Nervous Nelly panicked, hesitated and finally executed a feint to starboard and a roll to port. It was too little too late. The three torpedoes struck in rapid succession, immediately draining the Starwing’s limited shields and throwing it into a wild lateral spin. Seconds later the fighter slammed into a floating mountain, exploding on contact.
Another hit from a plasma cannon denied me the opportunity to celebrate. The two Starwings that had broken away earlier were now back and bearing down on me. I fired three torpedoes at them and leaned into the yoke, dropping the Strumpet’s nose towards Ganesh. Before I could break out of their plane of attack, they hit me again with another sun-hot burst of plasma. That strike was followed immediately by another from the rear as one of the the other pair of fighters swung around to fix its crosshairs on me. The shield bar blinked in a manic, strobe-like manner announcing that shield power had dipped beneath twenty-five percent. The torpedoes I fired were destroyed in a shower of Federation laser bolts.
I orientated the Strumpet planet-ward and darted away as fast as my reflexes would allow me to fly through the floating rubble. Two more plasma strikes buffeted the ship as I pulled out from between the closing pincers of the Starwings. The shield bar disappeared in a red flash, replaced by a low, wailing alarm. My shields were down. It wouldn’t take too many plasma strikes to chew through the five microscopically thin layers of Crysteel ablative sheathing. They were the Strumpet’s last defence. Her last hope and my only chance now lay inside the gas giant Ganesh. I suffered several laser strikes but fortunately only one more hit from their plasma cannon before I was able to break out of the ring.
Free of the debris field, I was able to throttle up and open some distance between the Strumpet and the Starwings. Moments later the Federation fighters came out of the gas giant’s ring firing their cannons. I was able to swing out of the path of three of the bursts. The other two each struck a wing. The alarm in my helmet wailed louder. The Starwings fired a salvo of torpedoes while their cannons recharged.
As the missiles gave chase, the Strumpet and I plummeted into the molten maelstrom that was the planet Ganesh.
I dived through the outer clouds of hydrogen and helium and plunged into the planet’s second, superheated strata of vaporized metals. My HUD flickered on and off the deeper I penetrated the swirling swaths of red, gold and green. The Starwings did not follow me down into the second strata, they left that job for the torpedoes. I noted the nearest one was forty-four seconds from striking the Strumpet. A moment later, my HUD failed. All data was lost to a blizzard of snow. I turned it off and checked my scope. It too was blind, the monitor crackling with static. Good, I thought, knowing that if I couldn’t see the Starwings, then they couldn’t see me either.
“Strumpet, “ I called out. “Release our nuke with a ten second delay and throw every last joule of energy into putting as much distance between us and it. Now!”
The nuclear tipped warhead was ejected from the torpedo cartridge. The extra juice poured into acceleration did not amount to much. The Strumpet might have squeezed a few more hundred kilometers per second if we hadn’t been flying against the current of the storm band, but it was too late to change course. I could only hope we were moving far enough fast enough as I white-knuckle gripped the yoke and waited for the blast which would either save us or blast the Strumpet and I into thousands of pieces.
When white light washed out the roiling bands of color outside the canopy, I knew the nuclear warhead had exploded. “See you on the other side, ol’ girl” I whispered when, a moment later, the Strumpet’s lights all went out.
Outside the ship, the white light faded to gold and then darkened into orange and then the shockwave hit the Strumpet like a titan-wielded sledgehammer. The ship spun like a top as it was hurled through the corrosive atmosphere of Ganesh. The artificial gravity began to fade. The centrifugal force quickly became crushing. The last thing I heard before I passed out from the pressure was the teeth grinding screech of tearing metal.
10
When I came to, the elephant was off my chest and the lights were back on. My head ached as if it had been cleaved in two. The dizzying view outside the ship told me that we were still spinning. “Strumpet, how long have I been out?”
“Six minutes thirty-one seconds since repowering.”
“What’s the damage, Strumpet?”
“We’ve suffered a hull breach in the cargo bay,” the computer replied. “The breach has caused a partial collapse of the gallery. Shields are at nine percent and regenerating. Atmospheric composition makes assessment of the ship’s exterior impossible.”
