by Tim C Taylor
They destroyed the enemy’s upper level orbital platforms as they passed through that sector, but again their missiles could not penetrate the corrosion barrier to damage anything lower.
But would that matter?
All of this was merely a distraction, cover for Arun.
And his ridiculous, brave ship, named the Hotchelpis after the Jotun deity of good fortune, continued its ascent.
Just when she thought the Hardits might be leaving the ship’s destruction to the corrosion barrier, New Order medium-range SAMs launched from Russia. The last hoarded remnants of General Aelingir’s anti-missile defenses revealed themselves and sent up powerful defensive barrages to protect Arun’s ship.
Eleven klicks up already, and not a scratch.
Then came the moment she had been dreading. Some of the lower level orbital platforms – they hadn’t the intelligence to know how many – housed fast-reaction fighters capable of void and atmospheric flight. These de-clamped from the underside of the platforms and ignited powerful engines.
The enemy fighters closed in on Arun’s vessel.
— Chapter 64 —
Three! Three! Sector Leader Uelemas-Xal had just three fighters at her command! Where were the others?
“Sectors four, seven and nine have fighters within strike range of northern Europe, sir. They are refusing to reinforce us.” The senior coordinator lifted her tail in humility. “Sir, could you talk with the commanders of these other sectors?”
“No, Reyayan, I could not.”
Reyayan allowed a little whiff of challenge pheromones to escape. Idiot. Did the fool not understand what was going on here?
Obviously not. Reyayan’s shoulders tensed. Was she actually going to challenge her rightful superior for command?
There was no time for this foolishness. Uelemas-Xal swallowed her pride and explained herself. “The reason I can’t contact my fellow sector leaders is because they are either dead or as good as. It is probably only a temporary oversight that I myself retain operational command of this sector.”
The tension left Reyayan’s body and her lips slackened and drooled. Oh, yes. She understood now.
“Our supreme commander is purging the glorious New Order military forces of any element that could one day threaten her absolute authority. Which means it is down to us alone to swat this fly rising through the putrid London air to meet us.”
“Flight Leader Naldreg reports ready to attack,” called the signals coordinator.
“Then tell the flight leader to stop reporting in and start blasting those stinking nefnasts out of the sky.”
This had better work, thought the sector leader, but she had little confidence that it would.
Over Europe, the outer layers of the fast-deployment orbital defense network had been blasted away by the Legion. The inner layer – the platforms below the corrosion barrier that began at an altitude of about one thousand miles – were directed down at controlling the planet below but were deliberately starved of munitions. Since Tawfiq’s choreographed rain of fire as the barrier had first slid into place, their loadout had been limited to the minimum necessary to disrupt the Legion’s surface operations. The supreme commander could control the planet from here if she wanted to, but first she intended to reassert her personal authority over the defense platforms.
Typical of Tawfiq to cripple her military at just the wrong moment – or did the Legion have intelligence on the inside? She had heard dangerous whispers that the foreseer allies were plotting against the New Order. That the disgusting creatures could not be trusted was obvious to everyone – everyone, that was, who hadn’t been bewitched by their lies.
Plots and rumors circulated so thickly on and beneath the Earth’s surface that they had spread their cancer as far as orbital defense. Uelemas-Xal had no time for them. Her sector was a bastion of sanity… Maybe the other commanders really had been plotting?
None of that would matter if Naldreg’s preening flight crews didn’t shoot down the stupid contraption coming at them from Europe then… A shiver of fear rustled through her fur. No. No, it didn’t do to dwell on the consequences of the supreme commander’s displeasure.
At last, the attacks were going in. Naldreg’s miniature formation of three fighters engaged at an altitude of thirty miles with missiles and wing cannons.
Hits were registering!
But still the Legion craft plowed its way through the sky.
Naldreg’s fighters came in for another run. Fire blazed across the strange ship’s hull. Clouds of debris blackened the upper atmosphere. And still the nefnasts climbed higher.
“Why don’t they die?”
