by J. J. Snow
“4…3…2…1…bank!” Reilly marked the first turn as Duv jigged left and down through a tunnel, popping back up moments later to the surface. “Twelve degrees, ready, bank!” He flipped the ship sideways as Chang and Marek opened up the Bofors laser turrets, blowing one of their pursuers out of the sky.
Reilly continued to call out the turns as Duv flipped the ship deftly through its paces, barely skimming walls. Another ship crashed behind them, unable to deal with the increasing complexity of the canyon tunnels.
“We are inbound to the honeycomb…switching to optical tracking. Duv, you call it.” Reilly switched her nav display over to the rail gun mount and began to target the ships behind them.
“I got the best Mark-One eyeballs in the fleet. Ain’t no one can keep up with me!” Duv breathed softly to himself, focused. A small globe came up from the panel in front of him and generated an up-close holo-view of the honey combs while a laser locked onto his eye movements and the HAILE system confirmed the lock. Duv would use his eyes to guide the ship, where they went, the ship went. He reviewed his training: look out in front, way in front, follow the curves with your eyes, your eyes lead the ship, don’t look too close to the nose, don’t get distracted or you’ll crash and burn.
The honeycombs were a series of caverns and tunnels that led to a large opening in the top of an active volcano. Some were interconnected, some were dead ends, and because the volcano was still active, the layout of the tunnels was constantly changing. As hot gas and liquid spurted upwards, new tunnels and tubes would form or old ones would get sealed off and collapse. Duv had recently mapped the tunnels, but even so, it would take all of his flying skills to get them through it.
Reilly fired off the twin rail guns in response to a few bouncing blasts from the nearest enemy ship. It split in half like butter under a hot knife, and she watched as the pilot was pulled out by the rushing air to his death. The nearest ships both attempted to pull back and wound up getting in each other’s way. The spikey star-shaped wings crashed together, entangling the two ships and pulling them into the wall just behind Dark Angel 97. The resulting explosion pushed Duv forward and up briefly as Tiny adjusted the shields to protect the ship.
“Whoa! Okay, that was almost not good.” Duv veered off of the wall that suddenly appeared in front of the ship and banked a sharp 70 degrees upwards, then leveled out and began to dodge clumps of rock and lava pillars as the tunnel flashed by. Reilly continued to focus on the enemy. If Duv couldn’t get them through this, then no one could, and they’d all be dead. So it was no use worrying about it. She fired another blast with the rail gun as the ship behind flipped over the beam and returned fire. Two more ships dropped in behind the first one, black and well armed, and began to fire as well.
“Chang! Marek! We’ve got a couple Dreggers back there—see if you can’t knock out their launchers before they get much closer—we’ve got no room to maneuver here!” Reilly fired up the electronic countermeasure system just in case. Dreggers carried heavy explosive rounds that would launch and attach to a gunship’s hull, then burn through the outer hull and detonate their primary explosive packages beneath the armor plating. In space, this would cause a severe breach, but within the confines of the gas-filled lava tubes, it could cause the engines to explode, blowing up the ship—not to mention bringing the entire tunnel system down on them.
Duv flipped the ship upside down, rapidly spiraling up and then suddenly down again through the tunnels as the others continued to engage the Dreggers. He turned it right-side up and then pulled a quick flip and zoomed into a side tunnel. One of the Dreggers came up short, careening into a wall and exploding. The tunnels shuddered in response while the other two ships continued to follow them. Marek winged the smaller ship on the next turn, and Chang followed up with a volley that pushed it into a dark shaft. They watched as the explosion blasted out through the openings in the tunnel walls.
“C’mon, baby. Almost there, almost there!” Duv muttered under his breath, sweating as he banked and beginning a steep climb up a tunnel that would lead back towards the surface. The remaining Dregger followed doggedly, sliding around their fire as if it was immune. It opened its launcher.
“Captain! She’s getting ready to launch!” Marek hollered out.
