadly, but this was on a scale neither had seen: each destroyer was the size of a town and the Dreadnought was big as a city. They stuffed the horizon and snuffed out the sun.

Taivan grounded Khair. And not just because his knee nudged her thigh whenever a floundering jet exploded above her. He watched a three-dimensional view of the battle, rotated perspectives and adjusted the magnification, compared current enemy movement with past tactics and relayed opportunities to Jiao. Nothing was too vast when it fit in his hand.

Coloma ministers gawked and glared. Their generals took notes. Taivan wore a headset and took no more notice than a bear sharing a cave with rabbits.

“They’d level everything above ground and kill our waiting ambush,” Davids said.

“If you sortie out from—”

“Or we can surrender these mercenaries,” a secretary of something trivial waved at them.

Taivan snorted a laugh, covering his microphone.

“That’s enough,” Davids said.

“Go on.” Taivan said, voice beige neutral, not looking up from the model. “Enlighten us with your martial prowess.”

“The only way out,” the minister, so old he belonged in a museum or better yet, a mausoleum, said to Davids. “Is for you to step down in favor of someone who hasn’t yearned for war since they took office.

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