USS Lincoln: Mercy Kill by Mark Wayne McGinnis

Author:Mark Wayne McGinnis [McGinnis, Mark Wayne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-06-17T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 29

Liquilid Empire Star System

USS Adams

Captain Galvin Quintos

I paused the feed, sat back, and rubbed at my tired, burning eyes. Having paused Captain Stone’s final log entry several times, I’d gone back and viewed numerous earlier log entries by Stone and others of his senior staff. I’d needed to get a more complete picture of what had happened leading up to the Lincoln crew’s ultimate demise.

It had been difficult to watch—seeing their growing despair—already knowing their ultimate fate. I stared at the frozen image of Captain Stone … Would this, one day, be my own epitaph? Speaking desperate, albeit altruistic, last words intended to warn others, perhaps another starship captain I would never know, never meet. I’d grown to admire the salty-dispositioned, often sarcastic, and just as often sensitive and nostalgic ship’s skipper. But the past few hours had provided me with more than just backstory. It had offered me, oddly, a different view, a new perspective on the life that I too had shared on such magnificent vessels as USS Hamilton, USS Jefferson, USS Oblivion, and USS Adams. For commanding officers like Captain Stone, him showing his true mettle in making the ultimate sacrifice, already knowing he’d never see his wife, Angie, again; never breathe Wyoming’s sweet mountain air or take a walk with his ten-year-old grandson, Trent; or hell, just sit reading a book by a raging fire with his two rambunctious Irish Setters. Choosing this life had surely been a sacrifice for Stone. But now, as I looked into the man’s eyes, I didn’t see that sacrifice or any kind of resignation. What I saw was the man’s unwavering need to still win. A need to prevail, even with his fast-approaching, all-too-imminent demise. Had he known, someday, that someone like me would be sitting here in this well-worn leather chair, a chair that still held the embedded indentations of his ample backside?

Captain Stone hadn’t known me from Adam, but I felt he was letting me know personally that his cause, our mutual cause, was everything. That this shared cause was far more important, essential, than this, his, lost battle along the way. And that cause was actually so simple. It was the survival of humanity. That trumped everything. That all those personal sacrifices along the way … well, it was an honor to have those to make. Humanity not only needed to survive; it needed to prevail, and to do so right here against this new, particularly heinous foe. As terrible as the Grish were, the Varapin … I knew in my bones, these Liquilids were a fucking scourge upon all things decent. If evil even existed, these beings were evil incarnate.

I motioned for Captain Stone’s eight-year-old video feed to continue.

“Wave after wave of the alien fighters continued to assail us. Initially, our Arrows had a consistent record of taking them down, but that changed. More of these relentless creatures appeared, sometimes with days in between, but they persisted. To make matters stranger, we observed a peculiar

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