“Phoenix One to Phoenix Feather Squadron,” Motoshita barked over the communicator. “Don’t let the Malevolence lock you in its crosshairs or it’s good-bye pilot. Move fast and make your shots count. Good luck, people.”
Arterius moved to attacking speed, locking targets into the Hornet’s computer. He banked to the left with his wingman Jaran. As he did so, the Malevolence commenced its attack, the omnipotent blasts of its capital tachyon cannons raging into the fray – but luckily none hit. Other squadrons began streaking towards different targets, firing, and the sky was lit up with the chaos of battle.
Arterius targeted the lead fighter of the nearest enemy squadron, a J10-15P Dragon. He fired, sending a salvo of blue, pulsing laser bolts toward the craft. It connected. It connected better than Arterius could have hoped for. He saw the bolts slam into the cockpit, followed by the Dragon slamming into the craft next to it. They both went tumbling off course and then exploded. Arterius smiled. In his eyes was the gleam of a Jaguar with his prey in sight. An instant later, forty-eight more Dragon and Anubis fighters screeched forward and he veered upward, taking evasive action.
At that moment, he saw his squadron leader. Smoke plumed from her port side. Phoenix One’s craft veered to the left and crashed into Phoenix Two, causing them both to lose control and fly off, away from the battle, and then explode in a plume of flame.
Arterius, stunned with disbelief, checked his radar. Multiple bogies were closing in, freshly launched from the hangar bay of the Malevolence. He tried to swallow but found his mouth dry with fear. There were so many of them! The enemy was obviously well prepared, and it was clear that they outnumbered the forces of the Resistance by three to one, at least. The enemy fighters streaked forward, sending death in the form of lasers, missiles, and auto cannon shells before them. Arterius struggled to keep his Hornet under control, traversing a shock wave of debris and expanding gas that rocked the battlefield. There was a huge bang then, his ship blasted by an auto cannon shell that broke armour apart on his left wing and fuselage.
A beeping announcement pulled his attention to his weapons monitor. Apparently, one of his pulse lasers had been rendered inoperable by the damage. He cursed, then moved his crosshairs over the enemy fighter that had damaged him. The crosshairs turned gold and he opened up with his remaining pulse laser. The bolts hit the tip of the enemy’s right wing, shearing off a two-metre-long piece of it. The pulse laser also hit the right wing, near the fuselage. The biomachine dipped a meter or two out of formation and then flew back up.
“Son of a bitch,” Arterius sneered, his teeth gritted.
The return fire from the enemy fighter, an Order 07A Anubis, missed wide, and Arterius concentrated on one last salvo before they passed each other. He stared at the crosshairs on his holographic HUD and waited until they turned gold. The moment they did, he triggered another pulsing salvo. The laser bolts stitched a set of holes across the left side of the biological fuselage, and the Anubis began to break apart, exploding in a glorious crescendo.
Still slightly dazed from the shock of seeing both his commanding officer and executive officer die together in a fiery plume, Arterius flew on, rolling hard to avoid another trumpeting blast from the Malevolence’s tachyon cannons. As he rolled back into an upright position, a pulse laser erupted from somewhere to his right, stitching holes and burn marks across the left side of his Hornet. Warning klaxons sounded. Multiple failures registered, his HUD flickering as power flowing to it came and went.
Arterius knew he was dead. Power was coming and going, meaning the ejection equipment would not work and he could hear the internal structure of the Hornet groaning and giving way. First one wing broke off, then the armour on the left side. He closed his eyes, and tried to think of his family, of the newborn baby he would never get to meet, as his Hornet exploded and he was no more.
On the spacious Main Bridge of the Ballog, Queen Anacksu’namon read the reports that had been transmitted to her just moments earlier, her heart pounding in her chest, her eyes wide and darting. The information scrolled rapidly across a floating, ghostly-blue screen that hovered in the air above her command seat, replete with damage readouts and other visual assessments. Their aerospace forces had been crippled by the engagement, it would seem, with less than half of the fighters launched from the Ballog still operational. Many of those were so badly damaged that they were returning to the hangar bays, demanding repairs. And the Ballog itself had sustained heavy damage; the capital ship’s shielding system, effectively a protective layer of energy distortion containing a high concentration of gravitons around it, had been reduced to less than a third of its full capacity – as impossible as it seemed. But despite the huge losses, they had achieved their first objective: the ground forces had been successfully mobilised, and the second stage of General Hiryu’s battle strategy could commence.