Reyayan failed to appreciate the rhetorical nature of the question and answered. “Our attacks are defeated by a combination of force fields, defensive munitions, and the fact that whatever does get through explodes against another layer of their defensive shell that they simply jettison away.”
Uelemas-Xal watched her fighters come in for another attack run. With the same dismaying results.
The Legion was trading the expendable portions of their ship for distance, and it appeared that most of the contraption was expendable. All the enemy needed to do was for the Drakhnix-Lho fuselage to reach the Legion warboats that were circling in high orbit like salivating scavengers, and the secret of the barrier would be compromised. The executions of everyone responsible would follow swiftly, although the deaths themselves would be excruciatingly prolonged.
“Sir,” Reyayan reported, “I am detecting an unauthorized ground launch.”
“Origin?”
“Victory City.”
“Deep within the Americas!” Uelemas-Xal flicked her tail at this subordinate afflicted with chronic idiocy. “Where the Legion has not yet dared to tread and never shall. Leave it be. We have a genuine crisis to deal with.”
“Yes, sir. Codes identify Americas launch as the supreme commander’s private shuttle, but there’s no flight authorization and the pilot is not responding to hails. Something about it seems… off. Should I contact regional command for advice?”
“No, you should not. The regional commander on the ground has gone missing. The regional commander in orbit is also suddenly unavailable. As far as I know, I am the most senior officer in the entire network to survive the supreme commander’s reorganization.”
“Reorganization, sir? I wasn’t informed.”
“Idiot! Do you really not understand what I’ve been trying to tell you? This is a purge. That vessel is the supreme commander’s personal shuttle, and you want me to turn our guns on it. Are you insane, Reyayan?”
“Sir, with due respect, it is my duty–”
The Sector Leader drew her sidearm and shot the annoying junior officer through the head. “Replace this dog with someone who has a thread of sense in their head!” she shouted at the terrified deck crew.
As subordinates rushed to obey, Uelemas-Xal pushed Reyayan’s corpse away and used her station to patch through to the neighboring platforms – the ones with fresh fighters that remained in their clamps.
“To anyone receiving this, I am Uelemas-Xal, acting commander for this orbital level. You can all see that Legion ship over northern Europe. I understand that you’re scared of your own tails with all the sudden reorganizations, but if we don’t destroy it, we’ll all be executed. So, if you value your lives, you are going to help me take it down, and here’s how…”
— Chapter 65 —
“Enemy fire is slackening,” said Ensign Skalzan. Aelingir had designated the young Jotun as Fire Control Officer, though Arun wondered whether this was a Jotun attempt at humor, because their craft had no offensive weapons. The New Order orbital platforms and atmospheric fighters had no such limitations.
“We did have a hidden intelligence source who said we would emerge unscathed,” said Aelingir. “Perhaps she will be proved right.”
Springer was sitting alongside Arun and offered no reaction. Aelingir was twisting her words. She’d s
aid the mission would succeed. Not the same thing.
Nonetheless, Arun dared to hope that the unlikely craft had now successfully punched through the New Order’s aerial and orbital defenses. Naming her Hotchelpis had paid off! The display at his position showed the pronounced curvature of the Earth as they traversed the lower reaches of the corrosion barrier on their way to Indiya’s navy. The outer shell was already disintegrating like sodden cardboard, but it had been designed to fall away in multiple lines of defense. The metal and armor composites were sandwiched within high pressure air bubbles, which were themselves trapped inside force shields. Maybe whatever it was that ate away at the fabric of a battlecruiser could be defeated by an air barrier? The truth was that no one knew. The last line of defense was the captured vessel itself. It had gotten through the barrier when it was under New Order control. Did it need the right security codes to pass through the barrier, or was a defense embedded inside the hull? None of the Legion techs had found any answers.
Could we jettison the shell now and accelerate unscathed through the barrier? Arun wondered. Let’s hope we never need to find out.
