Rilaef engaged the engine and closed all external ports, disconnecting the vortex shuttle from the hangar. Blast plates quickly fell into place. The giant rockets were engaged and white plumes of smoke filled the entire area, swallowing the shuttle.
Slowly, the vortex shuttle began to lift off into the sky and, slowly at first but then more rapidly, increased speed until the only sight left was the trail of white smoke standing out as an arrow against the massive backdrop of Tai Pan.
Silentwalker had been teaching Greyfur for a full season. He had found Greyfur wandering in the mountains suffering from exposure and numerous small injuries. The story told by Greyfur was unbelievable at first. But the other war master's began to support Greyfur's delusions. So Silentwalker began teaching Greyfur in the ways of war. Other war masters took on students, all of them people fleeing from the giant users.
He had no knowledge of how many of the people were left alive. He only knew that a full season was too long. Cold-time was near and it was the time to attack. The enemy would be weak, they would use cunning and selective kills, like the krilkow taking the ill and sick from the bantau herds. They would be as the krilkow, striking the weak and alone.
He stared down the path across the wooded land. Leaves were already off the trees, preparing for a winter's death sleep. He could see in the far distance the small dome. He knew not the details, but he knew it called the flying monsters who screamed the sky. He knew one was near to arrive, they followed strict times. He hoped that the fire tubes would kill the sky beast.
Greyfur approached Silentwalker and told of the white cloud strings coming from the top of the sky. Silentwalker made the wave and all one hundred twenty of them moved into the broken land, invisible as the ground. They approached to within screaming distance of the dome. They could see the flat black piece of ground that the sky beast aimed for. They waited.
Their approach was flawless. The computer vector was followed with text book accuracy. Rontinae was impressed by his new leader's exactness. He had never served with Canids before, but his opinion of them was rising because of the actions and professionalism of the two he was serving with. He was glad to have a leader that was capable.
“Leader,” Sareekar's voice was puzzled, “We have numerous radar signals locked onto us.”
“Explain,” Rilaef turned in his seat, puzzled.
“Confirmed, Leader. We have over thirty independent launches from the ground.” Her voice was strained but calm.
Shock swarmed over Rilaef. He almost froze, but acted before Rontinae could see his nerves. He increased thrust power and the vortex shuttle began rising in the air again.
“Jam,” he said, turning the controls that changed the attitude of the shuttle, making it fly horizontally, parallel with the ground.
Rontinae's eye slits opened in amazement as he watched Rilaef work the computations necessary to keep them from crashing.
“I am unable to jam them, Leader.” Sareekar said. An explosion rocked the small ship and it began spiraling. “Number three rocket has been destroyed. The warp pod is arcing. I suggest we jettison it.” Rontinae's voice was deadly calm.
“Eject,” Rilaef said. He saw the ground spinning around the periphery of the cockpit window. Inside they felt nothing, gravity always a constant, always readjusting. The sight, however, turned Rilaef's stomach. It felt like flying a simulator, he needed to feel the vessel to really fly. The thought came to him to turn off the gravity so that he could actually fly it in order to save it. The computer control systems were rapidly adjusting the rocket outputs and the spinning subsided.
Five more explosions hit the shuttle. Gravity shut off, as did most of the systems. The craft started an end over end tumble. Rilaef was on the verge of blacking out. He struggled to reach the eject lever.
Rontinae's hand hit it before his leader's, able to withstand more than double the gravity forces than the Canid he was in no threat of blacking out. He pulled and the triangle rocketed off the main body of the vortex shuttle, straight up, compensating for the shuttle's chaotic plunge. Rontinae did not black out.
The silver triangle cleared the shuttle. It hovered in the air and began to slowly descend on its own rocket. Rilaef had no control, there was only enough fuel either to bring it down or get it away from the shuttle in case of explosion. It touched down on rough land, tilting to the side.
“Get the survival equipment and evacuate this section,” Rilaef yelled as he climbed out of his chair.
They climbed out of the cockpit section and fled to cover behind a rise of rock.
