An explosive light flashed directly in front of her face, blinding her for a short time. She thought she was dead, but her eyes came back to focus in time to avoid the floating carcass of the Alliance cruiser Ultimate.
She tasted the salty sweat dripping from her upper lip—the taste of apprehension, of fright, of battle.
Another volley of bullets came at her from the starboard side, sweeping across her hull, flickering her plasma shielding. The whoop, whoop of several alarms blatted in her ear. She silenced them as she checked her shielding power. Still above eighty percent, a comfortable level considering the nightmare around her.
Her radar showed Red Dust and Quartz flanking her tail, keeping the stray missiles from her sides at bay—so much for their hatred of her. The Protector roiled back and forth behind them, slashing its way around the debris field to keep up with the fighters. Despite its immense speed, it had fallen behind. The Protector, ten times the length of her ship, needed more wiggle room to traverse the battlefield.
But it also kept Eamonn in check. Chloe sensed a great anticipation from him, overshadowing everything else in the battle. She had tried to shake it off. In the sea of voices that drowned her, his yelling was the loudest.
More than ever, she needed Seth to rescue her from this insanity.
She took a deep breath and threw that horrible thought from her mind. Since she met him, she had drawn her strength from him, but he wasn’t here. He had abandoned her. For the last two years, like when she controlled Parker during the ill-fated hunt for the Megacruiser, she had been able to use him to find strength to help her achieve her goals. Since she could remember, Seth had allowed her to overcome the fear within her heart. With neither of them there now, she had tried to grab Eamonn’s cluttered mind, a futile effort. The chaos was too great. She would have to find the strength within herself.
The whoop, whoop of the proximity alarm rang in her ears. She veered her starwing to the port side, spraying the oncoming MSA heavy fighter with a stream of sonic bullets and then adjusting back toward their assigned course, fighting to break through the defensive fire of the MSA cruisers.
One in particular, in front of her, parked itself in a direct line between them and the Solarspot. Chloe swore under her breath, seeing no obvious signs of advantage over it from her current angle. She scanned the field of ships across her bow, spotted a possible path, and dove the squadron toward Mars. Red Dust and Quartz followed, while the Protector yawed upward before finally avoiding the torn-off tail fin of the Ultimate and driving itself downward in pursuit of the lead three. The Iron Chunk and Olympus trailed the Protector, falling farther behind to offer support from the continually flanking MSA fighters.
A bright flash flickered from the Martian surface; a pang stabbed from Eamonn. Danger. Chloe angled her starwing to the side and avoided an orbital defense beam zipping away from Mars and across her hull.
Three things happened at once: the beam was so close to Chloe’s hull that it fried the sensors attached to the bottom of her ship; Shannon squealed over the radio as if she had just avoided death; and the MSA cruiser directly behind them, which had blocked them from reaching the Solarspot, turned a bright orange and exploded brilliantly. It was destroyed so fast she had to purposely hold her jaw shut and avoid gawking.
"They shot their own ship!" Red Dust cried. "I can’t believe it."
"They must have noticed Eamonn had entered the battle," Chloe said. "They aimed dead at the Protector."
"Shockwave!" Eamonn shouted. "Brace—"
But Chloe heard only garbled sounds before her ship was tossed side across side like a top spinning across a polished floor. She fired her retrorockets on full, causing the ship to stabilize and then jerk to a dead stop. Out of her canopy, she saw Quartz only three meters from her, and to the starboard side, Red Dust rested several dozen meters away, facing in the opposite direction. The Protector was nowhere in sight.
"Status," she radioed to the squad.
"Full stop," Quartz radioed back. "Engine and everything are fine."
"Me, too," Red Dust said. "Let’s get moving. An idle ship is a sitting duck."
"You guys decided to stop for a snack?" Atalo’s voice said over the radio. The Iron Chunk and Olympus crept across the port window. Hearing Atalo’s voice, she smiled. He wasn’t fazed by any of this—
Chloe saw it too late. A streak of missiles, one after another slammed into the Iron Chunk. The resulting explosion blasted toward Olympus, slicing the canopy off his Asterfighter. Olympus’s body ripped away from the Asterfighter and flew through the vacuum of space toward Mars. Atalo died instantly.
