Jack zoomed in on the asteroid. On the surface, there was movement.
Skalidions.
They were glinting as they moved on their many spindly limbs, scuttling across the surface of the asteroid. They appeared to be moving small glistening white pods, burying them in the structures being built by the large spherical craft.
They were exposed to the vacuum of space and appeared to have no clothing, no protective outer garment or suit, though they seemed to have a hard exoskeleton.
The asteroid interior was invisible to the tac boat sensors, so Jack could not look deeper than the surface that was being constantly built upon by the large builder Skalidion.
The tac boat formation moved in closer, but still Jack’s passive sensors could not penetrate the outer wall of the asteroid, a teaming nest of Skalidions. But Jack guessed, a gut feeling, that this was the center of the Skalidions’ local operation, at least it was one of them. A command center.
It was new information. It was useful tactical information. It needed to be delivered to the fleet.
Jack slowed his tac boat with slight thrusts that would go undetected. The way back would be slow under thruster power only. He had reached this spot in less than a single watch duration. The way back would take an entire watch rotation. A fleet day.
As Jack’s tac boat slowed, the rest of the flotilla followed and slowed as well. The line came to a halt only a thousand kilometers from the swarm above the Skalidion nest.
With the flotilla about-face, Jack activated the thrusters and slowly pushed his boat away from the huge swarm. His fingers hovered over the main drive boost. If he was detected, he would be in full retreat where it was every boat for themselves, so at least one would have to return to deliver the data recovered on the mission. Data that could hopefully be used to help the Devex defeat the Skalidions.
Jack watched as the distance between his boat and the swarm increased. Every kilometer brought a measure of relief. His pulse quickened as he saw the swarm patrolling the edge of the territory heading directly toward the line of tac boats.
It was possible they had been detected, Jack thought, or it might simply be the Skalidions’ patrol pattern. Either way, the seething swarm was on a direct course. If they hadn’t been detected, they soon would be as at least one of the hundreds of swarming Skalidion fighters would surely collide with a tac boat, albeit unintentionally. Their stealth mission would be all over from there.
Jack held his nerve. He stood by on thruster control, ready to move aside from any fighter that came too close. The line of tac boats held their formation. They knew that to run at this stage would mean the Skalidions would close in on them. Jack hoped the pilots were standing by to take evasive action, hands on the thruster controls, just as he was.
And Jack was sure they were anxious, watching the holostage image of the approaching swarm.
“Hold steady,” Jack whispered, fearful to speak too loud in case the Skalidions heard him, even though he knew it was impossible. Nevertheless, he breathed quietly, hoping to maintain his current state of invisibility.
Jack spotted the Skalidion fighter directly in his path. Even if he avoided collision, the close approach would surely give him away. He loaded a kinetic hail round into the flank hail cannon and braced for impact.
At only a hundred kilometers, and with Jack standing by the plow through the swarm, the swarm stopped. A sudden halt to their direction. Individuals in the swarm continued to move, but the overall appearance was of the large teardrop turning about-face in an instant.
Then Jack saw the reason for the sudden reversal. Moving in from the Devex side of the boundary came a warship, then another, then another, and all about them were hundreds of raiders, all in formation, moving in on the patrol swarm at speed.
Feeling his fist clench, Jack realized his frustration with the Devex. Their actions were ruining his mission. They had come to him for help. Jack was doing his best to provide it, but this hostile action was jeopardizing his mission to gather information.
The group of Devex warships was powerful and more than a match for the Skalidion patrol swarm. Maybe, Jack thought, the Devex were taking advantage of a target of opportunity, but the Skalidions were hardly an easy target. This patrol swarm could be more than a match for one Devex warship.
As the Skalidions raced toward the Devex, Jack at least recognized the Devex had saved him from a near certain collision with a Skalidion fighter. Jack had never been up close with the Skalidion, and he was glad not to have to face them now.