“Something is moving around us,” Sareekar whispered.
“I smell it too,” Rilaef drew his hand slug thrower and looked around him.
“I smell nothing.” Rontinae put on his infra-red glasses and looked about him. “I see nothing.”
The cockpit exploded sending shards of sharp, hot metal showering down onto everything. Rontinae quickly snapped his eye slits shut and looked away, momentarily blinded.
“Call base,” Rilaef told Sareekar, “tell them our situation is urgent.”
“I was not aware this area was hostile.” Rontinae opened and closed his eye slits in an effort to see clearly.
Rilaef's ears pricked up and he touched Sareekar's arm. She stopped. Rontinae noticed the increased caution from the two reggf and worked the bolt on his automatic slug thrower.
A stream of plasma shot from their right. All three leaped out of the cover they had. Rontinae fired, spraying the area with burst from his weapon as they ran.
They reached another depression and stopped. Heat from the melting dirt was still close to them, slowly cooking them.
“Turn the beacon on,” Rilaef ordered, “and take up a three point position.”
All three went to the edge of the hole and took up firing positions. Rontinae could see nothing. He narrowed his eye slits and scanned the area. He saw movement and opened fire, emptying his clip.
Rilaef, trying to ignore the sulfur of the slug thrower, smelled the area. His ears rotated rapidly, trying to glean some sound. He heard movement and turned his eyes. For an instant he saw a figure, thick and short, his attention was instantly focused on the small object that the creature had thrown at them. He raised his handgun and shot the grenade. It exploded in midair, spraying the area with shrapnel, a piece tearing into his flight suit.
He heard a faint sound, an almost imperceptible breath as something was hit. He aimed and fired on sound alone and saw a figure like the first rise and try to dive for cover. He put three more slugs into it before it vanished from sight.
“I can't hear anymore, Leader,” Sareekar whispered.
“Try.” He continued to scan the area, his held a dull heavy ring that he tried vainly to ignore.
“I can't see them, Leader,” Rontinae said, shoving another magazine into his automatic weapon.
“We have to get out of here.” Rilaef's realization struck him as a slap. “They're surrounding us.”
Sareekar smelled one close. She fired based on her scent direction. She concentrated fire, following the sound of movement. Rontinae turned and saw something move from where Sareekar had been firing. He fired a short burst and the figure fell.
“This way,” Rilaef prepared to leap up out of the hole. “Now!”
The three of them jumped up and ran. Out of the corner of her eye Sareekar saw one of the strange figures jump up and fire a rocket launcher at them. She screamed and dove to the ground, firing her handgun while in the air.
Rontinae turned his torso, his neck completely inside his chest bone, and fired a three round burst. The creature fell. The rocket flew by, ripping Rontinae's left arm off at the shoulder and continued on until it hit an embankment and exploded, embedding numerous pieces of shrapnel into Rontinae's back.
He saw a mass of them rise from the ground, as if they had been a part of it, and swarm onto them. One rushed Sareekar and struck her with a spear in the lower abdomen. She fired point blank and hit it
in the forehead. Three others rushed Rontinae. He turned to fire but they hit him with their spears. All cut through his skin but didn't penetrate his torso bone.
Rilaef climbed to his feet, his handgun lying discarded on the ground. The lust was upon him. Two charged. He tossed their spears away with a block and descended onto them with teeth and claws.
Rontinae fired his weapon, swinging it broadly, and dropped the three standing around him. He looked to his stub and saw no blood. His left torso was burned, the blood stopped by the exhaust of the rocket.
Sareekar was snarling, a strange demonic sound Rontinae had never heard. She was thrashing amid four of them. The lust was full upon her, she grinned with the joy. Limbs were torn from the creature's bodies. Sareekar's body was cut and pierced until all of them fell into a heap of dying flesh.
Rilaef bit through the skull of one of the creatures and then stepped to the next. The smaller creature fell back, his spear piercing Rilaef's torso and lifting the reggf into the air. Rilaef slid down the shaft and ripped open the creature's throat with his teeth.
