“Trust me,” he smiled wickedly, then fully opened up the throttle.
The shuttle dropped down and barreled straight for a huge liner that tried to detach itself from a nearby docking point, tearing the hairline structure out of its bearing in the process. Frantic comm chatter filled all the frequencies, maydays and pleas of mercy and all too many messages that cut off right in the middle of a word or sentence. The crew of the MAIDEN had come to know these only too well.
Alexej edged the shuttle across the liner's bow, his huge and yet so delicately manicured paws deftly commanding the small craft. They came dangerously close to a collision before he pulled her around and raced along the passenger liner's belly.
Unfortunately, Ashani fighter pilots were no different from any other fighter jocks across known space and history: they loved a good challenge. Two of the fighters gave chase while the three others dug their teeth into easier prey.
“There's a ship ahead,” Annie called out from her station.
Tarek guessed she meant the mile long cargo container hauler filling his field of view which their pilot was going head to head with. He raised his eyebrows. “Yeah, Alexej, ship ahead.”
The pilot didn't respond, he just kept driving headlong towards the freighter which fruitlessly continued its far too late efforts to push itself out of Tanith's gravity well and into open space.
“Alexej? It's not going to give you the damn right of way!”
“How close are we?” Annie looked up from her station and gasped at the sight.
With impact a second away Alexej rolled the shuttle and grazed past a bleached red container twenty times the size of the shuttle, a huge grin plastered across his face. Behind them the Ashani fighters kept a steady distance and maneuvered into position for a clean shot.
“Effin' hell, Duchess! I paid for this shuttle, remember? Never do that again!” Tarek shouted through clenched teeth, his almost shoulder length black and gray streaked hair pressed out of his face by the g-forces the small ship's compensators couldn't handle. After all, the shuttle had been meant to transfer cargo and people. Becoming the next Spitfire hadn't been high on the engineers' list of priorities.
“Aw, hell, boss! Come on, don't say that wasn't cool!” Alexej flung the shuttle past another freighter within centimeters of disaster, the little ship's engines howling as if they were on their last leg. “You know this is cool! Did you see that?!”
“Right now I'm not sure what I don't want to see more: your flying or the insides of my stomach finding their way back out,” Tarek swallowed. “You still sure you know what you're doing?”
“Sometimes,” he grinned, but this time his voice sounded stressed, too. “Hang on, people.” He pulled another tight turn, this time brushing through the opening between a set of cables and passageways.
Their pursuers however had little trouble matching their pace, although Alexej's mad piloting still prevented them from the clean shot they needed.
“Although this could be a small miscalculation,” he called out in alarm, and a yelp from Annie's position joined the fray.
Tarek opened his eyes and saw the bow of an Ashani destroyer interposed on the shuttle's HUD. The warship was barely a thousand kilometers away and was picking off targets around it with contemptuous ease. On the display, he saw the destroyer turn in their direction.
He was about to utter a curse that would've solidified an old-school reputation as a sailor when Alexej threw the shuttle around in a radical move. Tarek's breath was punched from his lungs and he had trouble keeping his eyes open. The shuttle dodged past a freighter the size of the IRON MAIDEN which almost instantly exploded as the Ashani warship – the destroyer and the pursuing fighters – began firing. The plasma lasers cleaved through the engine section and destabilized the fusion containment, the freighter vanishing in a small, localized nuclear explosion.
“Ship on our port side, collision in five seconds!” Annie shouted. “Watch it, Alexej. This ship's not made for these kinds of games!”
The pilot flipped the shuttle into a roll and ended flying upside down to his original orientation. He whizzed past the long cylindrical form of a merchant guild's warehouse, barely clearing it. The station rushed by only a few meters from the cockpit.
A large mega-freighter a few kilometers ahead was struck by laser fire. A quartet of beams which would have scratched the point on a human warship, sliced clean through the unarmored civilian vessel, slicing fuel lines and igniting the hydrogen-based reaction mass. Burning fuel flashed into space and the shuttle's path, covering its outer hull in liquid fire.