With the tac boat line holding formation, Jack activated the thrusters and moved off the line he was on, upward to clear the Skalidion swarm.
Jack watched the Skalidion swarm to see he was clear over the top of them. The Devex warships and the Skalidion swarm entered weapons range and the space between the two groups lit up in a terrifying fire storm. White energy bullets leaped away from the Devex, and bursts of green fire poured from the Skalidions. The ordnance passed by with some chaotic mixing as white energy bullet collided with Skalidion green fire, but most energy passed and raced in toward its intended target.
The first contact of energy weapons on enemy ships created a sudden flash from both sides. Skalidion fighters were torn apart by the white energy bullets that continued to stream across space, and the green fire slammed into the Devex hull, burning in a slow but relentless assault.
The smashed Skalidion fighters and their billowing clouds of debris were set upon by the few spherical, flat-fronted craft. Jack zoomed in and watched the flat face of the sphere rasp away at the remains of the Skalidion fighters. Jack realized the craft were consuming the debris. He’d seen them deposit material on the surface of the nest asteroid. Now he saw them feed.
“So they don’t waste anything,” Jack said, impressed with the efficiency. Where the Devex left their broken ships and fell back, the Skalidion reused and recycled, and their material strength was not diminished by battle.
A Devex warship targeted by Skalidion fire exploded. A white sphere of tortured energy erupted, flinging debris in all directions. But the Skalidions had taken huge losses, and Jack could see that even though they had transferred all their firepower to a second warship, their numbers were so reduced by the assault that they were unlikely to defeat another one.
The battle was going to be short-lived, and even though the Devex had acted in contravention of the alliance so recently formed, Jack was pleased that their arrival had given him the chance to avoid colliding with the swarm himself. For that, he was grateful. As to whether the Devex attack had been intentionally designed to help Jack or not…
The second warship began to rotate slowly, having lost power. It drifted out of formation as yet more green fire slammed into it. But the Devex fire was relentless and poured into the shrinking Skalidion swarm, streams of energy bullets tearing through them. The skirmish would be over soon.
The alert on the flight console came a moment after Jack spotted a new danger. Fragments of the destroyed Devex warship were racing toward the underside of the tac boats, still maneuvering with thruster power alone. One huge fragment, jagged and spinning, was heading directly toward Jack’s lower hull.
Jack had time to move aside. He activated the thrusters and nudged the tac boat out of the path of the wreckage. Watching the holostage for confirmation he was clear, he spotted the emergence of a new, huge signal. It was so big it filled the entire side of the holoimage. Jack zoomed in and saw the unmistakable mass of Skalidion fighters. A hundred thousand or more.
The first bursts of weapons fire overwhelmed the passive sensors. The Devex ships began to turn and head back to Devex space and the supposed safety of their planetary defense systems and larger fleet.
A collision alert sounded through the tac boat, bringing Jack’s attention back to his flight console, but before he could locate and evade the object, he felt the impact. He was fixed into his seat as his suit’s stability field kicked in, but the boat had been thrown off cours
e. Jack knew something had hit him. He checked back through the data.
Jack couldn’t believe it. In the sudden moves by the tac boat flotilla to avoid the expanding debris field, one tac boat had collided with Jack.
The tac boat’s slow speed meant the collision would probably not be a problem, as long as the Skalidions didn’t detect the impact, but then Jack noticed the red light. A plasma conduit had been ruptured and was venting into space, creating a flare that was already thirty kilometers long and growing. It was a hundred kilometers by the time he shut it down.
The rest of the tac boats were maintaining their heading, directly back toward the nebula in the dead zone between Skalidion and Devex space, the only hiding place for the fleet.
Jack shut down the flare and looked anxiously at the Skalidions. A small group of fighters had broken away from the swarm that was chasing the Devex, and it was closing in on him.
He quickly activated the lateral thrusters and spun the ship through ninety degrees, turning it on the spot. Now facing along the line of tac boats to the port side of the formation, Jack kicked up the main drive and powered away.