The randomness of war constricted Chloe’s heart, and terror grappled with her.
"Get moving, Chloe!" Quartz shouted over the radio. "MSA fighter squadron coming in a diamond formation at your nine."
Chloe snapped out of her funk. This was war. Deaths happened. Her shoulders pushed back against her seat as she accelerated her starwing to maximum. Moments later, she rejoined Quartz and Red Dust.
A spray of bullets funneled across her starboard side engines toward Quartz’s ship. The bullets fizzled off her hull, but enough of them connected to let Chloe know that Quartz would be in trouble if another volley were to do the same. She adjusted her course to come closer to Quartz, acting as a shield against any direct assaults.
The Protector shot past her. Moments later, her ship shook as it passed through its ion exhaust trail. Quartz followed down and away while Red Dust shot up. Chloe yawed upward to follow Red Dust as he slowed to pull MSA fighters away from the Protector.
It turned out to be a good decision to trail Red Dust. Chloe came upon a squadron of MSA fighters from the side, targeted them, and fired. The streak of sonic bullets sped from the tips of her wings to the lead MSA fighter. Her bullets came after Red Dust’s, and they tore into the weakened plasma shield until it finally popped. She sent a missile winding at the fighter, jerked her control stick to the side, and swept back toward the Protector. The missile’s explosion against the MSA fighter flashed in her peripheral visual field, and then a terrified scream was silenced in her mind. The pilot was dead.
Red Dust followed behind her. "Chloe, get back to the Protector. We will need you to protect the package when it is released. I will handle the fighters."
"You are ten times as strong with a wingman. Let me help you." She didn’t understand why he wanted to fight alone.
"No, I am serious. Concentrate on the Solarspot. With Atalo and Olympus gone, we have no support anymore. Let me play out here."
"Fine," Chloe said. She slammed her finger against the transmission button on her control stick, silencing him.
His ship yawed downward, taking several MSA fighters into a diving chance. She wished him luck.
She needed luck as well. The Protector and Quartz streaked well ahead of her now, approaching the Solarspot. She found herself alone within the battlefield, and even if she didn’t tell anyone yet, she wasn’t a warrior. It relieved her to not sense Seth within the firefight. She was positive he was still on Mars, perhaps manning the orbital defense weaponry. She shuddered. He couldn’t be doing that. He wasn’t like that.
Wham! She heard a succession of thuds as something pounded against her portside engine. She craned her head, hoping to catch a glimpse of the problem. She saw nothing. The proximity sensor—the one still working on the top—indicated the plasma shielding wasn’t draining. Not weapons fire, she thought.
Wham! Another impact, but this was larger. She whipped her head around and saw the sparks from her hull.
She had entered a debris field, something Eamonn had warned her about before the battle. Explosions, especially those in space, always caused a grouping of debris that hid against the darkness of space. Eamonn stressed to her two details to always remember: don’t panic, they were unpredictable, and don’t panic, you happen upon them abruptly. How could I not panic?
She jerked her control stick upward, slightly panicked—sorry Ea
monn—by the entire idea of flying through a cluster of jagged metal, but little did she realize she had turned into a group of MSA fighters. They swooped in point formation toward her.
She fired her sonic bullets at them, hoping to get them to veer away. But she didn’t trick them with her panicked fire, and they cut to a position vertical to her own, split the bullets, and sped at her.
Heading straight at them, Chloe couldn’t think of anything but a full dive downward toward the Protector and the Solarspot. The traffic was greater, but it would also add confusion to the MSA fighters that were barreling toward her. She twisted her arms around, sending her starwing wing over wing into a corkscrewing dive.
The MSA fighters matched her course and followed.
Chloe zigzagged back and forth, avoiding the random fire from the MSA fighters behind her. Zooming and whooshing around battle debris, she veered her starwing through the burning corpse of an Alliance cruiser. It enveloped her ship. Her wing banged against an engine mount, jerking her downward, but she regained control quickly, no worse for wear. She checked her rear proximity sensors and found the MSA fighters were still on her tail.
