Flying the Storm

by Arnot, C. S.

  He forgot to expect the sound. He stood there watching slack-jawed, not even noticing when the shock crossed the slopes in a pale wave of grass.

  Then hit the most shattering explosion he’d ever heard. It sounded like the air itself had burst. He’d never heard anything so loud in all his years. He jumped, losing his balance for a second, stumbling backwards with his hands clasped to his ears. Fredrick fell off of the wing, landing amongst the tussocks in a startled heap.

  “For fanden!” Aiden heard through muffled ears. He went to help his friend to his feet.

  “I shit myself the last two times as well,” shouted Fredrick, wiping grass and mud from his front.

  Hammit seemed unperturbed by the Enkidu’s shot. He seemed to find what he was looking for, and swung down from the wing to where the two airmen stood.

  “It’s the coolant valve, right enough,” said the boy-engineer. “Something’s ate it right through. It’ll need replacin’.”

  “Replacing?”

  “Replacin’, aye. A new one. Might be I’ve got just the thing… only, I’m not rightly meant to take bits from Commander Petrus’ craft…” The boy went sheepish all of a sudden, wringing his hands and eyeing the aircraft just across the meadow.

  Aiden tried to reassure the boy. “Hammit, I don’t think the Commander will mind much, given his current state.”

  The boy looked at him. Aiden could see the argument behind his eyes. It could have been loyalty to his masters… or maybe just fear. He pitied him, then.

  “Go on, mate,” he said gently. “We need your help.”

  That seemed to settle it. The boy nodded and set off at an ungainly lope across the grass to the other aircraft.

  Aiden watched him go for a moment before turning to the east. The saddle had a fairly uninterrupted view that way, he saw, but even so he couldn’t see what the Enkidu had been shooting at. Neither could he see where the constant barrage of shells was coming from. It had to be incredibly far away. But there, near the horizon where the blue haze turned to white, he thought he could see little specks of cloud maybe… or maybe smoke. Something was happening over there.

  The Enkidu was giving as good as it got.

  He found that the noise was starting to get to him. Every shell burst thumped in his chest like a blow, and alarmed him more and more each time. He looked then for Hammit, seeing him working away at one of the Gilgamesh’s aircraft’s engines. The sooner he found that part, the sooner they could get into the air and out of there.

  But maybe that wasn’t such a good idea. Maybe they were actually safer on the ground. It wasn’t the Enkidu he feared: if Solomon had wanted him dead he would have pulled that trigger. If they were in the air when the Gilgamesh arrived… But then, how would it be any better to be on the ground?

  “Who the hell is he, anyway?” asked Fredrick, over the noise of the blasts.

  “He was with the team the Gilgamesh sent. They were all killed by the factory’s defences, all except him.”

  “Lucky guy. What… what happened in there?”

  With everything that was happening outside, Aiden had forgotten his hurry to tell Fredrick about Vika and Solomon. Now the urgency had gone, it seemed a bit foolish. What would it actually change?

  “There’s a bloody factory inside that mountain, Fred,” said Aiden. “A whole bloody automated factory. I got to see the warship… But Solomon chased me out of there with a gun. Told me the Enkidu was his, and nobody would tell him what to do with it.”

  “So his intentions weren’t entirely noble then?” He sounded unsurprised.

  Aiden shook his head. “I should have seen it coming. We handed it to him, man. We just handed it to him…”

  “If it hadn’t been us, he’d have found others to take him.”

  There was truth in that. Aiden tried to take some solace from it. “Fred, there’s something else. Vika-”

  “Is fucking Solomon,” completed Fredrick. “Yeah, I’d noticed.” He spat in the grass and took a swig from his hip flask. “I have two theories about that. Either she likes the guy with the biggest aircraft, or she has daddy issues and wants an older man.”

  Daddy issues. That might have held some water… “Maybe she’s looking for help for her father’s cause.”

  “Or that,” nodded Fredrick reluctantly, in a way that suggested he already knew. Maybe he preferred to hold on to the bitter reasons. Maybe they made it easier to swallow.

