“Nice one,” Dyara said.
“Blue Two, line up with our next target!” Darius shouted over the comms.
His wingman clicked out an acknowledgment and drifted into line with another Blade. Darius followed that maneuver closely, using Blue Two’s shields like they were his own. They might not be able to fire their weapons while they were shielded, but this was the next best thing. Darius squeezed off two pulses from his lasers in quick succession. This time both shots hit, stabbing his target full of holes. The enemy fighter didn’t explode, but it immediately stopped firing. He’d probably hit the pilot.
Darius smirked. “Next target!”
Chapter 6
Tanik kissed Feyra goodbye under the umbrella-shaped colari trees that grew around their cabin. The fabric of his old Revenant uniform clung to his body, squeezing the sweat from his pores and distracting him as they ran in itchy lines down his back.
“Be safe, my love,” Feyra said as he withdrew. “May you return victorious—and soon.”
“I will,” he said, then turned and strode into the field where the Keth children had been sparring minutes ago. His mag boots felt too heavy and too tight, but they’d be weightless soon enough. Tanik hesitated in the field, taking a moment to savor the sights and smells of his world before he left. Keth cabins peeked through the colari trees standing around the field. Tanik sucked in a deep breath. The sharp scent of the colari trees’ cone-shaped leaves made his nostrils flare. He slowly let out that breath and looked up to a clear, dark blue sky. The color was deepening with the fading light of day. Ouroboros was remarkably similar to Earth. If something ever happened to the Keth’s homeworld, they had a ready replacement waiting on the other side of the Eye. Maybe that was why the Augur had been so driven to wipe out the Keth.
“What is it?” Feyra asked. “Is something wrong?”
“No,” Tanik replied. “I’m just homesick. That’s all.”
“You haven’t left yet,” Feyra said, her eyes twinkling with a combination of amusement and Sprites.
“No, but I didn’t get to stay long enough.”
“You don’t have to leave. I can convince my father to let you stay.”
“And justify his reservations about me?” Tanik shook his head. “No, this is the only way to elevate myself to your level, to become a Duma and start our own Kibiksa.”
“One you will populate with false heirs?” Feyra challenged.
Tanik favored his partner with a wan smile. “Not false heirs. Your heirs. Your blood will run in their veins, even if mine cannot. Don’t worry, I’ll let you choose the Aroketh to sire our children. But—” Tanik raised a finger and jabbed it at her. “—if you replace me with him, I will kill you both and mount your heads beside the Augur’s.”
Feyra grinned, and a warbling laugh bubbled up from deep inside her throat, like the croak of a frog. “You had better leave before you entice me further and start something that you have no time to finish.”
Tanik turned away with a thin smile. Closing his eyes, he cast his mind out across the light years, searching for a particular presence... After just a minute, he found Darius—in the cockpit of a fighter, of all things, in the middle of a heated battle. He had his fleet pinned between enemy Revenants and Cygnians. Tanik scowled. Vartok was right. Darius was about to get himself killed.
Summoning the energies of the ZPF, Tanik opened a wormhole to one of the lower decks of the Harbinger. He opened his eyes to see that deck on the other side of a shimmering portal.
“It’s a pity you can’t come with me,” Tanik said.
Feyra smiled. “As your Keth prisoner?”
“As my Keth lover,” he corrected.
Her smile broadened and her eyes danced. “I’m sure I would enjoy the looks on the Revenants’ faces when you introduce me as such, but I don’t think now is the right time to reveal yourself to them.”
“No, I suppose it isn’t,” Tanik replied. “Goodbye, Feyra.” He leaned in for a final kiss and then dashed through the portal. As soon as he reached the other side, his magnetic boots snapped against the deck, but the lock broke almost instantly as the effects of the Harbinger’s acceleration set in. He pitched forward and went flying head-first down the corridor. The end of the corridor rushed up to greet him, fifty meters of bulkheads and doors blurring by him in an instant. Tanik drew on the ZPF to slow his acceleration, but there was no time to re-orient so that he’d land on his feet. He arched his back to hit the wall shoulder first, and got the wind knocked out of him as the rest of his body followed.
