Star
Blazers, Space Battleship Yamato, and all related names
and elements are copyright © 1998 by Voyager Entertainment, Inc. and Leiji
Matsumoto. Star Blazers is a
registered trademark of Jupiter Films, Inc.
All Rights Reserved.
Nota
Bene: This work of prose is inspired by the original North American Star
Blazers series, and inspired by Uchuu Senkan Yamato to a lesser
degree. However, some events and
character depictions may deviate from the accepted standard. This is a work of fan fiction by “Wicked Good
Grrrl” (a.k.a. Andrea “Ande” Lyon) and is her property.
O-BON FESTIVAL DAYS
By Andrea "Ande"
On that August day in 2199, when the Earth Defense Fleet was to
go into battle against the Gamilons at Pluto, Captain Abraham Avatar came up
with a haiku that was almost satisfactory:
Good land and
water.
For these
necessary things
I shall fight
while I live.
A member of the
press had asked Avatar “what you’re fighting for” just before Avatar had taken
off on the Plutonian Armada. He’d
answered, “Good land and water”. A
forty-some-odd year career in the military had pressed his thoughts and speech
into a kind of bone-crunching immediacy and economy. He’d brooded for a decade over images of
shrinking seas and blasted continents; what else really mattered?
Yet it was
Avatar’s economy-of-words that made him a man given to thinking, and sometimes
speaking, in haiku. He heard
himself verbalize that five-syllable phrase, and then found himself puzzling
over it in odd moments as he tried to come up with the next two lines. But haiku usually contained an element
of transience or death, and Avatar would not write about a dead Earth.
What did it say
that the solution to finishing the haiku was to implicate his own
mortality?
I shall
fight while I live..., he thought.
Grim. How long a time would he
fight and live?
It was during O-bon,
when the Japanese honored and feted the dead.
Avatar missed his late wife Sarah even more around this time of
year. Sarah had been the sort of woman
who liked her beer straight from the can, even when she was dressed up. She had been the better card player of the
two of them, and Avatar had a long, successful career at card-playing. But these were only two of her amusing
qualities, and not among her best qualities.
She was very brave and smart, and he thought she would have liked to
serve in the military; she would have been good at it. Yet the custom of military equality--women
and men serving equally, alongside each other--had eroded by the time Sarah and
he were young. So much progress had been
undone in the years of global warfare.
Now that warfare had gone from global to interstellar, would women even
want to serve?
Ironically,
Sarah might have been alive today if she’d served...
Although it had
been a sorrow to lose her, there was the mercy she’d died before the Gamilons
began their campaign on Earth. She’d
been gone even before they blew up the tenth planet, Minerva, as an example of
their obscene might. She would have
known how far away Minerva was, and would have understood the attendant danger.
Her headstone,
grave site, even her ashes had been vaporized and scattered in the
planet-bombings of 2189.
The senior
officer-on-deck stood and rapped out, “Captain on the bridge!” as Avatar came
out of the ready room. All hands stood
in their places and saluted briskly.
Avatar returned
the courtesy and replied, “At ease.” The
in-flight, pre-battle chorus resumed as the crew turned back to their work.
The bridge was
lit here-and-there with the green glow of various view screens. Chimes, cheeps and “quiet alarms” punctuated
the background hum and growl of the ship in motion. There was the low human chatter of his bridge
officers taking and giving reports, and the slightly tinny murmur of
disembodied voices coming over the intra- and inter-ship comm’ links.
Avatar
shivered. Why was he so cold of late,
and more tired than usual? Shipboard
temperature was usually very comfortable, but he’d suffered a chill, now, for
about a month. Normally he disliked the
ascot that was part of the higher officer’s uniform, though he’d never let on.
The ascot was a damned affectation, made him look neckless, and it fought with
his beard, which pilled the silk. Now he
was grateful for the extra layer.
“Location,
please,” he requested.
“We’re coming
within range of Pluto, sir. Enemy has
not yet made their presence known.”
“Cruising
speed?
“Three-hundred mega-meters per
hour, sir.”
“ETA at Gamilon
airspace?”
“We’ll be there
in about half-an-hour, Captain.”
“Nearest EDF
vessel?”
“Missile Ship
17, the Yukikaze, commanded by Captain Alexander Wildstar, sir.”