“On it.” Reilly waited for the Dregger to launch its deadly payload, then punched the countermeasure button. Three decoys exited the back end of the ship. The Dregger’s explosive round locked onto the right decoy and blew up. The concussion of the explosion blew both ships around. Duv cursed as he temporarily lost focus and grabbed the yoke, struggling to push the ship back on course and out of the wall. He slid the bird side to side and then pulled a steep right bank and shot up one of the lava tubes.
“Uh, Captain? I’m going to have to make us a short cut—looks like the volcano is pissed!” Duv kept his eyes locked on the holoscreen while pointing to the map. The heavy detonation had reopened several active lava chambers, and molten rock was rushing up the tunnel behind them, causing the cross-tunnels to collapse. Reilly cursed and spun the rail guns forward, dialing them to full power and charging them up.
The Dregger apparently had also realized what was happening and was zigzagging behind them, avoiding bursts of lava as it exploded from the side tunnels. The fighter shot at them, desperately trying to take the Dark Angel down so it could get ahead of the volcano. Laser fire peppered their rear shields as Tiny worked, shifting the power to the aft portion of the ship to buy them time. The Dregger suddenly disappeared as a wave of lava poured out of a side chamber, pulling it down under the fiery tsunami.
“Chang, Marek—I need your guns forward! We’re going to have to blast our way out of here!”
Reilly watched as Duv guided the ship, jinking and pushing as fast as he could towards the surface. The lava was closing in as he slid the ship sideways into a low tunnel and then blasted straight up. Through the bridge window, they could see a dark cap of rock blocking their escape. Duv gritted his teeth and gunned the ship towards the wall.
Reilly gave the signal, and they all opened up their guns, blasting at the rock. The rail guns cut two deep channels while the Bofors turrets ground away at the stone, breaking it into pieces. Even with the full firepower of the gunship, the lava cap stubbornly refused to give way, yielding chucks of debris slowly as the ship continued to advance forward. Duv quickly ran out of room as the lava flow continued to surge upwards behind them.
“Brace for impact!” Duv maxed the thrust and drove the gunship forward.
They hit the wall hard, and the crew lurched with the impact. Tiny struggled to keep power balanced between the forward and aft shields as the others continued to fire at the rock entrapping them. The engines screamed as the rock ground against the hull, then finally gave way around the ship. The Dark Angel jumped into the light, and Duv punched it as the volcano roared to life behind them, spewing heat and lava high into the air. The crew cheered as the gunship screamed towards space.
“Stay frosty, folks. We’re not through this yet.” Reilly charged up the rail guns again as the ship broke into the black. Seekers drifted everywhere in sight, joined by about twenty Tethers. They had been waiting for the gunship to appear and now slowly moved into attack formation around the Dark Angel.
“We’ve got a lot of company up here…” Duv noted as Chang and Marek spun the guns outward and around, taking in the view.
“Tiny?” Reilly said, not taking her hands off the rail gun controls. Tiny deftly flipped the switches on the electronics suite, interrogating the nearby ships until she found Ty’s handheld signature.
“Over there, in that small knot of ships at the back. It looks like they’re prepping to jump.”
“Duv, we need to get to that ship and disable it before it jumps. Everybody, weapons free! Duv, go now!” Reilly commanded.
Duv pivoted the gunship in a tight loop and shot up through the knot of enemy fighters. A firestorm immediately ensued as the ene
my gave chase, trying to bring down the Dark Angel as it dodged through the remaining debris from the Roen defense stations. Duv smiled grimly and began a series of intense maneuvers. He played chicken with several ships, pulling up and causing their pursuit to fly into each other or have to suddenly veer off, then shot straight down on the confused enemy below so the gunners could take them out. He hit the motion dampeners as two other Tethers flew by and one crashed into the back of the gunship briefly then spun off. Tiny grumbled and sent him a look as she upped the rear shield again.
“Y’all always like fighting like this?” Marek yelled to Chang as he mowed down three Seekers and two spaceborne Tethers.
“Like what?” Chang replied, calmly returning fire, flipping his pod to track one of the Tethers who had fired a rail gun at him and blowing the target to pieces as they passed.