As for Mecha units, four regiments of bipedal Ares-class war machines and six mercenary regiments (courtesy of Paramo) were at their disposal, armed to the teeth. This counted out to just over fourteen-hundred Mechs, which had already pressed forward to engage the enemy Mecha on the desert floor below – though the Laputan forces numbered at almost four thousand, and included deadly quadrupedal MAWLR units. They were an astounding number to say the least, but Anacksu’namon knew that this battle could decide the fate of the entire world. Now was not the time to retreat.
She took a deep breath to calm herself, and turned to look at General Hiryu, who stood hunched over a computer console behind her, liaising with the Mech Commanders on the ground.
“Give me a geographical map of the Baiterkana Plains and the surrounding area,” the General said to one of his aides. His face was that of a battle-hardened veteran; a strained, rigid, immobile expression and an unwinking glassy stare. He was somewhere in his late forties. Absently, Anacksu’namon realised how terribly the strain of his frightful experiences must have affected him over the years.
“Yes, General.”
The aide waved a hand over the computer console and a holographic map of the nearby Baiterkana Plains appeared, showing a three-dimensional representation of the area itself and the surrounding five square-kilometres of scorched desert wasteland in every direction. The hovering spectre of Laputa could just be seen on the edges of the map. Hiryu stood examining the map for a moment. He planned, discarded, and planned again, trying to think up some way to beat the enemy forces into retreat without too much loss of life. Beat them back and away from the capital ships, so that the Nommos reinforcements could take down the Malevolence, Damarus’ flagship, without unnecessary collateral damage.
The Kings of the Second and Third Factions, Offikatlin and Dudreda, were seated nearby, liasing with their own forces who made up most of the infantry units on the ground, both front line and reserve. Their warriors were among the best and most skilled in the world, trained to perform high-risk, dangerous missions that most other infantry units could not perform. They were high-value assets commanded at the strategic level, often delivering effects disproportionate to their size. Once the Malevolence was down, they would play a vital role in the siege of the Silver City itself.
“General Hiryu!” Anacksu’namon blurted then, getting his attention. “The Ballog’s shields are down to fifteen per cent capacity…”
“What…?” He turned, aghast, and saw on the perfectly centred, domed view screen the Malevolence opening up with its tachyon cannons once again, firing directly at the nose of the Ballog itself. “Return fire!” he shouted. “All batteries!”
Despite his anticipation, he flinched at the sudden bright blaze of pinkish light as the forward section of the Ballog erupted. The ship shuddered; but they were all right, Hiryu realised with a surge of relief. The defensive shields had held…
“Shields failing…”
And then the deck lurched forward again, absorbing another salvo, throwing the General from his feet. He flailed, striking the back of Queen Anacksu’namon’s seat with his right should
er, and wound up on all fours. He tried to push himself up to a standing position, and was immediately thrown to his knees again. With difficulty, he forced himself back onto his feet. The Ballog felt wrong... She was shuddering, rolling – not the way she usually did under fire. It almost felt like… free fall.
“Report!” Hiryu roared.
He saw Anacksu’namon grasping her seat, struggling to remain composed, a look of utter alarm spread over her features. “Controls are offline!” she yelled.
It was all happening so fast…
A sudden terrible certainty seized him, made him glance up at the view screen. Hiryu was an experienced, hardened warrior, a man well suited to command, a man who had never buckled under pressure before, never allowed himself an instant’s hesitation in the deadliest of situations. Yet the sight on the screen left him speechless with horror.
The Queen of Einek saw it too; the rocky desert floor, hurtling toward them with impossible swiftness.
No one on the bridge uttered a sound at the sight; no one except Anacksu’namon, whose spontaneous, heartfelt utterance spoke for them all.