Captain
Alexander Wildstar. Avatar had been
grooming hotshot Alex Wildstar for his own captaincy as if it was a way to make
up for the past. Wildstar’s parents had
died ten years ago, when he was eighteen.
Something about that had struck a chord with Avatar, perhaps his guilt
about not being much at home. As if in gratitude, Wildstar and Yukikaze clung
to Avatar’s ship like a faithful hound.
Alex had a
younger brother who was now about eighteen, and was also a recent Academy
graduate…Darwin? Darrell?
“Captain
Avatar?”
Ensign Song,
the communications officer, piped up and interrupted Avatar’s thoughts. Said ensign was one of those jug-eared,
boyish men who always looked a trifle too young, until they hit the
half-century mark. “Would you like to
talk to anyone? I can open up a private
channel.”
The
good-hearted and discrete ensign knew that Avatar’s son was within hailing
range. Avatar had spoken with Abe, Jr.
the night before. The conversation had
been stiff, not as a father talking to his son, but as a superior officer
talking to someone he commanded. Abe,
Jr. was accustomed to knowing him as a military officer before really knowing
him as a father, and that had forced both of them into roles.
Avatar decided
he didn’t need to talk to Captain Wildstar either.
“No thank you,
Ensign. I’ve already said what needs to
be said. Maybe later.”
The Earth
Defense Fleet intel' had suspected that the Gamilon planet bombs were being
launched from a base on Pluto. This
sortie was intended to put Earth ships where they could infiltrate to the
surface and find that base. Trouble was
the resources and manpower were stretched very thin. In some instances there had been as little as
three days to prepare and repair ships and get thousands of men ready.
Three days...!
“Within
captured Gamilon airspace about Pluto, Captain Avatar.”
“They’ll
scramble their ships very shortly, people.
Keep a sharp eye on the face of that planet.”
“Activity
spotted in orbit around the Plutonian equator, sir,” the radar operator
reported.
“Identify,
ensign!”
“Gamilon fleet
is already in the air.”
“Estimated
numbers.”
“One hundred
ships in the near approach. Gamilon fighters…innumerable…”
“Nonsense!”
“Good God!”
someone cried. “The rest of the
Pluto-Gamilon fleet is coming about from the other side of the planet!”
“I asked for
estimated numbers, ensign! How many does
that make now?” Avatar barked.
“Sorry,
sir! One-hundred-fifty ships…two
hundred…they’re still coming!”
“Estimated
five-hundred small fighter craft already debarked, sir,” the assistant radar
chief reported.
Already one
plane for every two of our ships, Avatar thought. “How many Gamilon carriers?”
“There are
currently five Gamilon carriers in the air, sir.”
“Estimated
number of planes they’re carrying?”
The ensign in
charge of crunching the numbers turned in Avatar’s direction, looking
sick. “Those carriers hold up to two
hundred small fighter craft apiece, sir.”
Avatar’s
stomach twisted. He took a couple of
deep breaths. It already looked like the
EDF was outmanned and outgunned.
Into the
valley of Death / Rode the six hundred…
Inopportune piece of poetry to remember right now…
“Get a scan on
their power levels. Figure out where
they are in their firing cycles.”
“Yes,
sir…Gamilons are ready to commence firing.”
“Closest enemy
carrier five mega-meters away, at a stop, sir.
Preparing to discharge complement of small fighter craft.”
“Open channel
to all EDF carriers!”
“Yes, sir!”
“Attention, all
carriers! Commence debarkment of all EDF
fighters!”
The EDF had put
most of its energy into building and maintaining ships instead of planes. There were fighter squadrons here and there
under EDF command, but the top brass were more concerned about having the
larger ships. Avatar had argued for, and
lost, a greater complement of warplanes within the Fleet. He’d read enough history to know that one
couldn’t assert any naval superiority without plenty of small fighter
craft. Someone had forgotten their
history. A raft of someones…
“Captain,
Gamilons have trained their guns and ordnance at us. We are within firing range of their
battleships.”
“Gunnery,
ordnance…at the ready,” Avatar commanded.
At the gunnery
battle station he could hear the creaking and ticking of controls being set,
and weaponry being trained on the Gamilons.
If things on Earth had been different, they would have had computer
systems instead of all this manual crap.
God knew that the Gamilons had no shortage of computer systems…and the
Gamilons had destroyed Terran abilities to keep their own systems. From communication satellites to Avatar’s old
laptop, electro-magnetic pulses from planet bombs regularly “murdered” Terran
electronics.
