by Dean M. Cole
Looking down, Jake realized he had the console's edge in a white-knuckled death grip. During the last two seconds, the insane panorama had skittered across the view-wall five times. As Zoxyth lasers filled the space around his squadron, his ship's automatic defense systems had it jumping all over the place.
Grinding his teeth, Jake forced himself to focus on his next task.
As the Turtle reached the designated initialization point, it turned and rocketed directly at the targeted dreadnought. Over the squadron's channel, Jake said, "IP inbound. Gunfighters, cleared hot!"
Training his weapons on their designated target, Jake unleashed a devastating volley of plasma bolts and kinetic rounds. The Turtle shuddered as the massive release of energy momentarily overtopped the drive's inertial dampening.
The dreadnought's shields flared. Then the rest of Gunfighter Squadron added their firepower, and they collapsed. A fresh wave of spreading lightning bolts signaled the shield's death.
On cue, his squadron shot out of the ingress path, departing the plane of the attack on a perpendicular vector. Then Richard's Phoenix Squadron rolled in on the dreadnought.
While it continued to fire on the Galactic Guardian, the targeted Zoxyth ship shifted the weapons it had dedicated to self-defense to the new attackers.
Suddenly, one of Richard's fighters erupted in a brilliant detonation. It had jumped out of the path of one beam and directly into another.
"No!" Jake screamed.
Fresh gouts of molten rock shot from the asteroidal ship as Phoenix Squadron opened fire. Jake saw Sandy's jinking fighter on Richard's right wing.
"Thank God," he whispered and instantly felt guilty.
Additional jets of debris blasted from the enemy ship. Then Richard's squadron also vectored out of the attack path and out of the direct line of enemy fire.
Jake released the breath he'd been holding.
"Okay, Vampire Six," Richard said. "She's all dressed up for you!"
"Roger, Phoenix Six," said Colonel Newcastle. "I'm inbound now. Nuclear bunker buster armed."
For today's battle drill, Admiral Johnston had split up Newcastle's squadron. He'd assigned one of their nuclear-armed fighters to fly clean up for each of the starfighter task forces. As the Commander Air Group (or CAG), Newcastle had assigned himself to the one that contained Richard and Jake's squadrons. Now Giard saw the Texan's Vampire Space Fighter race toward the target.
With a mighty effort, Jake dragged his eyes from the image and shifted his focus to the task at hand. Directed by the autopilot and fire-control computer, the attack plan uploaded by Admiral Johnston already had his ship's weapons trained on the next target.
Consulting the holographic rendering of the battle and the plotted attack plan, Jake verified the vectors assigned to each of his fighters.
Nodding, he glared at the second Zoxyth ship and said, "You're next, asshole."
As if responding to his words, the targeted dreadnought redirected a portion of its attack away from the Guardian and fired on Jake's ship. The Turtle easily avoided each beam. Although the millisecond durations of those laser contacts had several hull temperature alarms flashing their warnings across the console's curved top. Jake had learned that the Argonian vessels didn't have foreknowledge of the laser's trajectory. They simply jumped out of the beam like a child who had touched a hot pan. However, the speed of the computer and the drive it controlled outstripped the ability of the laser. It moved out of the path faster than the weapon's energy could burn through the shields and the ship's skin. But it moved so quickly the human eye perceived it as precognition.
Suddenly, a new light source drew Jake's attention from his target. To his left, a web of glowing fissures spread across the first enemy ship. Then the Turtle's view-wall darkened as the brilliant light that streamed from every crack in the asteroid flared. Finally, each blade of radiation merged with its neighbor as the nuclear conflagration enveloped the entire enemy ship.
"Die, bastards!" Remulkin growled in accented English.
Jake looked at the now tumbling molten remnants of the first ship. "Oh shit!" Remembering Admiral Thoyd Feyhdyak's doomed effort to vaporize those same globs, he looked at Remulkin and said, "Run an orbital analysis of that debris. Where is it going?"
Remulkin grunted something unintelligible. It sounded derogatory, but the liaison bent over his half of the console, and his fingers became a blur of activity.