Several more Tethers began diving on the ship, forcing Duv to engage in some old-school dog fight tactics to allow the gunners to take them out. He spun the Dark Angel, just missing a head-on collision with a Tether traveling parallel to them, the bottom of the Tether scraping above the bridge window as he dove again. As he spiraled out of danger and banked the bird back around, the Tethers tried another strafing run on the gunship with their lasers.
“Outnumbered! Y’all are always the hell outnumbered!” Marek hollered back, spinning his pod as two more Tethers blasted by him, trying to break through the shield to kill him. He spun his gun up and returned their fire, whooping as his tantalum laser rounds connected with the backside of one of the ships, causing it to explode violently as the engine went up.
“Think positive!” Chang hollered back, firing rapidly at another Tether who had launched high-explosive mines towards their hull. “We are not outnumbered, we just have unlimited target selection!”
Duv spun the ship and then banked again. They were in range. Reilly fired both rail guns simultaneously, striking the nearest ships in the group that held Ty. They split into pieces as their pilots were ejected into space. She ran the rail guns up again while Chang and Marek continued to keep the other fighters at bay. Suddenly two of the ships jumped away. Reilly fired, taking down the third, but it was already too late. Ty was gone.
“Captain, they jumped! We lost Sergeant Ty!” Tiny confirmed from the back of the deck.
“Damn it! Tiny, did you track them?” Reilly blasted two more Tethers and their associated Seekers as Duv continued to maneuver deftly through the barrage of return fire. The gunship shimmied in the wave of laser fire as the Tethers began to mass again. Chang and Marek blasted away at several more as they bunched together and strafed them, leaving behind a series of laser scores on the side and back of the gunship.
“I have a rough plot based on trajectory. It’s enough to get us close.” The ship shuddered as two more blasts hit the port side. “Shields are holding, but I recommend we get some distance between us and the Tethers. Under this type of fire, they won’t hold for long.”
“Duv!” Reilly swung back, but Duv was already in motion. He flipped on the journey program and launched the first journey, jumping the ship away from the Tethers and then immediately jumping again along a series of shorter hops to throw off any pursuit, and engaging the ship’s stealth shielding. After the fourth jump they paused, waiting.
“Status?” Reilly looked around as Duv and Tiny began running their systems checks.
“Gunners checking in, we are fine, no damage to the guns, light to moderate laser scoring along the hull but no breaching or heavy damage. She looks good from the outside, Captain,” Chang reported.
“Ma’am, our countermeasure system sustained minor damage from the blast in the tunnel but nothing I can’t fix, and the shields are holding well at about seventy-six percent across the board. They should be back to a hundred percent within the hour. The Tether ship with Sergeant Ty on board made no attempt to disguise its path. In fact, they seem to be leaking neutrons almost as if they want us to follow. I should be able to get a solid final location for them by running a couple of standard star-tracking programs to trace their route.” Reilly nodded in acknowledgement, and Tiny turned back to her console to run a few more scans.
“Journeys are plotted, and we have no pursuit at this time. If we continue on course, we should arrive at our designated rendezvous with Commander Zain in exactly fourteen hours,” Duv reported.
“Brynt, Macen, report,” Reilly ordered.
“They are a little busy right now, Captain. But I’m fine!” a voice responded.
“Seth?” Reilly looked around at Tiny and Duv. “This can’t be good.”
—————
Ty opened his eyes. His vision blurred, then cleared, then blurred again. He tried to see where he was and what was around him, but everything looked dark and gray. One eye was swollen shut, and he was pretty certain his nose was broken as well. The front of his shirt was wet with sweat and blood, and his head throbbed as he tried to remember what had happened. He moved to sit up but found that his hands and legs were manacled to the floor. He wrestled with the chains for a minute and then leaned back on the cold metal surface.
Suddenly a bright light flashed on, blinding him. He could hear voices, but his ears were still ringing from the explosions and he couldn’t make out what was being said. He squinted, trying to see around the light, to get a glimpse of the shadowy person behind it. The light grew brighter, and he leaned away from it. A dark object came flying in as a brilliant blast of pain shot through his skull, and he knew no more.
