by M. D. Cooper
“No one has come up with a good name yet,” Rika replied.
“What about Fort Hammerfall?” Chase asked. “Sounds badass, has great connotations.”
Rika pursed her lips, considering what it would be like to use her old team name like that. “I think that could work. Maybe people will mess with us less if it means taking on ‘Hammerfall’.”
“It’s a—aw, shit, so much for free and clear.”
Rika looked at the scan console and saw a contact shadowing them, three kilometers back. The contact flickered in and out as lightning flashed around the pinnace, then another one appeared, moving up on their port side to bracket the ship.
“Does ATC have them on its boards?” Rika asked.
Chase shook his head. “Nope. According to the towers, those ships aren’t there at all.”
Rika checked the pinnace’s loadout, hoping that not all its cargo from the Golden Lark had been unloaded before Chase left the base.
“Booyah,” Rika whispered. “The SkyScream is still in the bay,” she informed Chase.
“What? Have you looked at this storm? You going to risk it in a SkyScream?”
Rika grinned and leant over to kiss Chase on the head. “You’re sweet, hon. That’s exactly why I’m going to do it.”
“Stay safe,” he called back, but didn’t add anything more.
“Where you going?” Kelly called out as Rika rushed through the passenger bay to the cargo hatch.
“We have company,” Rika replied.
“Company?” Kelly rose.
“Don’t worry, we also have a SkyScream.”
“Shiiiiit,” Keli swore. “I love flying those! Just the one?”
“Yup, and it’s the captain’s prerogative,” Rika said as she ducked into the pinnace’s small cargo bay. It was empty except for the SkyScream, and Rika couldn’t help a grin as she approached the ship.
The light attack craft was a special weapon that the GAF had produced in the later years of the war. They were made to fit RR and SMI mechs, and were pure joy to fly. When Rika had found seven of them in Stavros’s hangars, she ensured that the Marauders secured them.
She climbed up the back of the craft, past the two large engines, and activated the SkyScream’s pilot integration procedure.
A slot opened up for her arms, and she sank both limbs into the ship. The vessel detached her limbs and then opened another set of holes for her legs. Rika set them into the ship, and it detached her lower limbs.
Two armatures reached out and attached to Rika’s arms and pulled her forward, settling her into the pilot’s pocket.
Connections attached to her legs, and then the vessel was still for an instant.
Rika nodded and drew in a deep breath as the ship sealed itself around her head, and folded its layered armor over her body.
One moment she was Rika, with a bipedal body—albeit one whose limbs were stored back between the engines—the next, she was a SkyScream: a light attack craft equipped with missiles, chainguns, four electron beams, and one mean railgun.
It was a heady feeling, and Rika swallowed before calling up to Chase.
Rika laughed as the pinnace’s bay doors opened below her, and the docking clamps released the SkyScream—her.
In an instant, the relative calm of the bay was replaced by the storm’s rage. Rika tilted her wings up and pulsed the SkyScream’s engines, pushing herself up and back.
Rika nodded absently—as much as she could.
Niki chuckled in her mind.
Rika dropped behind the starboard pursuer, staying just above its engine wash. The vessel wasn’t much larger than the SkyScream, ten meters wide and fifteen long. Stubby wings held an array of armament, and a pair of tailfins rose above the fuselage, twisting side to side in the gale-force winds.
No running lights were visible on the ship, and if her own scan systems were not military-grade, Rika doubted she would have seen the fighter until she was right on top of it.
Niki spoke in a strange voice.
Rika felt Niki nod in her mind.
Rika charged her railgun anyway. The weapon stayed tucked within the nose of the SkyScream until fired, so she didn’t have to worry about the enemy aircraft picking up on her EM signature.
She took a number of slow breaths, calming herself before the inevitable fight. Then movement on the rear of the vessel caught her attention.
Rika dropped through the clouds after the aircraft, lining up to fire once more. She was tempted to use her electron beams, but that would point her out to the other vessel, and one foe was enough for now.
Rounds flew from the rear of the aircraft, and Rika spun through the air in an erratic corkscrew as she followed after her target, waiting for the right moment to fire.
She was finally charged and lined up when the aircraft fired all four of its missiles. They streaked forward, and then rose up toward the Marauder pinnace.
Two exploded within seconds, but the others were out of range.
Rika knew the beams would be of little use in the storm, but the chaff should create a highly reflective cloud mixed with the rain.
One of the missiles detonated in the chaff cloud, but the other swung wide and closed in on the pinnace
.
Chase said, and Rika saw four detonations behind the pinnace. She knew those bombs would fling explosive rounds out in every direction.
A moment later, the other missile detonated.
Rika drew her attention back to the ship she was chasing, and saw that it had pulled up, slowing to come behind her.
No chance.
She twisted in the air and fired her thrusters on a collision course with the enemy craft, spinning again and firing her engines right above the enemy ship at the last moment.
The blast melted part of the canopy, and Rika extended the SkyScream’s ‘feet’. They latched onto the aircraft and tore the rest of the canopy off before ripping the forward half of the craft off.
The pilot ejected, and Rika gave a cry of exultation as she fired her engines again and pushed off from the falling wreckage, streaking through the air toward the second ship.
As Rika approached, she saw the pursuit craft fire two missiles at the pinnace. She tried to fire her electron beams at the missiles, but nothing happened.
She’d forgotten about the chaingun, she just wanted to tear that ship apart. For a moment, she wondered if it was a part of the predatory flight imprint that the SkySkream used. Then something ricocheted off her left wing, and she dove to the side as bullets followed her through the air. She jinked up, then down, and saw an electron beam flash through the night a meter from her right wing.