  Vika is aboard that warship, Aiden thought suddenly. He’d known it all along, only now he’d realised the consequences of that. If the Enkidu went down, so would Vika. Though she’d played them false it still bothered Aiden. If she was really just trying to help her father and her people, then who was he to judge her? He’d done worse things just in the past week than she had by abandoning them for Solomon.

  In truth, he doubted that Solomon would fall for her in the way she probably hoped he would. He was definitely a man with big plans, and those almost certainly did not involve uniting a fragmented Armenia. She was fighting a losing battle if she thought she could persuade him to do that.

  But then, that begged another question. What did Solomon want her for? He reckoned he could have a good guess at that. She’d be strung along for as long as he wanted her, baited with vague promises and hope. That poor girl.

  Aiden felt helpless, stuck on the ground while a growing battle filled the air above. The noise was intensifying, and the Enkidu launched a pair of missiles from hidden ports in its sides. They howled off up into the blue sky, arcing towards the little cluster of dark shapes above the horizon. The barrage of shells continued.

  He was trying to find something good to salvage from the situation. The engineer, maybe. He was only a boy, and yet he had been crew on the Gilgamesh. Did they recruit children for the menial tasks? It would make sense. Children would be easier to control; children would be cheaper. Aiden already knew that the warship didn’t operate on the same moral compass as everybody else.

  Whatever his reasons, the boy had made it clear he didn’t want to go back. Take me with you, he’d said. Don’t leave me here. He could have just meant the stinking, death-filled tunnels, but Aiden had thought that there was more behind the words. He’d been given a chance that surely not many engineers on the Gilgamesh got.

  That was another unsettling thought. Children aboard the Gilgamesh: young boys and girls working away in its depths, oblivious to its actions and motives. And the Enkidu was shooting its monstrous guns at it, trying to bring it down. If the crew had been thousands of grown adults knowingly doing wrong, it would have been different. But now Aiden had the horrible feeling that there might be hundreds, if not thousands of children aboard.

  He ran to the Gilgamesh’s aircraft. “Hammit!” he shouted, seeing the boy poke his head up from behind an engine cowling. “Are all the engineers like you? Your age, I mean?”

  Hammit looked at him like he’d asked a stupid question. “I’m one year away from senior rating. About half are younger than me, half older.”

  “How many engineers are there?”

  The boy shrugged. “A couple of thousand.” He ducked back behind the cowling then.

  There could be two thousand adolescents and children keeping that monstrosity in the air. Several thousand more adults, he knew, for the rest of the crew and the marines. And all of them would die, if what Solomon had told them of the Enkidu was true.

  The warship fired again, but this time Aiden barely noticed the blast. Two thousand children.

  Jet fighters stitched white trails in the sky high above Aiden now. They were swooping and diving, releasing little white missiles that would swarm and twist before bursting into flame where the Enkidu shot them down. Then a fighter screamed low through the gap in the mountains, pulling up suddenly to launch a missile. The Enkidu hadn’t seen it coming.

  For a moment, it looked as if the missile would hit, but at the last it exploded not a hundred metres from the side of the warship. The fighter pulled up ha
rd, great cones of flame howling from its afterburners, vapour shearing from its wings and fuselage. The Enkidu opened fire with autocannons, spraying great streams of tracer after it. Somehow the fighter was untouched. It climbed high into the blue until it was almost invisible, re-joining its squadron at altitude.

  Aiden’s neck hurt from looking up. He turned back to Hammit, who had stopped to watch too.

  “Hammit, we need that part now.”

  36.

  Visual Range

  There it was: pale and grey, rising from the hazy horizon like the moon. The optics zoomed in on it as Solomon leaned forward, and through the shimmering air he thought he could see black smoke funnelling from its sides. He’d hit it, there was no question about that, but it hadn’t been enough.

  The Gilgamesh was still coming, and now it could see him.

  It was huge. He’d seen it before, a long time ago, but the size of it still terrified him. Even bow-on and at forty kilometres it was almost the size of his fingernail. And as he watched it hammering towards him, he knew that the air between them would soon be filled with slugs, shells and missiles, each one of which had the potential to knock his little warship out of the sky.