Wincing, he pushed himself up into a sitting position. It wasn’t easy. He needed to get to a fighter to save Darius, and in order to do that, he needed Admiral Ventaris to kill the engines.
Reaching out for the bridge, Tanik searched for the admiral’s presence. But he didn’t find Ventaris. Instead, he found Lieutenant Hanson from Flight Ops sitting in the command chair. Even more curious, a Marine Major was sitting at the comms. You’ve certainly been shaking things up, haven’t you, Darius?
Tanik found the officer at the helm and planted a suggestion in his mind that the engines were malfunctioning dangerously and could not be fired again until the problem was diagnosed and solved.
Almost immediately the pressure of acceleration lifted, and Tanik sprang to his feet. He walked down the wall to the floor and looked down the corridor, first one way, then the other, wondering which way to go. What level was he on? Glancing behind him he saw bold white letters on the wall—S09. He was just four levels above the flight deck. He needed to get down there to steal a ship and join the action.
Tanik mentally activated his extra-sensory chip and connected it to the ship’s network. He queried the ship’s computer to find the nearest bank of elevators. A schematic flashed before his eyes, revealing that the elevators were twenty meters away, down the left side of the corridor he stood in. Tanik took off at a run, his boots drawing metallic thunder from the deck.
As soon as he reached the elevators, he waved the nearest one open and walked inside. He hesitated with his finger hovering over the button F05. A vision flashed unprompted through his mind’s eye, and he realized that there was something else he needed to do before he went down to the flight deck. He stabbed the button labeled C18, and the elevator shot upward, heading for the command deck.
Chapter 7
Darius rocketed around the night side of Hagrol with the thirty-nine remaining Vultures in his wing. They’d lost nine fighting the Cygnians who’d tried to intercept them—almost a full squadron. They hadn’t even reached Kovar’s fleet yet, let alone boarded his ship.
“We should have a visual on the enemy fleet soon,” Dyara said.
Darius nodded absently, mentally preparing himself for what was to come. He watched stars creeping out from behind the featureless black crescent of Hagrol’s night side.
“We’ve got visual! Wow, that’s a lot of ships...” Dyara breathed.
Darius stared at his sensor display in shock. There were forty-three capital-class warships, and more than a hundred fighter squadrons already launched and waiting for them. By contrast, Darius’s fleet only had eighteen capital ships and less than forty squadrons of fighters. Kovar’s fleet was more than twice as strong. Suddenly Darius wondered at the wisdom of charging out with just four squadrons of fighters to deal with Kovar.
“We need to turn around,” Dyara said.
Darius shook his head. “We’re not going to get another chance at this.”
“We never had one!” Dyara replied. “These aren’t Cygnians. They’re Revenants, like us. They’ll be shielded, like us. And if they’re even half smart, they’ll figure out the same scissor move that we invented so they can shoot at us from behind those shields.”
“So we jink hard and fly fast. All we have to do is kill Kovar, and I’ll do the rest. They won’t be able to fight us once I’m controlling them.”
“And you won’t be able to control them if your dead. Use your brain, Darius! W
hat’s left of it, anyway.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you’re not yourself, and you’re not thinking straight. Ever since you started guzzling Sprites, you’ve been acting like a completely different person! You need to snap out of it before you get us all killed!”
Darius focused on his breathing to quell the rising tide of anger that Dyara’s lecture provoked. “Are you done?” he asked quietly.
She blew out a breath. “This is not going to end well, Darius.”
“We’ll see about that.” He keyed the comms and said, “Squad leaders, this is Blue Leader, listen up: do not engage enemy fighters. We’re going to fly in fast and land inside the target’s hangar. From there we’ll set up a portable airlock and cut our way in. Set throttle to five Gs and follow me, over.”