“Aim carefully,
men. The Gamilons won’t let us have a
second chance.”
There was a
chirpy hail-chime from communications that indicated a message coming in from a
Gamilon ship. Ensign Song reported the
same and added, “Switching on translator, sir.”
Of course,
Avatar thought grumpily.
After listening
to the transmission, Song reported.
“Sir, the commander of the Gamilon fleet has just called for our
immediate surrender. They remind us that
we are outnumbered and they know we are the last of the remaining Earth Defense
Fleet.”
The ensign
hesitated before he continued. “What
shall I tell the Gamilons, sir?”
Avatar knew
immediately what he’d like to say to the Gamilons. He squelched what he wanted to say in favor
of something that wasn’t obscene.
“Tell them they’re idiots.”
“What, sir?”
“I said,
‘Idiots’!”
Within seconds the opening salvo was fired
into the midst of the EDF ships. A
battleship, the Ararat, manned primarily by Turks and Armenians, was the
first vessel to flame and shatter into nothing.
Apparently the Gamilon translating devices
caught all the nuances of his reply, Avatar thought. One last chance to denounce the enemy was as
good as they would get.
Kia-aaa!
Several minutes
into the fray, it was apparent the enemy was going to knock them out of the
sky.
At the same
time, radar began picking up signals of a large craft--neither EDF nor
Gamilon--streaking towards the battle-site.
“Coming in very
fast, sir!” the radar operator said.
Moreover, the
approach of said craft spooked the Gamilon fleet into some unprecedented
behavior. Where several enemy battle-
and missile ships were lined up for clean shots at EDF vessels, they threw
themselves to port, starboard, and even abaft...and re-trained their weaponry
on the incoming ship.
“No
recognizable markings,” someone reported.
“A ship of this kind has never been seen before, at least in this part
of the galaxy.”
“Its speed and
size says it comes from outside our galaxy, ensign,” Avatar judged. “We’ll inspect any available footage
later...”
...if we
survive...
“...and make a record of anything that could identify it. Radar!
Analysis!”
“Yes, sir!”
“Have you any
reading on its trajectory and bearing?”
“Working,
sir...”
The unidentifiable
stellar craft streaked through the midst of the EDF and Gamilon fleets. EDF held their fire and tried to keep out of
the way. The Gamilons were not so
cautious or courteous.
Avatar watched
the barrage of enemy fire peppering the stellar craft as it whizzed past. All of the Gamilons were bombarding that
craft...
What is it
about that ship that has the Gamilons scared? Avatar wondered.
“Captain
Avatar!” reported analysis. “Discordant
readings on flight path of that ship.
Closest we can figure, it was on a course for Earth. Gamilon bombardment has forced it into a
possible collision course with Mars!”
“Relay a
warning to all Martian bases, then!”
The stellar
craft held up through the Gamilon barrage, but was clearly wounded. Part of its hull was beginning to burn and
come apart.
One Gamilon
battleship which was flying backward kept up a steady rain of fire even after
the stellar craft howled past it. That
Gamilon ship--fortuitously for the Gamilons, not so for the EDF--was in line with
Avatar’s Biwa-ko. The latter was
to be on the receiving end of the unintended Parthian shot.
“Incoming..!”
Avatar’s ship
was dealt a crashing blow on the starboard side. Avatar’s balance was shifted so quickly, it
was if he’d walked on a slick of ice.
He’d flung his right arm up and out for balance but couldn’t right
himself. He did a sort of half-gainer in
the air before he landed hard on the deck.
There was a nasty, popping crunch somewhere near his right shoulder
joint. Dislocated or worse? It would explain why he couldn’t move that
arm now...
He got up and
looked around the bridge. Several people
had been knocked down, but were struggling to their places even now. “Everybody all right?”
“Yes, sir,”
echoed around him, even from Ensign Song, now bleeding freely from a forehead
gash. Face plant into his console? His crew would deny even serious hurt just to
be able to keep fighting. This was,
militarily speaking, just as it should be...
A medic
approached Avatar, who was by now holding up his injured arm with his left
hand. “Let me take a look at that arm
then get you down to sick bay...”
“Nothing
doing!” Avatar barked. “See to Ensign
Song--blood’s running into his eyes.