Alexej fought with the controls, the sinews on his arms plainly visible through the stress of piloting the craft under these hellish conditions. He kept them on course, dodging the twisted remains of the dying ship's bow section as it passed them, its exposed girders reaching out like skeletal fingers to stab them.
“I'd really like to be someplace else, Duchess!” Tarek in a bout of frustration and impatience scolded his pilot. “Get us on the planet. Please!?”
“We're almost there.” The pilot's answer came as a hiss through clenched teeth. “Just a little bit more.”
He dove past more twisted metal, deeper into the expanding clouds of debris that had begun to litter the planet's orbit. The fighters were still on his tail. He carefully lined up on the burning wreck of a couple million ton freighter as it slowly tumbled towards the planet below.
“Alexej! Sensors show another ship's coming in from behind. It's an Ashani frigate!” Annie warned.
“I know, I've got it on scope.”
Frigates were ineffective in fighting real warships unless they managed to sneak in under their defenses and launch a shipkiller nuke at point blank range. But they were ideal commerce raiders and picket ships, and even a glancing blow from their guns would obliterate the shuttle.
“Sit tight!” The pilot grinned madly. “This will be something to tell your kids about.”
He accelerated, rushing towards the tumbling wreck. The shuttle passed beneath the vessel and shot out of the far side, right in front of the frigate which was busily cutting up the far side of the defenseless ship. They passed within spitting distance – relatively speaking – of the frigate's bow, taking the Dominion's gunnery officer so by surprise that by the time he even registered what had happened, Alexej had already brought them outside their gun arcs again.
If the Ashani gunnery officer had been surprised to see Alexej, the fighter pilots were even more surprised to round the freighter in pursuit and come face to face with the warship on a collision course. Instinctive reactions taking over the lead fighter pulled his craft harshly up the zed and straight into a floating piece of the freighter's hull the size of a house in suburbia. But the second craft was quick enough to turn and avoid the obstacles, forcing the pilot to black out with the force of the turn.
“Sneaky son of a bitch,” Tarek laugh was forced due to the g-forces, but it was heartfelt. “We're free to land now, right?!”
“I hate to be the killjoy, but not quite,” Annie's voice was surprisingly clear given the multiple gravities they were all suffering under. “That other fighter's still moving!”
The surviving Ashani pilot had recovered quickly from his blackout and was now gaining ground again.
“Will we reach the atmosphere before he does?” the MAIDEN's captain asked, pushing out each word.
“We should, but you do realize their fighters are atmosphere capable?” Annie informed him soberly.
Tarek's curse came out as an undecipherable growl, indicating he had in fact not known that particular piece of information.
“Ever seen a military combat drop?” Alexej's grin was grim now as he posed the question.
“Yes, I have,” Tarek answered truthfully, then paused and his eyes widened. “Oh, sweet merciful Allah, no effin' way…”
“I don't see you offering any better options, boss, do I? We need to get down fast, and that's the quickest way.” Alexej com
mented nonchalantly.
“Yeah, in a dropship that isn't held together by two decades worth of rust and grease!”
“It'll be fine. Just hold on, people,” the pilot enthused, then added almost as an afterthought, “Oh, and the g-forces are quite bad.”
Tarek looked like he wanted to say something but before the MAIDEN's captain got out a word of protest, Alexej dropped the shuttle's nose and accelerated once more towards the planet. Its front immediately began to glow and within seconds had turned white hot, completely obscuring their field of vision. As soon as they hit thicker layers of the atmosphere the shuttle bucked cruelly, throwing the crew back and forth against their restraints. Tarek tried to yell at Alexej but couldn't speak under the intense conditions. The stress was a lot less severe than that of a true military drop, but the assault landers were equipped with the necessary compensators. The MAIDEN's shuttle wasn't. They didn't get the full speed advantage of the maneuver Alexej had intended. A greenish beam shooting right across the shuttle's bow drove that point home all too clearly.
“That fighter still with us?” Tarek coughed.
“Yep.” Annie confirmed tersely, the shuttle rocking even more now that they had entered real air currents. “And he's way too close for comfort.”