It was terribly bad luck that a conduit would be ruptured in that minor collision. It was a hundred to one shot. Jack checked the status of the tac boat that had run into him, making sure it wasn’t in danger. The boat was fine. Then Jack noticed which one it was.
It was Scepter Three. The Fleet Intelligence observer. Could it be a coincidence that it was the intelligence agency’s observer that had collided with him, and in such a manner as to highlight his position to the Skalidions? Jack thought not. It would have taken a pilot of incredible skill to rupture that conduit. Jack almost marveled at the skilled piece of piloting. One thing was clear, Mallet wanted him dead and would use any trick in the book to get her wish. A wish she was about to get.
The Skalidions closed in on Jack’s boat, ignoring the others in the line that were still running dark. A planetary system ahead and above Jack was his best chance of escape.
He readied the kinetic hail round he had loaded into the flank cannon. The cannon swiveled around and targeted the lead Skalidion fighter on his tail. The Skalidion vanished in a green explosion as the kinetic hail shredded the craft. He loaded another and brought the top-mounted laser emitter up to full power. He couldn’t hide from the Skalidions now, he couldn’t even fight them all off, but he wasn’t going down without trying.
The laser fired and destroyed another Skalidion, and Jack set the flank cannon to independent fire. Kinetic hail rounds fired in regular beats, the dull sound echoing through the small tac boat and filling Jack with hope for his escape.
Then a burst of green fire hit.
The green fire mixed with the drive energy and created a huge boost of speed, and complete loss of stability. Jack tumbled out of control, spinning wildly. The next burst of green fire hit the upper laser emitter and burned it down to the housing.
Suddenly, Jack saw the first potential landing spot in the star system he was now tumbling toward. With a well-timed boost from the thrusters, he put himself in the gravity well of a gas giant’s moon. The size of a dwarf planet, the moon even had a thin atmosphere, enough to slow Jack’s decent and generate enough friction that even if the Skalidion green fire didn’t get him, entry into the moon’s atmosphere would.
Another blast of green fire and Jack was tumbling. Creaking filled the small tac boat as some part of the outer hull was ripped away by centrifugal force and yet more Skalidion weapons fire.
Then he hit the moon’s atmosphere. The internal temperature jumped, and the inner hull began to glow brightly from the heat, with Jack still inside
With the hull temperature reaching ferocious levels, Jack clambered out of the pilot seat, snatched up his helmet and pulled it on. His tactical suit’s environmental controls were close to failure as the internal temperature soared even higher. With the deck plates glowing white hot, Jack ran to the boarding ramp access panel. He deployed the boarding ramp and made ready to jump.
The ramp’s mechanism squealed and seized as the hinges melted. Globules of melted composite dropped onto the glowing deck plates. Jack snatched his pulse pistol out of his hip holster and fired up the electron blade, slicing through the hinge mechanism. The boarding ramp fell away and tumbled into the burning atmosphere.
The fire raging over the outer hull of the tac boat blasted into the interior, flinging Jack back across to the opposite hull. He activated his suit’s thrusters and moved himself toward the opening and out into the moon’s atmosphere.
Falling away from the tac boat, Jack spun and watched the machine fall away in a fiery ball. He turned away, kicked up his suit’s thrusters, and powered away from the flaming ball that surrounded his boat. The wrecked boat went down like a meteor, smashing into the surface below.
The moon below looked cool, dark, green, and inviting. The fire rippling over his faceplate died away as he moved deeper into the atmosphere. An alert from his suit’s onboard environmental controls warned him his suit’s safety systems were about to fail. Jack had only moments.
Opening a vent on his calf, Jack let cool air rush into his suit’s interior. He felt the blisters on his face, his hands, and his eyes burn from the dry heat of the fire he had just escaped.