“Mother of God…”
The Ballog and the Malevolence appeared as giant light-flecked blisters riding the poisoned air above the glowing battlefield below. Ammold Paramo stood amidst the chaos, staring up through thick black smoke at the mighty capital ships, leaning against a boulder of metaconglomerate rock while the nanobots in his Assault-Class Rãvier suit repaired the damage inflicted by multiple projectile impacts. The noise of the battlefield around him was a clamorous roar combined with persistent weapons-fire, so loud he could barely think, and all around him powerful bodies surged forward, sparking with laser fire.
The Ballog had a sort of hooked-cone shape, with the bridge located at the top and several jagged, ivory-like spires at the bow. There were similar appendages located at the bottom of the ship. The infrastructure was exposed in many places where the outer plating had been torn off by enemy weapons fire. Parts of the vessel were missing and the original colour had long faded, replaced with the burn marks from its last battle. Sparks leapt across the hull at intervals and pulsated along the surface. Somehow, it was badly damaged, its shields stripped away, and Paramo wondered how that was even possible. Battleships were so massive that they could receive heavy bombardment from multiple enemy capital ships for hours, even days, without their shields being knocked out or even suffering any major damage. Yet here it was – on the verge of destruction. Did the Malevolence have some kind of advanced weapons technology he wasn’t aware of?
The First Faction’s most powerful battleship and Lord Damarus’ flagship, the Malevolence had some design similarities to the Ballog but was larger, totalling 4,845 metres in length. The ship was based around its infamous tachyon cannons, a weapons-system not used onboard any other warship class, due to its absurd power requirements. The tachyons were firing right now, aimed directly at the nose of the Ballog.
A moment later, there was a triumphant groan of stressed metal and organic polymers that blasted across the entire battlefield like a foghorn, and the Ballog went down, plummeting toward the desert floor and impacting with a violent crash. The ship broke in half at the hangar deck; the rear half tumbled, exploding in sections, before a bigger, single explosion ripped apart the front half.
Paramo stumbled back, despite being several kilometres away from the doomed battleship. He used his right arm to shield his eyes from the explosion, then scrambled to hail General Hiryu on his communicator.
“General Hiryu! General, this is Paramo. Please respond!”
Just as he feared, there was no reply. How utterly devoid of decency, pity and compassion must Damarus have been, to allow such a thing to happen? Sweat beaded on his forehead; the loss of the Ballog would be a fatal blow to the armies of the Resistance. Without Hiryu’s leadership, things could turn extremely messy now, and quickly. Their only hope would be to survive long enough until the Nommos reinforcements arrived – if they were even coming.
The most mysterious and elusive of all the four races of the Terran Alliance, the Nommos people were a bioengineered race, and their technological superiority made them powerful beyond all proportion. They rarely involved themselves in the affairs of the Terran Alliance, absent and unheard from for decades at a time, so the news that they were interested in helping to overthrow Damarus had been particularly welcome…
It was said that the Nommos people embraced genetic engineering as the way to solve the problems which had plagued their race eons ago. Over the millennia since, they experimented with every kind of genetic modification their technology allowed, which led them into increasingly more bizarre mutations of their bodies and minds. They began interfering with their basic instincts, curbing their aggression and sexual instincts and cultivating strange new ones instead. Their society was mysterious and difficult to comprehend, and for this reason few people from Earth had ever actually visited their home worlds, in the Sirius system. Despite being one of the first members of the Terran Alliance, discovered by early mining colonists, the Nommos maintained a strict policy of non-interference with the other races, refusing to share their immense knowledge and technology, for the most part. That said, many of Earth’s breakthrough technologies were Nommos in origin: Rãvier suits and bioships being just two examples. More than a hundred years ago, the Terran-Nommos Convention was an early cease fire between the two governments, initially only a desperate measure to prevent the annihilation of the human race by the Nommos, and relations were unstable. However, as the Nommos grew to understand Damarus’ mystical powers, they became interested in working together more, the two species growing closer together. But even after a century, much Nommos technology remained mysterious and utterly superior – namely their advanced weaponry and ‘slipstream’ space propulsion. . The Nommos had never really trusted Damarus, that much was certain.