“They’re not finished with us yet,” said Springer grimly. “Look…”
Arun accepted the feed she was sending to his display; it showed enemy fighters massing below them, about 800 klicks above the ground.
“They can’t afford to give up,” Arun replied. “Tawfiq is not forgiving of failure. Doesn’t mean they’ll get through our defenses this time.”
But he wasn’t so sure. The lower extremities of the corrosion barrier had already eaten through the outermost air bubble and was corroding away the armor within. With each second that passed, they were less able to defend themselves, and although he counted only eight enemy fighters, they were now headed on intercept
Arun nodded at the Jotun crew on the main deck about ten feet below. “They don’t seem worried.”
Springer laughed. “So long as their honor isn’t at risk, the most reaction you’d get out of Aelingir’s team in the face of certain death is a microscopic ear twitch.”
“That’s what I was looking for,” Arun replied. “Didn’t see one.”
He shut up, his attention captured by the New Order fighters closing fast. In the earlier attacks, down in the lower atmosphere, the enemy fighters had swooped and banked to get at them, but up here the air was so thin, they were effectively operating as void fighters.
The enemy didn’t bother with maneuvers. They simply came in on fastest intercept.
Barney quietly confirmed the analysis of the TPA-6C tactical computer they’d installed in Hotchelpis: the Hardits were going to hit them at point blank range, one after the other.
Arun felt so helpless but there was nothing he could do but interfere, and he’d learned the hard way not to do that.
In came the enemy, blasting fury from wing-mounted weapons pods and nose cannons.
Again, the Hotchelpis defended herself with point defenses, the portable force shields strapped to the outside, and the detachable outer layers that the crew shed like seeds from a dandelion head, soaking up the brunt of the Hardit attack. The one defensive measure the Hotchelpis did not deploy was the one thing she did not possess: maneuverability.
The lead fighter kept coming… and coming.
“Brace for impact,” came a shout from the main deck.
“Vulley me,” screamed Springer, which amounted to the same thing.
A fighter at ramspeed? Disbelief that this was really happening numbed Arun in the fraction of a second remaining before a crash deafened his ears, and a jarring impact shook him like prey caught in a predator’s jaws.
But when he glanced at his console, they seemed to have survived the attack. Some of the outer shell had sloughed away, but the fuselage was still pressurized, even some of the air bubbles encasing them still held.
So why were the Jotuns flicking their ears in consternation?
Another New Order fighter hit them, and this time he made himself ignore the thunderclap of impact and coolly observe the outcome on his console screen.
The enemy fighter struck them a glancing blow, scraping itself along the armored nose cone of the Hotchelpis. The enemy fighter looked like a slimmed-down version of the captured craft Arun was strapped inside. That meant all of its armor was over its nose, not along the fuselage, which ripped open along half its length. It passed by, and for a moment it looked like a wounded animal with a bloody gash gouged out of its flank – wounded but undaunted. But they were inside the lower reaches of Tawfiq’s corrosion barrier. Whatever had protected the enemy fighter now failed. The edges of its flank wound widened, burning away like smoldering paper.
Debris was sucked out of the aircraft, some of it still alive.
Time slowed as Arun watched a Hardit being sucked into the air. Inside its anonymous green pressure suit with an opaque visor over its snout, it would have seemed to him disconnected from the horror about to unfold, if not for the way it waved its limbs and tail frantically.
Arun set the external camera to follow the Hardit’s descent through the gossamer blue of the upper atmosphere. The corrosive barrier bubbled away the suit and helmet but then paused after liquefying its victim’s fur and tail while it worked its way through tough hide. A part of Arun’s mind had just enough time to note that the barrier corroded artificial materials faster than skin and fur. Then the Hardit’s skin was gone and Arun saw its naked heart beat one last time. A flash image of a skeleton with a grinning snout burned into Arun’s mind and then the Hardit vanished.
Arun felt a welling up of pity until he remembered who the New Order were, and what they had done to the humans on the planet where he’d grown up, and to him personally.
“Rot in hell,” he whispered at the patch of empty sky that had consumed the Hardit.