“Give me your best guess, Strumpet, how much sheathing would you say we have left?”
“Considering the nuclear blast and the corrosive nature of the atmosphere, I estimate that we have lost forty to sixty percent of our ablative shielding.”
“Let’s split the difference, Strumpet. Assuming we’ve only got half of our Crysteel coating left, how long can we spend in this soup?”
“I estimate thirty-six minutes remain before the ablative coating is completely eroded away and a further fifteen minutes before the atmosphere terminally compromises the hull.”
“Alright then, Strumpet. Let’s wait twenty minutes before we surface. In the meantime do your best to figure out where we are relative to Ramage and the last known positions of all the Federation ships.”
If the nuke’s explosion didn’t convince the Starwings that their torpedoes had destroyed us, I was hoping that our prolonged stay in the radioactive and corrosive depths of Ganesh’s atmosphere would finally convince them that we were dead. Without shields, most ships of the Strumpet’s class wouldn’t last more than ten minutes at this hellish depth. The median temperature at this strata was seven hundred degrees celsius with the occasional hotspot that could spike the heat three times as high. Storms, hundreds of thousands of kilometers wide, raged for centuries at this level. They whipped metal-laced winds to five hundred kilometers an hour and occasionally generated lightning bolts a hundred times more powerful than anything a plasma cannon could produce. Even with shields, only a suicidal madman or someone like myself, who was already as good as dead, would consider spending more than ten minutes this deep in Ganesh.
Six minutes into our waiting the Strumpet began to be pelted with iron hail. The ship’s weak, regenerating shields began to be depleted again at a precipitous rate.
“Let’s get out of here now, Strumpet!”
The ship lurched upward. Seconds later the shields failed again and the rattle of hail striking the hull was nearly deafening. The sound recalled to mind a boyhood memory of waiting out a hail storm under the tin roof of a barn in Arkum Valley. The noise this storm generated was much louder and the threat it presented was infinitely greater.
Eighty-two seconds later the pelting ceased. The shields began to power up again. The scope began to flicker on and off.
“Hold altitude, Strumpet,” I ordered.
The stuttering glimpses of the ship’s scanners showed no signs of the Starwing fighters. That was cause for a cautious optimism but not enough to tempt me to broach atmosphere just yet. It was still impossible to tell where the combination of the nuclear blast and the storm winds had hurled us. All we knew for certain was that we were on Ganesh’s nightside. Rising too high in this hemisphere could reveal our presence to whatever Federation scanner might be fixed on the gas giant.
I powered down everything I could do without, blurring the ship’s energy signature with Ganesh’s and laid as low as I dared in the relatively safer top strata of its atmosphere. Several minutes later Strumpet got her bearings by piecing together the small batches of data her sensors were snatching from beyond the boiling clouds of hydrogen and helium.
With our position determined, the Strumpet and I devised our escape plan.
We held our position for another seventy-two minutes until the rotation of the planet Ganesh swung us back around to face its star, Vishnu. We then broache
d atmosphere and parked ourselves on the gas giant’s Lagrange Point One for the seven and a half hours it took the orbit to carry us to the far side of Vishnu. I spent those eight plus hours being bombarded by radiation. Most of it was filtered by the combination of the ship’s shields, Crysteel sheathing, the hull and even my EVA suit but, all the same; with the multiple and several prolonged spikes in millirems, I feared that I was shaving days off my already sawed-off life expectancy with every hour I spent hiding between the gas giant and the red dwarf.
While I slowly baked in the lethal auras of Ganesh and Vishnu, I found myself revisiting my life with my long-lost commune sister and lover, Estrella of Arkum.
*****
Estrella was the most precocious of my siblings at the commune. She was always my favorite. We were, as Drake observed, inseparable, even before we coupled. I was fourteen years old, she was twelve when we first made love. Our elders, after learning of the development in our relationship, encouraged and even prodded us to ‘spread the love around,’ sharing our ‘discovery’ with our siblings. We were too young to process the advice properly, too young to even question it. Children that we were, we assumed that our elders had our best interests at heart even though their interest in our loveplay embarrassed us. And while we ‘spread the love,’ as they suggested, we would always gravitate back to each other. Our preference for one another seemed to dismay the adults and it began my chafing against the commune’s lifestyle.