She cursed them.
The shell of the ship disappeared, and she could see the full spectrum of the battle from her cockpit once again. She accelerated even faster, forfeiting much of her agility for comfort room, away from the annoying MSA fighters.
She licked her lips, tasting the sweat pooling on her upper lip. She had been on many meteor runs over the years, too many for her even to count. There had always been extreme risks involved in being so close to a meteor thundering toward the Earth, and death was ready to pounce. All it would take was one mechanical failure on her starwing or one sudden orbital shift from the meteor. She always thought she could handle any of the randomness that occurred during those times.
This battle was different. At any instant, if you were conscious of it or not, you could die. Everyone was in survival mode. She had never known the true meaning of kill or be killed until now. The adrenaline rushing through her body terrified her. It wasn’t how it was supposed to be. Her definition of humanity seemed so wrong.
An Alliance cruiser yawed toward her. She jerked her control stick to avoid it. Her starwing sprang upward, pressing her back into her seat hard. She turned faster than she wanted and gritted her teeth as the gravitational forces danced within her head, flashing white spots into her view. Her compensator must have been damaged because it pulled her harder than usual. She bore the rush through the turn, and her vision cleared again as she leveled off into a straight path.
She caught three flashes of light out of the corner of her eye. Her rearview screen displayed the destruction of the trailing MSA fighters.
Chloe whooped for joy to no one other than her cockpit computer. She angled back toward the Alliance cruiser. The name of it read Sheriff.
"The flagship," she muttered. Thanks to it, she was still alive.
A joy filled her mind. She felt him; a beam of hope fighting to rip apart the terror. She fought to control the urge to let go and become complacent now that he was here. He hadn’t died rescuing his wife.
"Parker!" she shouted over her radio. "Do you read me, Parker McCloud? To anyone on the Sheriff, I need to speak with Parker McCloud."
A long moment passed, and then a familiar voice radioed back. "Chloe, what are you doing here?"
"Parker, you have to get to the Solarspot and protect Eamonn. The Protector is important."
"I know," he said. "Follow us and try to keep the MSA fighters off."
Chloe smiled from ear to ear. "Why did I bother to radio? Somehow, I knew you would know."
"You have to be more patient, or we’ll lose the Solarspot," Samantha Burns said. "You’ve already cost us one MSA cruiser."
"Don’t tell me how to run a battle." Gwen’s eyes darted around the radar screen, looking for the Protector. Eamonn was going to be dead soon, and she wanted to be the one to kill him. It would sicken her to pin a medal on a nameless pilot for killing the most wanted man in the solar system. "You forget how I trapped the Alliance during the Battle of Mars. The orbital defense system was designed for this type of battle. The Alliance made the mistake of flying too close."
"The only mistake I see is the overuse of our primary weaponry. They have mixed with our ships to limit the use, and you are too stubborn and arrogant to oblige them. We still have air superiority without the defense system. Let our fleets do their job."
Gwen waved her hand toward Samantha. "The fleet is losing traction against the Alliance forces. The Solarspot is in danger. The Protector and the Sheriff have broken through."
"Because you have our cruisers worried about being fried by us," Samantha said and then repeated herself for emphasis in a more forceful tone: "By us, Gwen."
"Address me as Supreme Chancellor Arwell. Be silent and coordinate the attacks against the outer column of ships. I’ll handle my part."
Samantha bristled. "The Alliance has successfully separated our fleets into two groups, trapping the outer group away from Phobos, and forcing our inner group back to Mars. Their only retreat points were behind the Solarspot, out of the battle. You are killing us!"
"Lock on the Protector and fire," Gwen said.
"I can’t lock on a ship that fast and that small," the weapons officer said.
A rage built in Gwen. She turned her fury from Eamonn to the weapons officer. She drew her pistol from her belt and slammed the butt into the weapons officer’s temple. A terrific thud resounded in the control room, stopping the chatter and the movement for a moment.