The jolting re-entry had been even more straining for the small fighter, but as they slowed to hypersonic speeds he was getting more accurate.
“Can we do anything about that?” Rául shouted from his chair.
“We throw you out the back and you nag him to death!” Alexej snapped in an atypical bout of anger.
The shuttle suddenly jerked forward and entered a twisting spin. Alerts blared and warning lights filled the flickering displays.
“We're hit!” Annie yelled.
The IRON MAIDEN's shuttle twisted through the sky, trailing flames and thick black smoke. Another shot hit it and cleanly cut off one of the delta wings. To the Dominion pilot's eternal – and ultimately rather short – shock the twisted piece of debris ripped away from the wounded vessel and, with a cruel twist of irony, slammed right into the fighter, tearing it apart in a quickly dispersing cloud of splinters and debris.
“I have good news and bad news, guys!” Annie called. “The fighter's gone, that's the good part. Bad news is they'll need tweezers to identify us if we hit the ground at this velocity!”
“I'll try to stabilize her,” Alexej cried and slammed a button, shutting off the alarms. “But the compensator's gone and its' really going to hurt. And it's still gonna be a crash landing. If there's a god you'd like to pray to, now might be the best time. Brace yourselves!”
As they fell through the cover of clouds and the ground raced closer, a city in the distance, Alexej fired the retro thrusters rockets. The sudden explosion of energy slammed into them like a steam hammer. The last things that went through Tarek's head before blacked out were the screams of his crew and the realization that they were still going way too fast...
Outskirts of Tanash Kutur
Tanith, Independent Star System, Pact of Ten Suns.
Chaos. Complete and utter chaos ruled in Tanash Kutur. It was as if some divine force had flipped an invisible switch in people's heads, turning them from sapient beings into animals guided only by the instinct to flee.
Sirens in a dozen different pitches and volumes howled over the rooftops from nearby and afar, but their cries had nothing on the cacophony that threatened to sweep away the packed streets below them. Pedestrians doing their daily chores and travelers from near and far transformed into raging currents trying to run for cover, make it to their vehicles, flee the city, get somewhere in their fright other than where they found themselves at the moment. Scratching, shoving, punching, shrieking. Samantha felled someone with the butt of her carbine and kicked another one away from her. Standing up to the maelstrom of tens of thousands of people was impossible, and at the first opportunity Sammy's squad pulled their local guide after them into back alley.
“Jesus! Stampeding elephants have nothing on that!” 'Grunt' Kayser cursed.
Sammy was inclined to agree. If they hadn't stuck together from the first sound of the sirens onwards the panicked crowds would've swept them with them like leaves on a gurgling mountain stream. She kept her eyes on the near and far entrances to the alleyway, the carbine in her hands automatically following her every move. A few paces away Alyosha, their local human guide, sat huddled between two garbage containers, ignoring the rank smell. Her eyes were as big as saucers, and her head whipped around with every sound that pierced into the alley's twilight.
“Sarge, we can't stay here,” Samantha warned. She licked her lips to moisten them, then drew heavily on the small straw inside her helmet, gulping down the fluid.
Masters stared at her through his helmet's visor, then turned around and quickly scanned their surroundings. “Right, Lee. The streets are no option, but we've got to get the hell out of here before the Dominion's hammer falls. Grunt!”
The soldier inadvertently stiffened at the parade ground growl. “Sir!”
“Make yourself useful for once and see if you can pull down that fire escape ladder!” Masters pointed at a rusty construction clinging to the wall of a nearby building. “We can't use the streets, but the roofs are open. I hope you people fondly remember your urban assault course. You're about to put the knowledge to good use.”
Even compared to Masters' usual dour tone that sounded ominous. But Samantha had no time to ponder the situation. With an ear-shattering screech the ladder came free of the probably decades of rust that had kept it in place, and slammed down on the paved ground.
Sergeant Masters' eyes whipped back and forth between the entries to the back alley, searching for any reactions. But the frenzy out in the nearby streets was too much and too loud for anybody to have noticed. Still, his eyes gave Grunt an invisible lashing before he jumped into action, leaning down to the cowering woman next to them. When he did, his voice was almost soft.