***
Strobing multicolored light streamed through every port of the Tidor Drof's bridge. The ship shook violently as wave after wave of enemy fire burned into its shields. It appeared Admiral Johnston intended to make good on his promise.
"Lord Thrakst, we just lost the Forebearer's Redemption!"
Shaking his head, Thrakst growled.
He refused to look at Phascyre. He wouldn't give the coward the satisfaction. Instead, he glared at the image of the Galactic Guardian. On the main display, the rocky profile of the dreadnought Zoxa Prime drifted across the Guardian's curved surface.
Staring at the Prime, Thrakst nodded grimly.
Intuiting Thrakst's plan, the Raja suddenly turned toward him. "No, my Lord. That is not …" Phascyre began but stopped as Thrakst extended his forearm's dewclaw talon and gave him a final warning glance.
Nodding, the Raja retreated.
Thrakst opened a channel to the Prime's captain.
"Commodore Rasynth, I need you to ram the enemy's command ship."
"Lord?" The commodore blinked his confusion. "My ship is too slow. I'll never get close enough. I—"
"Vent your core, Rasynth."
The commodore blinked again, but this time with complete comprehension.
"The Forebearers demand it," Thrakst said.
Finally, Rasynth nodded and then bowed. "Yes, my Lord. May the Forebearers greet us with open—"
Cutting him off, Thrakst gave a curt nod. "Yes, yes, Commodore. Quickly, please. Time is of the essence," he said, then terminated the connection.
***
The scientist punched a final command into the console and then stood straight. A holographic rendering of the battle and the planet below popped into existence above the control panel.
Jake breathed a sigh of relief. A curving red line showed that the enemy fleet and the building debris cloud were in an orbital insertion trajectory. They wouldn't hit the planet.
Remulkin reached into the hologram, gesturing at the point of closest approach. "They're going too fast to enter orbit, but either by design or chance, the bastards are on a trajectory to skim the atmosphere. It's an aerobraking maneuver that will slow them enough for the planet's gravity to pull the formation into orbit."
Ahead of the Turtle, a plume of fire suddenly burst from the right side of his assigned Zoxyth dreadnought.
Jake blinked. "What the hell?"
As he watched, the torrent of fire continued to spread outward. Soon a massive jet of white-hot plasma streamed from a lake-sized hole in the largest asteroid of the ship's hull. At its perimeter, hill-sized boulders periodically broke free only to be vaporized in a brilliant flash when they drifted into the plume of fire.
"Is that a rocket motor?" Jake said.
"No. Not a normal one, anyway," Remulkin said without his characteristic snark.
The disruptor field had removed the parallel-space option. This rocket must be an emergency supplement to the version of the gravity drive employed by the Zoxyth. Jake could see that the combined effect generated significant thrust. The incredible acceleration was deforming the structural supports that tied together the ship's various asteroids.
"They're flying straight at the Galactic Guardian!" Remulkin said.
Looking at the hologram, Jake saw that the scientist was correct. With acceleration rivaling that of an Argonian battlecruiser, the ship rocketed straight at the carrier. Giard shook his head. Even he knew that flying straight into the muzzle of a carrier's main weapon was to ask for a quick death.
"Gunfighter
s," Jake transmitted across the EON. "Shift course and match acceleration."
Finally reacting to the new threat, the Galactic Guardian redirected all of its weapon batteries at the approaching Zoxyth ship.
"Same plan, new vectors," Jake continued over the squadron's channel.
In the hologram, he shifted the squadron's attack vectors to run perpendicular to the Guardian's laser attack. Caught between the lines of incoming laser fire and outgoing rocket thrust, the rendered enemy ship looked like a lumpy, cancerous tumor impaled on a spike of fire. Alternatively, the opposing beams looked like an axle rammed through the dreadnought, and the rendered equally spaced starfighter strike lines ran from it like the spokes of a wheel.
Through his EON, Jake sent the new discrete headings to each of his fighters.
Presently, several of the battlecruisers adjacent to the Galactic Guardian added their laser fire to the mix.
As Jake maneuvered to attack, he could no longer see the portion of the enemy ship closest to the Guardian. That half of its shields glowed like an umbrella-shaped star, obscuring the underlying dreadnought.
"IP inbound!" he broadcast over the EON channel.