Rontinae looked up and saw one standing a distance away with a plasma rifle. He knew the time was near and stood, waiting. He saw another one walk up next to the first. Surrounding Rontinae were only dead. The one lowered the plasma rifle and vanished behind the rise of ground followed by the other.
Gunboat five-thirty-four from Earth base pulsed toward the rendezvous point. Lieutenant Wilson sat in the pilot’s seat. He could see the Cruiser Exeter only a few thousand kilometers from his position. His crew of two, gunner and computer operator sat behind him, one facing rear and the other sitting in a seat hanging from the ceiling.
The gunboat itself was fifty meters long, sled shaped with a blunt nose and wide cockpit view port allowing for an increased view of the field of blackness dotted with white points of light. It had short stubby wings and a tall tail fin with the number 534 inside a picture of the Earth. The whole craft could drop into the air and fly, using the pulse engine to push faster than the jets still in service.
Below the cockpit, accessible through a manual pressure hatch, were the living quarters. Three small bunks grouped in zero gravity fields gave weightless sleeping environments. Stored with their sleeping arrangements was enough food and water for thirty days, sixty on emergency rations.
The gunner controlled the sensors along with a plasma controlled warp field pumped anti-matter projector able to hit a target out to ten light seconds almost instantly. In addition they carried six external missiles with anti-matter warheads, each missile with its own pusher plate. The gunner also controlled the electromagnetic shield, power focused to give specific defense. The shield had been rated to withstand one, sometimes two, direct anti-matter hits without destroying the craft.
The rest of the ship was the antimatter reactor and the pulse engine with a maximum push of power hitting the exponential curve at close to point six C sustaining only nominal damage to the reactor. Wilson's face could be seen through the window. Only a quarter meter of transparent metal separated him from vacuum. The gunboat sped through space cruising at point 1 C, the sun a faint burning point of light. They reached their check in position and changed course, heading toward a spin around Uranus and then an acceleration back to Earth.
Wilson stared into space, seeing the stars and seeing in the distance a bright point of light that was Uranus. He sat in the chair, clad in a jump suit with prepared pressure tubing for easy access to the space suit that was hung in the locker to the port of the cockpit.
“Lieutenant,” Harkin turned from the Engineering panel, a half hexagon of touch screens mixed with keyboards. “I'm getting a gravity shift disturbance at about twenty thousand klicks out system.”
“Jesus,” Kyle looked down from the gunner's position, his face ashen, “already?”
“Shut up, Kyle,” Wilson changed his course, matching the numbers scrolling from the sensor log. “Just get the sensors focused onto the disturbance. Harkin,” he spoke without looking behind him, “get a tight beam to the Exeter.”
“Aye sir,” Harkin started speaking into his headset at a low tone.
“I've got three ships on scan now, Lieutenant,” Kyle said, the form fitting sensor sights hiding his face and his expression.
“Don't lock on,” Wilson said quickly, “just watch.”
“They are about twenty meters long, about five high and thirteen wide. They're delta wing shaped. Sir,” Kyle turned to face the others, “they look like airplanes.”
“Sensor beams are hitting us,” Harkin said, holding is hand over the mike on his headset as he looked at a changing bar graph on one of the screens. He touched the screen and saw a line chart. “They look really similar to ours.”
“Jam it,” Wilson ordered.
“No can do,” Harkin said, “besides they're on their way back.”
“Bingo,” Kyle said. “They must have read us. I have heavy gravity disturbances coming from all three ships. Holy,” Kyle cut himself off, “They're moving. Hell, they look big as hell now.”
“They're hitting us with some kind of energy beam, Lieutenant,” Harkin said.
“Give me a course and speed, Kyle.”
“They're system up, in a V formation.”
“Exeter's on the line, Lieutenant,” Harkin said without emotion.
Wilson quickly flipped a switch and touched the mike to his headset, “Gunboat 534 T, Wilson here.”