“Alyosha, can you stand up, please? We need to move.” He gently reached out with his hand and held it there for a few seconds. Long enough for the frightened guide to focus on the situation, focus on him. Shivering, she took a deep breath and grabbed the sergeant's hand. He pulled her up to her feet. “Good. Lee!”
“Sir?” Sammy kept her eyes pinned on the near entrance,
“You've got point. Get your ass up that ladder. Grunt will cover our backs. The civvie is with me.” He shouldered his carbine. “Time's a wasting, people. Let's get moving!”
With a last glance at the roiling streets Samantha secured her weapon and began to move up the ladder. The building was three stories tall and evidently built from the local version of bricks. Age had made them brittle, and she cringed with every step she made as dust and small specks of stone broke from the foundations of the relic she tried to mount. It was more nerve wrecking than anything else.
At least getting up there wasn't truly physically exhausting, even with the backpack and equipment she carried with her. Even the standard infantry armor First Squad and the rest of Alpha Platoon wore was clad with an inner layer that stimulated and intensified the muscle strength and reflexes in the arms and legs of the soldier who wore it. A semi-rigid framework around back and shoulders also lessened the weight of the backpack and turned what was essentially a medieval knight in plate armor into a highly mobile fighting machine able to run long distances and climb obstacles as easily as any unburdened person.
She reached the top and pushed herself onto the roof, her eyes quickly taking stock of every nearby position that could be of use to her or used against her. The action came to her as instinctively as breathing did. Airborne troopers were trained and drilled time and again in multiple environments until processes like that one had become part of their very fabric. They had to.
Jamming herself against the outer base of the roof she pulled the ladder towards her, holding the swaying, decrepit construct as tightly as she could. Boots clanked on it below her an
d after a few seconds Alyosha's black-haired head peeked over the edge. Freeing one hand Samantha grabbed her shoulders and lifted her onto the roof. Grunt and Sgt. Masters, their uniforms making them indistinguishable from another for those who didn't know them, followed the civilian.
Without much further ado Sammy gave the ladder a series of powerful kicks. It gave in much more quickly than she had anticipated and slipped from its loose foundation, crashing down on the pavement fifteen meters below where it collapsed in on itself. Her heart made a leap. The ladder had snapped like dry wood.
Grunt leaned over the edge and looked down. “Well, that was close,” he deadpanned. “Good thing the big bad wolf didn't blow the house down as well. But keep huffing and puffing, Sammy. Might become useful one day.”
“On that note, are you done puffing hot air, Private Kayser?” Masters looked down on both of them from farther up the gently sloped roof.
“Just observing, Sarge,” Grunt shrugged.
“Then observe more quietly in the future. Get up here, people,” he motioned them to come to his position.
The roof below was some sort of compound that gave way when they stepped on it, leaving a path of dents in their wake. Together with the state of the ladder, it drove home to point of the age and state of disrepair the whole neighborhood was in, something Samantha hadn't first detected on the ground level with all the people and apparently well-frequented businesses around. But for now she was just happy that the roof held them.
The brief moment of joy evaporated like ice in an oven. Their stint in the tumultuous chasms below had given them a glimpse into what was going on. It wasn't any prettier from their new vantage point. If anything, it was even more frightening, Samantha thought glumly. Thick black smoke from dozens, maybe even hundreds of small fires fanned a creeping twilight that was starting to cover the large metropolis like a silken shroud. Even over the turmoil below the thunder of explosions was clearly audible. Some of it came in the form of sonic booms of starship starting and accelerating, trying to leave Tanith's gravity well as fast as possible. But most of the explosions were real explosions brought about by mass hysteria as the air traffic control system went into emergency shutdown, leaving every air car inside Tanash Kutur's vast boundaries to its own devices, or when delicate industrial work was left unattended because the people attending it no longer where there, or because of half a dozen more reasons Samantha could think of. At that rate, the planet wouldn't even need to be attacked by the Dominion!
Opening Moves Page 53