  “Enkidu, how long till the secondary propulsion is ready?” Solomon was working hard to keep his voice steady, even though only the Enkidu could hear him.

  “Five minutes and forty-seven seconds, Commodore.” A little yellow counter appeared on the display.

  “Okay. After the next shot, accelerate for high-speed evasives.”

  “Yes, Commodore. Firing.”

  The Enkidu shuddered again as the twin railguns launched their one-tonne projectiles at seven kilometres per second towards the Gilgamesh. This time, Solomon hardly had time to register the two white dots racing away before the warship swerved, slamming him into his seat as it brought its electric jet engines to maximum thrust. He could feel the tens of tonnes of air being compressed, electrically super-heated and blasted from the tail nozzles to drive the heavy craft forwards. He could hear the fans and turbines even through the thick armour plating and sturdy structure of the warship.

  The Enkidu was climbing now, banking wide to the north. The barrage of rail-shells had stopped, which Solomon did not think was a good thing. He could see the white trails of the fighters high above, though by now they had surely spent all of their missiles. Oddly, they weren’t returning to the Gilgamesh yet. The only real offensive move they had left would be suicidal gun-runs… The Enkidu had reduced the intensity of the anti-air fire, which suggested that the AI had reached the same conclusion. Lasers and missiles from the factory mountain fired from unseen positions, harassing the fighters above. The fighters were not, and really never had been, the true threat. The true threat was…

  An alarm sounded to Solomon’s right. He saw a cluster of red dots marking a huge number of projectiles and missiles that had just been launched by the Gilgamesh. His pulse stepped up a notch as he watched the Enkidu track them. She’d seen them, and she would avoid them. He had to put his faith in that. She would keep him alive.

  But his hand still twitched for the missing joystick.

  The Enkidu was banking into a wide spiral, her lasers soundlessly picking off the rockets as they swarmed to confuse the targeting systems. There wasn’t much she could do about the slugs, though. They were coming at her much faster, spin- or fin-stabilised, twitching a little this way or that to correct for the Enkidu’s motion. As long as she kept moving, every missile with a tracking system would be constantly changing its heading, trying to stay on target. And that would spend their energy, meaning that when they reached the Enkidu they might just harmlessly slip by, unable to catch her.

  Suddenly the segment of the display where the Gilgamesh was zoomed in, and Solomon saw the warship much larger than before. It was still shimmering, still trailing smoke, but this time there were two distinct white flashes just above its bow, gone as quick as they’d come.

  “Shots have impacted,” said the Enkidu then. “Estimated heavy damage to the Gilgamesh’s forward energy storage, sensor arrays and communications. Penetration expected to be in the range of one hundred to three hundred metres. Possible damage to forward repulsor assembly.”

  “Thank you, Enkidu. Keep firing.”

  That wasn’t nearly enough damage. He needed one of those slugs to hit the reactor housing, or the primary repulsor, or even maybe…

  “Target the bridge with your next shot,” he ordered.

  “Yes, Commodore.”

  The Enkidu pulled gracefully out of her spiral then, at around five kilometres altitude. Her guns were loaded and she lined up for the firing solutions. Three, said the little armament timer. Two. One.

  “Firing.”

  The warship juddered once more and the displays flickered, showing the two slugs screaming off towards their target.

  But then Solomon noticed the red dots of the incoming fire. They were much closer. They were surely moments from impact.

  “Enkidu, those shells are-”

  “Yes, Commodore.” The warship’s engines whistled and howled as she twisted out of their path.

  Then the dots seemed to leap forward out of the distance towards him. It was too late.

  The air around the Enkidu and Solomon was suddenly torn apart as the salvo of rail-shells detonated. They’d missed, but not by much, and the shockwaves and shrapnel buffeted the warship. In front of the flames and smoke that had filled the air around his bubble flashed a series of red warnings, telling him that some of the shrapnel had penetrated the warship’s skin. It listed off the compartments that were compromised, the subsystems that were damaged.