Acknowledging clicks sounded through the cockpit speakers, and Darius set his own throttle to five Gs. Thrusters roared deafeningly in his ears, and the sheer force of the engines threatened to rip his hands off the controls.
Darius nudged the stick until the enemy flagship drifted under his targeting reticle. ETA to reach it was just over fifteen minutes. That was a long time to spend dodging lasers and missiles from all those enemy fighters. They were going to take heavy losses on their approach.
Glancing at the sensor display, Darius found all one hundred squadrons of enemy Revenants angling toward them. They’d reach firing range in... five minutes and twelve seconds. Outnumbered twenty to one, Darius could only imagine how many lasers would be converging on them when that happened. Dyara was right. They didn’t stand a chance.
Unless...
“Dya, I need you to take over for a minute.”
“Gladly.”
Darius shut his eyes and reached out into space with his mind. He found the enemy fighters and their pilots. Their luminous silhouettes outshone the stars. Kovar would be expecting him to try to take control of their minds, so Darius didn’t even try that.
Instead, he decided to take a more subtle approach. He summoned an image to mind of a massive fleet of fighters and capital ships jumping into the system right between Alpha wing and the enemy fighter squadrons. He used all of his strength to project that image to the minds of the enemy. For all they knew, that fleet was real.
“What the hell?” Dyara exclaimed. “Where did those ships come from?”
Maybe he’d projected his ghost fleet a little too over-zealously. Even Dyara saw it. Not opening his eyes for fear of breaking his concentration, Darius imagined his illusory fleet opening fire on Kovar’s fighters with a hailstorm of lasers and missiles.
“They’re breaking off!” Dyara said. “This was your plan all along. You knew they were coming.”
Darius smiled. Not exactly. “Take us in, Lieutenant Eraya,” he said, addressing her by her rank and last name. He struggled to keep the illusion fixed firmly in his mind.
“The enemy fleet is turning to run,” she said. “I’m detecting gamma rays. Their warp drives are spinning up.”
“By the time they can jump away, we’ll already be docked inside their hangar,” Darius replied.
“It looks that way,” Dyara agreed. “But what if they jump out with us on board? We’ll be cut off from our fleet—or fleets.”
Darius gave no reply, it was getting harder and harder to maintain this illusion with so many people watching. Several minutes crawled by with Kovar’s ships fleeing and their warp drives charging. In all that time none of the enemy fighters succumbed to fire from Darius’s ghost fleet. That would be suspicious, but there was no way to actually destroy enemy ships with an illusion. Darius felt Kovar’s presence join his among the stars, probing the illusion, looking for real, physical presences of pilots and crew to accompany the illusory ships, but of course, Kovar wouldn’t find anyone.
A split second later, Darius saw the enemy fleet and fighters turning back around. He let the illusion fade and opened his eyes.
“Um... what just happened?” Dyara asked.
“I bought us some time,” Darius explained. “How far are we from the target?”
“Those ships weren’t real,” Dyara guessed.
“How far?” Darius pressed.
“Six minutes, fifteen seconds,” Dyara replied. “Hang on, we’re being targeted! Going evasive!”
Dyara sent their Vulture skipping and jumping on a randomly weaving course just before bright red lasers came snapping out from Kovar’s flagship. Two heavy lasers slammed into their cockpit one after another, provoking a loud roar of dissipating energy from their shields. A dozen more laser bolts went wide, flashing by to all sides—some missing by a wide margin, others by a hair.
“Five minutes!” Dyara announced. “We’re taking heavy losses, Darius!”
Another laser hit them, followed by a second, and then three more. The repeated flashes of light dazzled his eyes, even though those visuals were simulated by the fighter’s combat computer.