“This is Exeter, hold for Captain Hobson.” The delay was faint, only a few seconds.
“We're being hit by a radio beacon from the aliens.”
“Lieutenant,” an older voice came across clear of static, “hold position and monitor. Take no action.”
“Understood,” Wilson transmitted, “Gunboat out.” He flipped the comm switch.
“Do we pick up the phone?” Kyle asked, looking directly at Wilson.
Rigaar sat in the small communications room. He watched a screen showing sapiens in a dialogue with each other. He had been studying two of their languages for the past year. He mouthed words as they were spoken on the screen, trying to understand how to pronounce some of the phonetic structures. Even though the reggf could speak the sapien tongues enough to roughly communicate, too many of the sounds in the language were too close. They frequently misunderstood each other.
The door slid open and Kaliif stood in the passage, his head hung, looking down onto Rigaar.
“The colonists are going kulja,” he said.
“Soon, Kal.” Rigaar leaned forward to shut the screen off but turned the volume down instead.
“We've been sitting four light years away for a while now, Rig.” He pulled his flask from his pouch and drank. “The commanders want to go someplace,” he said between swallows.
“You drink too much, Kal.”
“What else is there to do?” He leaned against the door jam, preventing the pocket doors from closing. “No one to fight, no place to fly and no females to copulate with. So I drink.”
“They may not accept us.” Rigaar's tone grew from tired to serious.
“I know.” Kaliif understood.
Rigaar appreciated the friendship with his old enemy. Kaliif was the only one who understood. The only one of their old guard still left. All the old ones died. They were the ones that sacrificed in the war with the Saurians. They were the ones that understood. Pirates cared more for the unity and protection of the reggf than the Protectors and the Reegarfs. No one good was left. They couldn't war with the Sapiens although he saw their strong xenophobia from their broadcasts. They even hated each other for differences in color; a concept foreign to a people where duplicate color patterns in fur was extremely rare.
“I worry about the camps,” Rigaar confided.
Kaliif stepped inside the tiny room and let the doors close behind him. He sat down on a ledge and handed his flask to Rigaar after taking another sip.
“I have seen their transmissions, too,” he said. “I will not allow it to
be.”
“To fight them would destroy us all.” Rigaar watched the quiet screen, the sapiens baring their teeth at each other and their strange barking sounds barely audible. “Even the children.”
“Your plan,” Kaliif closed one eye, “I know. We shift in, maybe five ships, we talk to the sapiens and see. If they fight then we go somewhere else.”
“No. One ship, me, alone.”
“Cha,” Kaliif raised his lip in a smile. “You know I wouldn't let you go alone.”
“Alright, kal, two ships.”
“Three, one to run back. Too long since you've been a pirate, Rig.”
“They don't have tachyon communications, we don't need three.”
“How can you trust their broadcasts?”
“They're speaking to their own, why would they talk of their pulse engines and antimatter projectors and wish to hide something like tachyon communications?”
“I don't know, Rig. But I do know that the sapiens are insane.”
“They're not too different than us.”
“I know, they have their blood lusts too.” Kaliif's lip dropped. “Only we regret ours. They use it for entertainment.”
Rigaar looked up quickly.
“You think they're worse than the Saurians?” he asked.
“Any master is a bad master.” Kaliif took the flask back and emptied it. Rigaar looked to the screen. “Besides, I'll be dead before it gets to that point.”
“Death seems better now. It’s hard not to see it all as lost,” Rigaar said.
“Loss, gain, profit is profit. At least the sapiens understand that much.”
“We need to hide much from them. Not let them know our number, our position.”
“Leave the colony out here?”
“No. Go to the second near star. They've got a fledgling base there with a livable planet. Ask them for it in payment.”
“For what, they're already ahead of us, unless we give them tachyon ability. But then we would have no edge.”
“Not for technology, Kal, but for service.”
Kaliif's lip raised again in a smile. “Maybe even some of their ships.”
“They build giant ships like the saurians,” Kaliif turned back from the screen, leaning back in the chair.
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