  But it was nothing critical. The Enkidu would fight on.

  “Commodore, we are being hailed by the Gilgamesh,” announced the Enkidu.

  He’d expected this much sooner. Now they would try to bargain with him.

  “Vox only.”

  “Yes, Commodore.”

  There was a static hiss in the bridge. Then a voice spoke; an authoritative, female tone. “NAUS Enkidu, this is Admiral Rosalez of the NAUS Gilgamesh. Cease hostile activity immediately or you will be destroyed.”

  Solomon had expected that. “Greetings Admiral Rosalez, you are speaking with Commodore Solomon Archer, naval special operations division. I’m afraid I must demand of you the same thing. Cease fire and come to a full stop no closer than twenty kilometres, and we will be on our way.”

  “You presume to threaten the Gilgamesh, Commodore?” she said the word commodore mockingly. “Your guns may be powerful, but it will take more than-”

  In the background, Solomon heard another voice. “Brace for impact, Admiral!”

  The comms link cut out, replaced by static. The Enkidu showed Solomon a zoom of the Gilgamesh, where the two slugs had just hit the prominent bridge above the flight deck. The bridge seemed to disintegrate in a ripple of shock and flame, throwing out great bulbous glugs of black smoke. When the smoke parted a little, it revealed the decapitated stump of the command tower, sticking like a broken tooth from the upper decks of the warship.

  “Better,” said Solomon, allowing himself to laugh aloud. They hadn’t seen the slugs coming. Their sensor arrays were either badly wrecked, or so obsolete they couldn’t make out the slugs.

  Even though the bridge had been destroyed, the Gilgamesh was still coming. It didn’t even seem to be slowing down. A few seconds passed before it fired another volley at the spiralling Enkidu. The cluster of red dots appeared once again, closer this time.

  Evasive manoeuvres with a craft the size and mass of the Gilgamesh just weren’t feasible. It was doing what Solomon would have done in its place; charging headlong at full speed until the weight of its guns could properly be brought to bear. Against any normal opponent, surface or otherwise, the Gilgamesh would have already won. But not against the Enkidu. She was in another class entirely.

  “Here it comes…” muttered Solomon, gripping the glass arms of the chair.


  “Yes, Commodore,” replied the Enkidu. Solomon hadn’t even realised he’d spoken aloud. “Incoming fighters above.”

  Solomon leaned back and looked upwards then. He could see the little dark fighters peeling off, one by one, from different angles. They were all streaking down towards him, and he saw the little notifications that the lasers were firing flash before his eyes. The Enkidu released a salvo of missiles straight upwards, burning and arcing towards the fighters. He saw the fighters spiral evasively, shaking them, but all the while keeping their noses towards the Enkidu. Three were obliterated by the missiles, turning to dirty balls of burning fuel and black smoke, but the others were still diving down on him. Then the Enkidu opened fire with her autocannons, unleashing torrents of white-blue tracers up at the incoming fighters that were now supersonic. Solomon watched as they nosed up and down, diving and climbing over the streams of blue fire. He felt the warship accelerate under him, thrusting to make herself a harder target.

  Come on. Hit them.

  The fighters opened fire then. It started as little orange blobs, so slow at first, which broke into streaks and beams as they speared downwards. Some of it streaked past the hull, but most fell like hellish rain upon the upper skin of the warship. The shells punched hundreds of holes in the armour, the depleted uranium turning incendiary as it pierced. It sounded like a horrible steel drum roll, battering and banging all around him. The display shrieked warnings at him. The engines howled and the warship threw herself into another tight turn. Two more fighters disintegrated above him, shredded by the point defences. A third, hit and spinning, hurtled right at the warship. Its pilot ejected, flopping like a ragdoll in the supersonic winds.

  “Stop that fighter!” screamed Solomon, pointing upwards. The point defence cannons hammered at it. It broke into a thousand pieces. Flaming wreckage smashed into the Enkidu, shunting the warship downwards with unbelievable force. Solomon was pitched upwards into his restraints. He gave a loud grunt as the air was thumped from his lungs.