The fighter’s crew were already dead, but Arun knew their suicide strike had succeeded. They hadn’t tried to hole the Hotchelpis, only to nudge her off course.
“Our vector’s wrong,” said the pilot. “We’re now suborbital, and we don’t have enough delta-v to reach escape velocity. We’re coming back down.”
Rather than ram them, the Hardit fighter now in the lead veered away. The other surviving craft fired at the Hotchelpis, whittling away at the defenses of this easy target.
“Gunnery solutions?” Springer asked.
“Negative,” Aelingir replied. “Both gunnery blisters were left behind in the River Thames. We armor-plated over the gaps. I never imagined this would turn into a dogfight. It was all about speed and survivability.”
“Can we dump mass?” asked Arun from his seat on the upper deck.
Aelingir and the crew down below on the main deck froze for a second.
“Negative,” replied the Jotun pilot. “If we discard the shields, they’ll blow us out the sky. Most of the other mass is fuel and there’s no means to jettison it.”
“What if we jump out?” Arun asked. “Can we set an autopilot to reach the Navy? I mean, look at General Aelingir. She isn’t exactly dainty. If we could buy even a slim chance with our lives, I know not one of us here would hesitate to go for it.”
“It’s already too late,” said the pilot. “And even we Jotuns wouldn’t mass enough. I admire you, General. Your bravery and imagination do your race credit but will not avail us this time. We’re out of miracles.”
The craft lurched, and Arun didn’t need the display readouts on his screen to tell him the nose of this escape craft had turned back down to Earth; his gut told him that loud and clear. He switched off the screen and, with a pounding heart, took in his surroundings for the last time.
Strapped securely into a high-gee seat, with a harness adapted for his lack of legs, he shared the upper deck of the main crew compartment with Springer; the other five crewmembers were below and in front of him on the main deck.
He wanted to look into her eyes one last time, but she looked pointedly away. What was she feeling? Guilt that with her final vision,
she’d breathed hope into this desperate mission?
The Wolfish swirls of red, gold, and blue concealed the flesh he’d once known, but did nothing to hide the unruly spray of auburn hair she wore as she had in her youth, nor the characteristic pinch of tension in her shoulders when she was angry with herself.
He’d lived so much life with this woman.
But it hadn’t been nearly as much time as they deserved.
What could he say to her that didn’t carry a wounding slug of defeat? She’d been ten when Jotuns connected to a Night Hummer conspiracy had covertly placed her in his crèche and told her to keep him safe, and she’d never been able to entirely break free of that command. How to tell her she’d been a remarkable success to keep him alive this long? Springer did not wear failure lightly.
Lightning flashed just off the port bow, blasting the last of the armored shell there to dust and sending the captured craft into a spiral.
Thundering hammer blows slammed into the rear of the craft, shaking it about every axis imaginable. Aelingir and the crew were shouting but Arun tuned out after someone said the engines were on fire. It didn’t matter. Whether the craft broke up in the atmosphere, the engines exploded, or was hit by missiles made little difference in the end.
The nose lurched down sharply, pointing directly at the ground, and their descent through the gravity-well accelerated.
Not long now.
His only regret was that Springer’s final vision had shown the secret of safe passage through the barrier escaping up to Indiya’s waiting forces.
She mustn’t die thinking she had led them all to their deaths.
He’d spent his entire life defending Springer and her visions.
Adrenaline surged through him… It bred hope. Springer had never been wrong about her foresight and he refused to believe she was now. It was their interpretation that could be faulty.
But what twist could possibly vindicate her now when they had only seconds left?
— Chapter 66 —
Will you stop frakkin’ with all this drent about security codes and that shite? I already told you, I don’t know any secret anything. Don’t you know what this present I’m trying to give you means, you chodding frakkwits? Get it to your tech teams, figure out how the New Order gets spacecraft and missiles through its barrier, and then get down here and kill every last stinking pelt on my planet. With compliments from the Resistance.