“So here is the video I promised—as you can see, he is still alive, just somewhat disoriented. I prefer not to have trouble on the flight back, so”—a younger man appeared to one side, grabbed his blaster, and smashed the butt of it into Ty’s temple to knock him out again—“we will keep him like this until we arrive. Not too long, three days maybe?”
“Very good! I would prefer that he is coherent on arrival and still able to speak, so if you would avoid breaking his jaw? When you arrive, bring him straight to me for your payment. It is most definitely a pleasure to make your acquaintances, gentlemen!” Crazy Ray clicked off of his handset and hummed a jig. He was in between auctions, and this news had just made his day fantastic. He looked over at his temporary assistant, who was struggling with the switches on the control boards, and laughed. The man looked up at him, fearful, pausing to see what would happen next.
“Go out and get me someone else from the communications center. You have four minutes.” Crazy Ray waved him off, then jumped up on the stage and strode across it purposefully. He opened up a crate, pulled out one of the new laser rifles inside, and then loaded it. He picked up his remote, tweaked the cameras, and then trained one camera on the door and the other on himself. As the “On Air” light came on, he smiled his signature psycho smile.
“People, people! What a fantastic day we have going on here! I have got some super deals that will quite literally knock your socks off!” He laughed hysterically, then sobered and unloaded an entire clip at the back of the room. The camera trained on the door captured it all as he mowed down the assistant, leaving behind only the man’s shoes. “These guns are the real deal, the latest in Vhax technology, and today only you get a free pair of shoes with your purchase!”
A second man numbly stepped through the door, over the body, and walked to the console to begin working the lights and sounds. He didn’t even react to what had just happened. Crazy Ray continued his auction, calling out bids as the blood from the hall flowed across the floor at the back of the room, perfectly framed for the viewing audience by the dead man’s shoes.
—————
Reilly and Duv ran down the catwalk while Tiny checked her med kit to make sure she had some extra tranquilizers and an injector. How Seth had come around so quickly she could guess. He must have decided not to take the pills. That’s what she would’ve done. As a precaution, Tiny double-checked her armament as she ran, looking for the small bolt gun that doubled a
s a pen. If she had to, she could immobilize him with a neurotoxin bolt first and then increase the tranquilizer dose. Hopefully it wouldn’t come to that.
Reilly jogged down the last hall, slowing to a walk with Duv at her side. Seth had keyed in from the cargo bay. Reilly wasn’t sure what to expect when they entered, but she crossed her fingers, praying that Seth hadn’t accessed any of the secure holds with the remaining Vervian equipment in them. They still didn’t know what most of it did, and if Seth had armed himself with any of those weapons, they could all be in a world of hurt. She was hoping for the best, but in this line of work, it was always smart to prepare for the worst. She handed Duv a stun gun and grabbed one herself, but also checked her blaster just in case. Duv was too distracted to notice. Just as well, Reilly thought to herself. She hoped she wouldn’t have to hurt the kid.
They paused at the hatch, waiting for Tiny to catch up, then slowly opened the door and walked into the room.
Seth sat on a crate at the back of the bay, head down, looking at something. Duv and Tiny flanked to either side of Reilly as she began to walk directly up behind him. She slowly moved closer, holding a hand out for Duv and Tiny to hang back a bit. Her footsteps sounded lightly on the cargo floor. When she was still a few feet away, he abruptly lifted his head. Reilly and the others froze.
“Captain Campbell. Did you know I could hear you coming from across the room? And I knew it was you just by the way you walked. It’s the way you balance your weight on the balls of your feet, always moving forward.” Seth paused a moment, fascinated. “It’s very distinct. I never used to be able to do that.”
Reilly stood still and waited. “What’s this all about, Seth? Where are Macen and Brynt?”
“I had to put them somewhere to keep them from causing any more problems. Over there seemed like a pretty good spot.” Seth sent a cold glare across the room. Reilly fought back a shiver, remembering Ty’s words about how Seth had changed into a cold-blooded killer in town. He was right. This wasn’t Duv’s son, the kid they had rescued from slavers. Something was terribly wrong. She pushed it all to the back of her mind as she took another couple of steps forward, looking for the missing men.