Make sure he’s not concussed. I’ll be all right.”
Avatar watched
as hundreds of Earth Fleet ships popped and exploded all around. There was no color in the fires but the harsh
glare of nuclear white. Each dying ship
seemed to provide its own O-bon light.
Large hunks of Fleet scrap started to drift everywhere, as candles
floating on a river...
“We’re pulling
out now...”
...before
this debacle becomes a tragedy, Avatar thought. Yet such thoughts couldn’t be spoken
aloud. “There’ll be world and time
enough to fight another day. Let’s go
home.”
He wondered how the reclamation of Yamato
was progressing.
Yoshida
Mitsuru, of her crew, had been able to record her last horrific moments in a
sort of after-the-fact diary he’d kept two-hundred-fifty years ago. Yet he was also able to report humorous,
beautiful, spiritually uplifting incidents that happened even as Yamato sailed
to her death. Avatar smiled inwardly,
just a little, at seeing his jug-eared ensign at his post, two new butterfly
closures above his eye and a trickle of dried blood down his temple, very
seriously taking reports from all survivors.
Now if Avatar could pull the imaginary short-knife out of his shoulder,
he might even be able to laugh at himself.
How he must have looked making that deck-dive..!
Eventually, the
EDF-Space Navy fleet was reduced to just Avatar’s ship Biwa-ko and
Missile Ship Seventeen. Avatar hailed
the latter. “Captain Wildstar, this is
Captain Abraham Avatar. Come in,
Wildstar!”
“Captain
Wildstar reporting. How are you, sir?”
One of the
medics standing behind Avatar had managed--rather dexterously--to get a strip
bandage wound once around Avatar’s right forearm and tie the long tails around
his neck: a temporary sling. “I’ve had
better days, and I suspect you have, too.
Be ready to beat a retreat.”
“Ready, sir,
but one caveat...”
“Go ahead.”
“As long as
there are only the two of us, we need to retreat in a formation where one of us
can guard against the Gamilons. I’ve got
a smaller crew but a better range of firepower...”
Not entirely
true, but Avatar wouldn’t argue that point with some of his systems damaged or
off-line.
“...so you
should go on ahead. If it comes to that,
you will bring home more souls than I, should you survive.”
“We leave
together or not at all!” Avatar commanded.
Wildstar was a stubborn one, and if he just spoke with enough
authority... “The Gamilons are just
toying with us right now, and we play into their hands if we split up.”
“There’s no one
protecting your rear, Captain! And
you’ve got four-hundred-seventy personnel on your ship compared to my
twenty! The Gamilons will catch up any
minute now!”
Alarmed, Avatar
barked at Wildstar, “You can’t reduce your strategy to a mathematical
equation! Repeat, we leave together, and
that’s an order!”
“Can’t talk
now, Captain Avatar. I’ll catch up with
you later!”
Wildstar was
determined to his course of action. He’d
killed the radio connection between the Yukikaze and Biwa-ko before
Avatar could completely get out the words, “Good luck, Wildstar.”
Avatar still
felt as if he’d been bayoneted near his right shoulder joint, and it was
growing difficult to breathe. Was he
having a heart attack, or was it the shock of watching the young officer go to
his death, or both?
The Yukikaze
drifted further behind, and the Gamilons fell into ring formation around
it.
Why would the enemy go after a smaller ship?
The Gamilons
were cowards! Bullies! Damn them!
Maybe there
would be four-hundred-seventy survivors to tell of this Gamilon contempt for
Earth’s warriors.
The Gamilon
ships opened fire on the Yukikaze, and they left the Biwa-ko
alone. Avatar watched the doomed ship
open fire with all available weaponry...
How magnificently it flared before its brief candle died!
Namu amida
butsu, Avatar prayed.
Yukikaze
had foundered to nearly a dead stop and began falling, falling in a decaying
orbit near Saturn. The hull had been
thoroughly strafed.
He imagined he
could see someone on the bridge saluting...
“Wildstar!”
But a ship
wasn’t supposed to fall like that...
A brighter flare
erupted. The concussion followed as that
ship exploded...
Avatar steadied
himself on the edge of one of the instrument consoles, and strained his eyes
for some evidence someone had survived...
He remembered
the old tradition of the captain going down with his ship. During WWII, Japanese officers would lash
themselves to their posts so they would not float away to the surface above
their sinking ships...