They were glad to see me go, I think, when two years later I followed my other great love into the Federation Forces. During my seven year tour I had several lovers but, at the end of it, I eagerly returned to Estrella. While I came into manhood in the FF, she had bloomed fully into womanhood at home. She was more beautiful than I remembered. Estrella stood five feet tall and was voluptuous of body. Her face was broad and high cheek-boned. Her lips were full and sensuous. Luxurious long curls of blonde hair seemed to shine with a light all their own, as did her sun-bronzed skin; her blue eyes glowed with all the glory and life of a summer day.
We wasted little time falling into each other’s arms. And fool that I was, I wasted little time introducing Estrella to bio-enhancers. The injections stoked our appetites for each other and enhanced our staminas for the long bouts of feasting. We introduced the enhancers to some of our other disaffected siblings and soon became king and queen of a crew of daredevils, fearlessly testing the limits of heightened senses and reflexes in one foolish stunt after another.
When the money ran out, we kicked the dust of the commune off our heels and began our crime spree. We started out with simple smash and grab jobs as we made our way across Aurelius. Hopping from city to city, we worked the sex trade, both the guys and the girls, to supplement the smash and grab cash. The sex trade was just another industry in the Federation of Free Planets, sanctioned by the FFP Constitution, regulated by guilds and taxed at the local and federal level. We never bothered joining the guild, however. We freelanced it, undercutting the pros with our discounts and our offers of fresh faces and fresh meat from the hick-filled hills. Young, free of the commune and feeling immortal on the almost daily injections of bio-enhancers, we burned through our days and caroused our nights away with feral abandon.
The more we used, the greedier and crueler we became. Near the end, we took to swindling our johns out of their chits or we just rolled them, hard and nasty, if there was coin to be got. Eventually we cut out the middlemen in our acquisition of enhancers. We started stealing from our own suppliers and raiding hospitals, pharmacies and laboratories. We were reckless and the enemies piled up on both sides of the law.
It was about that time that Drake got pinched. And while our brother refused to rat us out, the authorities had little trouble guessing who the partners in crime of the hick from Arkum Valley were likely to be. The Arkum Gang was thus forced to scatter to the four winds.
I suggested to Estrella that we leave Aurelius, at least until the heat died down.
“I’ll go wherever you go,” she said. “You and me Gael, together to the end. Okay?”
I smiled, touched by her earnestness; thrilled by the light in her eyes, that vestigial glint of adoration from her childhood. I kissed her. “You and I Estrella, together to the end!”
We could only afford to reach Terpsichore, a nearby Federation world of heavy industry, sprawling megacities and plenty of grime and crime in which to hide. Only it was harder to scratch out a living for ourselves on Terpsichore than we had anticipated. The people were harsher, colder and more cynical than those on Aurelius. They were not only impossible to swindle but we had to be constantly on guard not to taken in by their own elaborate scams. Before long we were out of money and low on options. Reluctantly concluding that we could not beat them, Estrella and I sought out allies from the underworld of Tyree, the capital city.
The only ones who would have us was an unsavory, jittery crew of Chloracaine-chewing numbed-wits run by an unsightly psychopath named Ridge. I didn’t like him or his crew but winter was closing in on us and Estrella and I were homeless and hungry and jonesing hard for enhancement. Working for Ridge and crew alleviated all of our immediate problems but I was always looking for a way out from under the gang’s wing. I believed the opportunity came nearly a year later when Ridge and crew set their sight on hitting a supply depot for a new FF base just outside the city.
The depot sat on a base that was still under construction. The barracks that would eventually house the five thousand troops had yet to be built. It was thus lightly manned with soldiers, no more than two dozen who pulled guard duty on the three store houses which had already been built and stocked with armaments and other goods which included a supply of bionites for the infirmary. A construction worker at the site who owed Ridge money bartered his debt away for the knowledge of how to disable the makeshift security system.