Rika gritted her teeth. Not tonight, assholes.
Her railgun was fully charged, and Rika boosted up, then slewed to the left, tracing a straight line behind the enemy craft. Right as she passed behind its engines, Rika fired.
The rail-accelerated pellets closed the distance between her and the aircraft in a fraction of a second, tearing clear through the enemy ship. One of the stubby wings exploded, and a moment later, nothing was left but a falling ball of flame.
Rika pulled up, twisting through the air and scanning the surrounding airspace for any more interlopers.
Chase laughed over the Link.
* * * * *
Rika set the SkyScream down beside the pinnace on the hard pack in front of Fort Hammerfall’s command building. While the ramp lowered from the pinnace, she triggered her craft’s disengagement protocols.
Her sense of self shrank back down to her human form as the SkyScream lifted her out of the pilot’s pocket and set her back into her legs. Then she reached forward and sank her arms into the sockets, feeling the ship drive the rods through her arms and legs.
“Shit, Rika!” Kelly called out as the rest of the team walked out of the pinnace. “Next time, I’m calling dibs on that thing! I watched your feeds, it was ridiculous!”
Rika jumped down off the SkyScream, and sent a command for the craft to fly to a nearby hangar. “We’ll have to see about that…we don’t have many of those birds.”
Kelly’s face fell, and Rika laughed. “Relax, I was kidding. You’ll get a chance. We don’t have many of them, but there aren’t many SMI and RR mechs, so everyone who wants to will get a turn.”
Rika climbed the steps to the command building, and Major Dala caught up with her. “I need to contact…well, someone. I have to report on what happened here tonight.”
“Who can you safely call?” The doors opened, and Rika stepped through, walking over to one of the drying stations. Warm air whipped across her body, blasting away moisture and leaving her perfectly dry—though in dire need of a hairbrush—in seconds.
Dala availed herself of a dryer as well, and the device lowered its output for a standard human. Rika wondered if it would have blown the uptight major’s dress off if it had remained on full power. That would have been worth a laugh.
Rika snorted.
Dala stepped out of the drying pod and approached Rika. “I can’t imagine this goes too high, but to hit you with fighters like that, it must. But I would have seen a sign, wouldn’t I?”
Rika felt a stab of guilt for her prior attitude toward Dala. The woman was trying to do her job, but people she trusted were clearly working against her—and now trying to kill her.
“Core be damned, I have no idea.” Rika softened her tone before she continued, tamping down the adrenaline still rushing through her from flying the SkyScream. “I’ve been on the horn to my liaison with the SAF, and he’s stonewalled me at every turn. And I sure as hell don’t trust your CO right now—no offense. If Zim himself isn’t rotten, his HQ is full of leaks. Who else do you have?”
Dala adjusted the hem of her dress and glanced at David. “I was telling David—right before he rushed me out the back—that we might have to go up the chain to General Adam.”
Rika cocked an eyebrow. “The five-star who runs Hercules Command?”
“Yeah. Scuttlebutt is that he’s not happy that we’ve joined Septhia, but he has given a few speeches on how unity is our best defense against Nietzschea. I don’t know for sure what he thinks of you, but nothing I’ve seen has made me think that he actively dislikes the Marauders.”
Rika agreed. It wasn’t a ringing endorsement.
“General Mill referred to General Adam as a fair man,” David interjected as he stepped out of a dryer. “And nothing I can find in his public information gives me concern.”
Rika sighed and stretched her arms over her head, half-wishing she could hop in the SkyScream and fly away from all this political nonsense.
She felt an itch in her right hand and tried to ignore the dysphoria she always felt when her GNR wasn’t present. “Even so, I have a suspicion that attempting contact with the general will be tricky—and may get intercepted before we can get in direct communication.”
Dala tapped a finger against her lips as she watched the others step out of the dryers. “I may have a way to reach him. But we’ll have to move fast. If I don’t show up for duty tomorrow, people are going to start asking questions—and I was last seen with one of your people.” She nodded to David at the end of her statement.
“You hacked all those systems?” Major Dala asked.
“I’m pretty sure they know where Dala is,” David said with a slow shake of his head. “If they showed up to stop you from telling me something, then it’s no great logical leap to assume they’ll know where I went afterward.”
“
Here,” Rika said.
“So how do we reach out to General Adam?” David asked.
Major Dala gave him a worried look. “Well, my sister plays rollerball with his daughter sometimes—on opposing teams.”
Chase whistled. “That’s a tenuous thread.”
“We’d better start working it, then.” David drummed his fingertips together. “I assume, Dala, that you have proof of the things you were telling me? You’d have to, otherwise they wouldn’t be going to such lengths to stop you.”
“I have a few purchase orders, and a money trail. They’re for equipment that matches what was used against you and your dropship. I’ve put in a request at the garrison’s depot to do eyes-on verification that the inventory is where it’s supposed to be, but it hasn’t come back yet.”
Rika grunted. “What are the chances that our friends back at the restaurant had no idea who David is? Maybe they’re just trying to take you out because you got too nosy.”
“You three were cloaked, Rika,” Chase added. “Maybe they won’t have realized that it was Marauders who spanked them.”
“A lot of supposition here,” David muttered. “I need to spend some time with all the pieces.”
“And we need to get a message to your sister,” Rika said to Dala. “Very carefully.”
“Which is tricky,” Dala said, her fuchsia eyebrows lowering. “She’s off-world right now.”
Rika saw Dala’s jaw tighten and shot Niki an admonishing scowl.