Everyone turned and recognized what had happened and then continued to work as if nothing had happened. Good, Gwen thought. But Samantha didn’t move; she stared at her oldest friend in contempt.
"You have lost hold of your reign and yourself. The MSA is about the betterment of man, not the inspirations of a corrupted leader. Eamonn has warped you."
Gwen kicked the unconscious man from his seat and slipped into the seat herself. "His death is the end of the Alliance."
"No, it isn’t."
Gwen tracked the Protector as it came around the Solarspot and into a clear view. She didn’t waste time, firing the orbital weapon right away.
The sensory board in front of Gwen lit up like a meteor storm on a clear Martian night. Gwen was confused, but Samantha’s face told her that she knew the dish had overloaded.
"What happened?" Gwen said.
"You overloaded the weapons system. You used it too much," Samantha said.
Gwen twisted around and looked directly at Samantha. "What did you do?"
"I will notify the fleet they can now engage the Alliance without fear," Samantha replied, shifting her attention away from Gwen and focusing instead on the control room commander.
Gwen didn’t argue. Samantha was now her enemy.
"Watch out for that debris field!" Hannah Rohen shouted from her captain’s chair.
"I’m trying, but we’re running low on fuel to the port side. There is a leak the engine room hasn’t figured out yet," Parker said, from the pilot’s seat of the Sheriff. Since a plasma energy pack burst in the former pilot’s face, Parker had been in control, taking orders from the ever-demanding Hannah Rohen.
Currently, they led a charge toward the Solarspot, which at this point started a descent course into the Martian atmosphere. It seemed that, and much to Parker’s disappointment, the orbital defense system had stopped targeting the MSA. He didn’t believe Hannah had enough operatives to take over the command center on Zephyria, and she denied that the weapons misstep was the cause of her forces on Mars. He believed her. He had seen the Protector in the area, barely avoiding the beam’s intense energy focus. It would only be one person at the controls.
Gwen was targeting Eamonn, a bold move with dire consequences. Besides destroying the MSA cruiser, it had lifted everyone’s spirits within the Alliance fleet. The outer fleet—begging to be relieved of their responsibilities—dug
their feet even farther into the space they occupied, eliminating the threat from the outer MSA fleets. They saw some hope that the inner fleet would get to the Solarspot. The inner fleet, not having the MSA’s primary rampart to deal with, charged ahead with fists flailing. They had moved two thousand kilometers in the last minutes alone, shrinking the distance to the Solarspot by fifty percent.
Now, immediate to their attention, the final pair of MSA cruisers were cutting toward them from both port and starboard side, which left them with few options. Turning to either side left them vulnerable to attack from the exposed side, while flying straight ahead left them vulnerable to attacks from both of the cruisers. Parker thought about yawing upward, taking the cruiser above the battle line and then dropping straight on top of the Solarspot, but Hannah pointed out that it would leave them exposed to an attack from the orbital defense system.
So Parker guided the Sheriff lower, drawing more attention from the MSA fighters. The Sheriff had enough energy to last until the bridge came up with a better solution.
"We need to draw attention away from us," Hannah said.
"Y’think," Parker said, sharply. "The problem is we are their biggest threat against the Solarspot. I can’t shake them."
"Let’s get the attention of the one on our starboard side since we can’t turn that way to begin with."
"Sounds good, but how?"
"I’m working on that," she said. She activated her radio. "Red Dust, Quartz, and Chloe, concentrate your efforts on the bridge of the MSA cruiser to the Sheriff’s starboard side."
"Affirmative," the three fighter pilots replied in unison.
"I will help you, too," Eamonn’s voice said over the radio. "I can’t do anything until you guys are within range of the Solarspot."
"Understood, Captain Dalton," Hannah said. "It is good my trust in Parker McCloud is well founded."
"Who is this? Where is Captain Terry?"
"I am Hannah Rohen, the new leader of the Alliance fleet," she said with her chest heaving proud. "Captain Terry has been relieved of command."
Lunara: The Original Trilogy Page 90