It was a rare opportunity, the very kind that criminal outfits like ours were constantly on the lookout for. It was perhaps too ambitious a job and it certainly was not without great risk but; if we could pull it off, Estrella’s and my take of the haul could afford us the means to break from Ridge’s crew and try our luck elsewhere on Terpsichore. If the loot allowed, maybe we could even relocate off planet.
We seized the opportunity!
The weather was with us. A cold rain had driven the soldiers indoors to their mess hall on the night we made our move. Additionally, there was a Hoopball World Championship game on the holo to distract the majority of them from their duties. Between the mess hall and the storehouses were six trailers that were being used as temporary barracks. All their lights were off. The four soldiers on guard walked the perimeter in pairs. Ridge had a pulse pistol that he used to stun the first set. Four of us quickly followed him over the fence, hauled the bodies into the shadows and then did the same to the second pair of guards once they too were stunned. The other dozen of Ridge’s minions quickly scurried over the fence. Two of Ridge’s men went to open the main gate. The rest split into two groups and headed to the storehouses and armory.
Breaking into the storehouses was as easy as advertised. Our group filled two of the five flatbed aeros we brought with us with cases of bionites and other high end drugs and medical supplies while the other half of the crew stripped the armory of its choicest weapons and ammo. We were almost done loading our haul onto the last of the flatbeds when our luck suddenly soured.
One off-duty soldier who was apparently not a fan of Hoopball surprised us and himself when he stepped out of one of the trailers. For a long time he stared at the line we had formed between the storehouse door and the aero we were loading. Just as dumbly, we stared back. The soldier suddenly darted back towards the trailer. One of Ridge’s men began shooting at his retreating form. Then a second of the crew opened fire. Then a third and a fourth. The soldier was hit a couple of times before he managed to dive into the trailer.
Ridge and I shouted at them to stop firing but it was too little too late. The soldiers in the m
ess hall were roused from the game playing on the holo. A curse-laden commotion erupted on base. We ran to the aeros. The soldiers poured out of the hall and gave chase. I grabbed Estrella and prodded her on ahead of me. We fired at the soldiers as we mounted our vehicles. One of them dropped. The others scattered for cover, two of the soldiers running for the base aeros. We sped away with sirens wailing faintly in the distance.
I was flying one of the flatbeds. Estrella and Ridge were squeezed in the front with me. Two of Ridge’s men sat behind us in the cab and another two rode out on the back. I was flying us back to Tyree when we spotted the pulsing lights of police cruisers speeding towards us from the city.
The sirens behind us were getting louder.
“Cut the lights!” Ridge ordered. “And make for the hills north of the city.”
I did as he said. Two of the other aeros cut their lights and followed our change of course. I guessed the remaining pair were too far ahead of us to have noticed.
“We should tell the others,” Estrella said, reaching for the comm controls.
“No!” Ridge barked.
“They’ll get pinched,” Estrella said.
“And that might buy us time to escape,” Ridge replied. “When you get to the hills Gaelic, put us down in the woods just three klicks east of the river. Those hills are catacombed with all kinds of caves. I played in them as a child. There’s one cave in particular roundabout there, it’s big enough to fly this rig into for nearly a whole klick. Beyond that, we’ll be on foot. But there’s a way that will lead us to Tyree’s sewage tunnels. I think I can still find it.”
Despite Ridge’s hopes, we were unable to shake off our pursuers. One of the FF aeros, undoubtedly following our infrared trail, closed in on us. Their orders to ‘land immediately’ blared through our commlink. We ignored them. They fired a warning shot over our heads. The men riding in the back of the three flatbeds fired back with their pistols and long guns. The Federation Military Police aero opened fire in earnest and the first of our three flatbeds exploded in the air as we crossed the river. The second flatbed was lit up with the pursuers spotlight before they opened fire on it. I snatched glimpses of them in my rearview monitor as they danced in and out of the spotlight, trying to evade their pursuers. They managed to dodge two bursts of fire, but the haul-heavy flatbeds were slow and sluggish. The third spray of bullets chewed through their cabin. I watched its driver slump over the wheel in my rearview before the aero plummeted towards the ground.
One Last Flight: Book One Of The Holy Terran Empire Page 9