Such and like,
Yoshida-sama reported, had happened on Yamato. And he, Abraham Avatar, was the one who’d been
tapped to take out another convoy on that refitted ship. Would he survive the Plutonian Armada only to
meet death on Yamato? Was the
pull of history so ingrained that he was sure to die in its repetition?
He would have taken along Alexander
Wildstar to crew her, and his son Abe, Jr...
Dear
God! How could he have forgotten! Abe, Jr. was on Yukikaze!
The medics
summoned earlier to the bridge had hung back at Avatar’s insistence, but were
there to catch him as he fainted.
Two ensigns stationed
on Mars went out on a reconnaissance mission concerning a ship of
unidentifiable origin. Said ship had
crashed on Mars within range of Polar Cap B Base. Messages broadcast from an observer between
Pluto and Saturn said the ship looked as if it had been harried for hundreds of
astronomical miles, and maybe for thousands.
The two ensigns suited up and took out one of the sled-planes that was
in common use around that polar Martian base.
They’d been trash-talking about women when the alien craft wrecked on
Mars, and going out on reconn’ barely interrupted their one-upmanship.
Or rather, the
reconn’ mission hardly interrupted Marc Venture as he gloated in front of his
best friend Derek Wildstar.
“Are you still
sulking over last night, Dare?” Venture said.
“If you are, stop it. You know
I’d never let you take sloppy seconds.”
“Some days I
wish the clap still existed so some floozy could give it to you,” Wildstar
said. Wildstar, who piloted the plane while Venture navigated, envied Venture’s
ease around women.
“You’d be
praying said floozy would spare the opportunity you could catch it, Wildstar,”
Venture replied easily.
Wildstar made a
disparaging remark about whether Venture’s father was really his father. Venture grinned. Both of them enjoyed slapping each other
around verbally, and had done so since their earliest days as bunkmates and
friends at the National Academy of Defense (Aerospace Division).
Even if the
joke about his parentage had been true, Venture had been sired by a handsome man. Venture was fairly tall, with curly,
nearly-black hair and dark-brown eyes.
He was a Japanese national, though ethnically Brazilian, and rather
disingenuously credited his “South American sex appeal” for keeping him in
female company. Wildstar had brown hair
that leaned to reddish, brown eyes, and was merely average in height. He looked the typical Asian with latent North
American tendencies, and he knew he was as easy on the eyes as Venture. Wildstar did pretty well for himself when he
had a mind to go after a girl but expected women to overlook him in favor of
his best friend. Maybe his only problem
was he was too shy when it really mattered, for otherwise any man in uniform
was a big score in those days when Mother Earth might curl up and die.
He’d conceded
Venture’s most recent victory, but was still angling to get back at him. He came into the crash site a little too fast
and hard. Navigate that, you himbo,
he thought, knowing full well Venture could do it.
“Take it
ee-ea-sy, Wildstar!” Venture said, alarmed.
They approached
the crash site to find two crafts: one large enough to be suitable for
interstellar travel and a much, much smaller life pod. The latter looked like some Chesley Bonestell
“pregnant space needle”, and its hatch had burst open. The sole occupant of the craft had stumbled
out, only to collapse in the snow. She
was a lithe, doe-like creature in a sumptuous lavender-rose-colored dress, with
long eyelashes and extravagantly long, honey-blonde hair spilling everywhere.
Wildstar was
the one who checked for vital signs. The
touch of his gloved hands was sensitive enough that he could check for a
pulse. He wished he could take off the
glove of his pressure suit, though, and touch the fabric of the dress she was
wearing--how luscious it looked in color and texture! Was it a kind of velvet, and would it feel,
as it looked, like the skin of a peach?
This woman was
regal enough that he had made a one-eighty from irreverence to awe, and he
suspected Venture felt it too. What garbage
had they been clacking about?
Whoever this
beautiful, foreign woman was, she didn’t seem to have a pulse.
“Is she..?”
Venture trailed off.
“I’m afraid
so.”
“She’s
beautiful!”
“She was...”
They started to
move her while doing a more accurate assessment with a bio-scanner, and a
capsule fell out of her hands. Venture
and Wildstar both inhaled sharply, but the capsule didn’t do anything
suspicious. When they turned a scanner
to it, the capsule turned out not to be a weapon. And it appeared to carry some sort of message…
TO BE CONTINUED.....
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