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! What’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 view, 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.
“Darius!” Dyara’s voice rose sharply as they rocketed backward down the launch tube.
With both of the Vulture’s wings sliced off, it was surprisingly easy to stay away from the sides of the launch tube. Keeping an eye on the rear-view camera, Darius watched the sealed doors of a vehicular airlock rushing up fast behind them. He nudged the throttle up just before they arrived to buffer the impact, but they still hit hard. Darius’s teeth clacked together and his guts clenched. The lights in the cockpit flickered but didn’t die. Another damage report flashed up.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” Dyara groaned.
Scanning the damage on his secondary holo display, Darius found that almost every system was marked offline. The canopy seemed to be in-tact, but there was a loud hissing sound coming from somewhere inside the cockpit, and cabin pressure was dropping steadily. At least they had a self-contained air supply.
“Now what?” Dyara asked. “It’s the two of us against... four thousand plus Revenants.”
Darius gasped dramatically. “That many? I thought there’d be less.”
Dyara ignored his sarcasm. “This is a Colossus-class carrier. Same as the Harbinger, so yes, that many. Oh, and Kovar’s ship is still accelerating at two and a half Gs, so unless you’re planning to crawl to the bridge under that much force, we’re going to be stuck in here until our air runs out.”
Darius ground his teeth, considering their situation. Dyara was right. Getting out of their fighter and cutting a way in would be the easy part. After that, they still had to find a way to negotiate the ship’s corridors while resisting significant forward acceleration. That would mean falling most of the way and using the ZPF to cushion those falls. And when they weren’t falling, they’d have to crawl through the ship while weighing the equivalent of four or five hundred pounds each.
“I never should have gone along with this mission,” Dyara said. “None of us should have. We lost all of our pilots just getting here!”
“Shut up!” Darius snapped. �
�I need to think.”
“Fek you!”
Darius almost lashed out at her with a kinetic attack, but he managed to stop himself. A flash of guilt followed that impulse. Maybe it was time to stop dosing with Sprites for a while.
“Are our missile launchers still functioning?”
“No,” Dyara said. “And even if they were, you can’t shoot missiles in here. You’ll blow us up long before you take out the carrier.”
“Maybe not,” Darius said. “How many missiles do we have on board?”
“A full complement. Eight Hornets, and six Stalker torpedoes. Even if you could fire all of them safely, that’s not enough to take out a ship this big—especially not since the crew are Revenants, and they’re all still shielding the ship.”
“We don’t need to destroy the whole ship,” Darius replied. “Just its engines, but you’re right... we don’t need missiles for that. We just need to gain physical access. Our swords will do the rest.”
“Do you know how far we are from the engine room?” Dyara asked.
Darius shook his head. “No, but I have a feeling it will be easy to find.”
“How’s that?”
“The engines are pushing us. If we follow the axis of that force, we’ll find them.”
“What are you going to do, cut through all of the bulkheads between here and there?”
“Exactly,” Darius replied.
“Are you insane?”
Darius pulled the release lever for his acceleration harness and then hit the open/close canopy button. The cockpit canopy groaned reluctantly open, and the remaining air in the cockpit whistled out in a condensing white stream of vapor. Darius grabbed the portable oxygen tank from under his seat and switched his air hose for the one trailing from the tank. Leaning forward with great difficulty, he clipped the tank to the magnetic plate on his back and then took his sword from a specially designed rack in the side wall of the cockpit and clipped the scabbard to his back beside the tank.
The direction of their shared acceleration with Kovar’s flagship was coming from directly behind their Vulture, so Darius climbed out over the back of his chair. “Are you coming?” he asked as he braced his feet to either side of Dyara’s headrest.
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