Suddenly, Paramo heard one of the other soldiers – a man named Reet’ger – shout, “Captain Paramo! Get back to your Mech! There’s a MAWLR coming!” Then came the thin sound of gun bolts pulled back and the explosion of machine-gun fire from his right. He saw Reet’ger’s head and torso explode in a gruesome shower of blood and entrails, and he yelped in horror, shaken back to the reality of his situation.
Panicked, he ran toward his Ares-class Mech, which he had been forced to abandon some minutes ago, his plasma rifle slapping against his back. The roar of weapons fire cut through the air and bullets passed him, ricocheting off the thick legs of his Mech. He whirled around and pulled up his rifle, letting loose a broad spray of plasma. He saw a half-dozen enemy soldiers dive for cover behind the piles of boulders that littered this area of the battlefield. Paramo took the opportunity to begin climbing up to his cockpit.
In his rush to get up, he took the first few rungs too quickly and his right foot slipped. His hands held tight to the rungs above, helped by the increased strength being fed to him by the Rãvier suit, but his right shin slammed into a rung and a red pain shot through his leg. He cursed his age and continued up.
The sound of gunfire continued, as well as a great deal of shouting. The soldiers below, many of whom had no idea what to do now that the Ballog was down, tried to figure out what was going on and drew up quick plans of action.
As he worked his way up the rungs, a bullet slammed into his left side, tearing straight through the Rãvier suit and through meat just above his hip. He did not fall, for his muscles all tightened at the moment of impact and his hands clung tightly to the rungs. His teeth clenched, and he said reflexively, “Come on, come on.”
He glanced up, and the cockpit seemed tremendously far away. Bullets and pulse lasers were ricocheting all over the surface of the Mech. Another bullet caught him in the shoulder and he found himself dangling from a rung by one hand. As he swung around, like a weather vane in a changing wind, he saw the forces scattered about below. The Resistance fighters seemed to have broken up into several groups, shooting at the Laputans, and there,
coming over the crest of the nearest rocky dune like a vision from some nightmare, was a huge, three-thousand-ton MAWLR unit: a monstrous, quadrupedal crab-like machine armed with missile launchers and heavy railguns.
“Aim for the heat sinks!” somebody screamed. “It’s the only way!”
Paramo scrambled painfully up the last few rungs and hurled himself into his cockpit and pulled the hatch shut. He connected his Rãvier to the Mech’s systems just as a missile spewed from the MAWLR and slammed against his rear torso. The Mech started to fall forward even as Paramo began to voice the secret code.
The Mech’s engines fired up, his thoughts interlinking with the controls. The fire-and-smoke-filled horizon rushed past as the machine toppled, the ground looming closer and closer. He threw one of the machine’s legs out to break the fall, then pushed the throttle forward, using the momentum of the fall to get into a quick run. Paramo knew that an Ares-class Mech stood no chance against a MAWLR, but he also knew he could outmanoeuvre it very easily. He might just make it.
He glanced at his monitor, and saw that only eight Mechs from his regiment were moving in the immediate vicinity; most of the others seemed to have moved off in the direction of the Malevolence, which hung in the air blasting tachyon beams at the few remaining aerospace fighters dogfighting around it like swarms of flying ants. This was not good. If the Nommos arrived to destroy the Malevolence, everybody needed to stay well clear to avoid being swept up in the inevitable devastation. Should he follow, and try to warn the others of their folly? He wasn’t sure.
He moved in a westerly direction, deciding it best to deal with the MAWLR before anything else. He turned his Mech from the waist up around ninety degrees, and dropped his targeting cross hairs over the edge of the MAWLR’s torso. The heat sinks – a MAWLR’s weak spot – were located just there. All he wanted was to shred the heat sinks – and within a matter of minutes the enemy machine would be reduced to little more than a useless hunk of metal and biomaterial. Anything more would be a nice bonus. When the cross hairs were in position, he issued a thought, and a thick red laser bolt shot through the air. The bolt connected, burning away some of the MAWLR’s armour, and then he fired two short-range missiles. The missiles struck home, and the outer armour of the MAWLR’s torso blasted away, revealing a shredded heat sink.
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