As soon as Darius stopped blinking the spots from his eyes, he noticed a damage report flash up on one of his secondary holo displays. He scanned it. Weapon systems were offline, ailerons offline—along with rudder, elevators, and flaps. They didn’t need atmospheric control surfaces in space, but the extent of the system failures made Darius wonder how badly they’d been hit. He glanced out the side of the cockpit to look for physical signs of the damage—
The starboard wing was missing. He checked the other side. The port wing was gone, too. That might not have been a problem, but the fighter’s magnetic docking clamps were located under the wings.
The comms lit up with traffic. “Black Leader here, I’m down six pilots from the approach! I’ve only got three left. Permission to abort! Over.”
“This is White Two, I’ve lost lead. I’ve lost... fek! They’re all dead! I’m pulling—” The transmission died in a suspicious burst of static.
“Green Three to Blue Leader, my squadron is down by nine, including lead. This is suicide, over. We have to turn back.”
Darius opened the comms for a reply. “Blue Leader to Alpha Wing, hang on! It’s easier to keep going than it is to turn back.”
“Two minutes!” Dyara announced. “We’ve got a problem, Darius. We can’t dock. Our mag clamps are gone.”
Darius rocked his head against his headrest, watching the enemy hangar bay loom before them—a rectangular prism with the ends cut off. “Match target velocity,” he ordered. “As soon as we’re in position, I’ll pop open the canopy. If you get us close enough to the hangar deck we, can jump to reach it.”
“Our acceleration and theirs makes that a problem. As soon as we clear our fighter, the hangar will go sliding out from under us at two point five Gs. It will be moving too fast by the time we hit. Even if we still had our mag clamps, this still wouldn’t work. We can’t board them while they’re under way!”
Dyara was right. That was a problem. His sheer lack of planning for this mission was beginning to show. Nevertheless, he did have an idea. “Hang on, I’m taking the controls,” Darius said. He gripped the flight stick in a tight fist and flew an evasive path toward the enemy hangar as planned. Enemy lasers flickered around them as they closed the last half a dozen kilometers to reach Kovar’s flagship.
Mentally activating the comms, he said, “Blue Leader to Alpha Wing. Change of plans, we’re going to fly straight through the hangar to the other side. We’ll gain access by flying in through the launch tubes, over.”
“Are you goffity? That’s not possible! We’ll hit the sides of the tubes and break apart inside the ship!”
Darius had to check his comms panel to identify the speaker. It was Black Leader. “It’s our only shot,” Darius insisted as another pair of lasers hit his fighter “Besides, it’s too late to abort now.”
“You don’t sound too upset about that,” Black Leader quipped.
Darius offered no reply, instead devoting all of his attention to the challenge ahead. The enemy hangar swelled to fill their entire vie
w, and a dozen different landing strips stretched into the distance before them. Darius swooped inside. Illuminated landing strips blurred by underneath them as they raced through the hangar. At least in here, enemy lasers couldn’t reach them.
The sharp hiss of an impact said otherwise. “What was that?” Darius asked, and threw them into a spiraling roll to avoid subsequent lasers.
“We’ve got two interceptors on our six,” Dyara replied in a tight voice, straining to speak against the Gs they were pulling.
“Just two?” Darius growled. “Don’t we have friendly fighters flying in behind us? Why aren’t they helping us?”
“They all broke off,” Dyara said.
Darius’s head grew hot. His pulse thundered in his ears. He considered forcing the other pilots to come back, but there was no way they’d survive a second approach. They probably wouldn’t even survive their cowardly retreat. He’d deal with the survivors when they got back to the Harbinger.
They reached the end of the hangar and shot back out into space. Using a rear camera and intuition to guide him, Darius located the opening of the nearest launch tube and fired the maneuvering thrusters to line up the back of the Vulture with the opening. The pair of interceptors that had been chasing him shot out behind him and flipped around on the spot to continue firing. Darius winced as enemy lasers raked over them in stuttering golden lines. He pulled back on the throttle, and the walls of the tube closed around them, blurring by to all sides. The open end of the launch tube shrank rapidly as they retreated into the enemy flagship.
Broken Worlds- The Complete Series Page 69