From this altitude, kilometers above the moon, Jack could see the moon was heavily forested around the equatorial region, but it was barren on the northern pole. The orange and brown gas giant filled the sky, and glinting over the western horizon, Jack could see the system’s star.
The ground raced toward Jack ever quicker, the northern pole now lost to sight as he fell faster and faster toward terminal velocity. His suit’s grav field was operating at its upper range. The suit’s thrusters assisted the grav field and slowed him further, but still, the ground came too quickly.
Jack could make out the tops of the trees. At first, it appeared as a mossy field, but as he got closer, he could make out branches and leaves. The trees were similar to the winter trees of his old home planet, thin leaves, dark and waxy with a fierce point. Now that he was even closer, the tops of the trees looked like a field of fierce, jagged, green daggers. Jack diverted environmental control energy into his suit’s thrusters. The thruster emitter aperture was now glowing as the thrust-jet heated the air around it, mercifully slowing Jack to a steady descent.
With the top of the nearest tree merely meters away, Jack began to pick his point of contact. Now fully in control of his descent, he touched down on the very tip of the tree beneath him, his feet barely touching the stiff, needle-like leaves.
Jack surveyed the forest at his feet. In every direction, jagged peaks poked up into the clear sky. Jack looked at the tree directly beneath him. His suit’s thrusters kept him stable as the tree flexed. Stepping down to the next branch, using his suit’s thrusters to keep him upright, he moved down through the canopy.
The sharp needles on the moon’s winter trees scratched Jack’s tactical suit. His gloves, his forearms, and his boots took the brunt of the punishment. Soon the forest floor appeared below, dark under the dense dagger-like foliage.
Jack dropped to the ground, his boots crunching on the dead needles. Jack took a knee and rested his hand on the ground in front of him. He took a breath. He had survived the landing, but could he survive this moon?
Looking up, Jack could just make out the clear sky and the deep orange of swirling clouds on the gas giant. If he could get a signal to the fleet, he knew rescue would be only hours away. But the Skalidion fighters would detect his distress call first. Jack would have to wait for them to leave the local space. He hoped they would not move in on this system, but they were possibly too preoccupied with defeating the Devex. The Skalidion would first attack the Devex before invading this simple forest moon, or they may even move on to attack the fleet.
Jack had to let the fleet know that the Skalidions were massing for an attack. It might be the last message he sent.
Jack released his set of
micro drones and sent them racing through the trees. They relayed the data back to his wrist-mounted holostage. Jack looked at the map of the surrounding area, the dark green holographic lines matching the dark green dagger trees all around. He spotted the clearing in the forest where his tac boat had come down, only five kilometers to the north.
The emergency communication system on the tac boat was built to survive the worst crash landing, so Jack headed toward the crash site.
The dead needles on the ground had lost their deep green color, and now sparkled like silver stiletto knives. They shattered under Jack’s feet, scattering diamond-like shards as he walked. The dagger trees stood evenly all about. The wide trunk-bases were the same deep green as the leaves at the very top, but they were smooth, and Jack caught his reflection as he moved through the dark forest.
With the glass shards at his feet reflecting what little light filtered down through the thick canopy above and his reflection on the smooth trunks, Jack felt he was walking through a hall of mirrors. Realizing his pace had slowed as he wondered at the sights around him, Jack picked up the pace. He jogged through the forest, the crystal shards of dead leaves kicking up behind him in a sparkling cloud that drifted just above the surface of the forest floor.
He recalled his micro drones as he neared the forest clearing and his smashed boat. A number of fallen trees were already losing their green and becoming clear glass, like the dead leaves on the floor. Jack took cover alongside the tac boat and made a damage assessment.
It was bad. Very bad.
The hull was still hot, and melted composite flowed over the glass needle ground cover, crackling and smoking. There was a chance a communication node could be salvaged, and Jack might get a message away.
Alliance (Jack Forge, Lost Marine Book 5) Page 7