The orientation of his attack run shifted the carrier to the top of the Turtle's view-wall. From this new perspective, it appeared that the Guardian was firing down on a speeding jellyfish. Undeterred, the dreadnought continued its incredible acceleration.
"That's suicide," Jake whispered.
"You're speaking of the dead," Remulkin said.
"What?"
The scientist shook his head. "All of them died when they vented their core. The instant they started to use it for thrust, it flooded the ship with enough radiation to immediately kill every one of them," the liaison said flatly.
When Jake looked back to the dreadnought, a storm of lightning bolts radiated downward from the shield's perimeter like tentacles, completing his earlier jellyfish analogy. One of the massive electrical bolts discharged across the Turtle's shields.
Then the force field collapsed. Instantly, the stone surface of the still accelerating enemy ship burst into white fire as rock sublimated directly into gas under the incredible assault.
Coming into range of the target, Jake fired his plasma and kinetic weapons. They blazed toward the doomed dreadnought. His rounds slammed into the unprotected ship, and it exploded, the combined multi-vessel assault converting its asteroids into gaseous and molten rock.
"Yes!" Jake screamed. Then he gasped. "Oh shit!"
The Argonian carrier tried to leap out of the way, but the incredible closing speed of the Zoxyth ship's remnants outstripped even the carrier's propulsion abilities.
The rushing, boiling mass slammed into the Galactic Guardian's shields, and the huge GDF carrier rocked. Its force field bowed inwardly. Electrical discharges spread across the shields. They glowed like a supernova again. Then they collapsed, popping like a bubble.
However, the force field had done its job.
The churning mass of molten asteroid now hung at a relative standstill, its velocity the same as the Guardian's.
"Thank God," Jake said, but suddenly, dozens of red Zoxyth lasers burned into a specific point on the enormous ship.
Colonel Giard's eyes widened as he finally understood the enemy's tactic. "They're trying to take out the disruptor!"
Remulkin nodded. Through a frustrated growl, he said, "If it goes down, the fuckers will escape!"
***
"Admiral Johnston, the disruptor field is collapsing!"
Bill turned and gave Tekamah a questioning look. The GDF supreme commander nodded gravely.
Returning a curt nod and pursing his lips, Johnston spun toward the weapons console and pointed to the officer manning it.
"Fire the weapon!" he said.
"Now!" urged Admiral Tekamah.
As the officer toggled the commands, Johnston stared through the view-wall.
"I hope we're not too late, Ashtara."
When the Galactic Defense Force's supreme commander didn't reply, Johnston stole a sideways glance.
Ash-white, the Argonian glared at the enemy formation, slowly shaking his head. Finally, Admiral Tekamah hoarsely whispered, "Gods damn you for making me do this, Thrakst."
***
"Direct all weapons onto the target now!" Thrakst said as the Guardian's shields collapsed. "Fire, fire, fire!"
Through slitted eyes, he watched the targeted sensor blister. First it glowed like a supernova. Then the image whited out as the brilliance of his fleet's combined plasma fire overdrove the camera's optical sensor. Finally, the display faded as that corner of the massive enemy ship dissolved into a cloud of expanding gas.
At the same moment, the sensor officer looked up excitedly.
"My Lord, the disruptor field is collapsing. We should be able to jump out of the system in a few zyxyns."
Thrakst nodded. The bubble of disrupted parallel-space spanned several light-seconds. They couldn't jump out until the collapse propagated throughout the entire sphere.
Outside, the battle continued to rage. Flashing, multicolored light still streamed through the bridge's various portals, bathing its interior in their stop-motion, strobing brilliance.
"Order all ships to jump the instant they get a parallel-space lock," Thrakst said. He started to grin, but in the bridge's strobing interior, the sensor officer's smile disappeared between flashes of light. The hatchling suddenly looked at him with confused eyes.
"My Lord!" he said. "I'm detecting an unusual energy signature coming from the Galactic Guardian."
The warlord narrowed his eyes again as he turned back to the GDF carrier.
"This doesn't make sense, Lord Thrakst," the officer said. "It looks like a gene—"
A radiant sphere exploded from the center of the Guardian. As the expanding luminescent bubble spread across the battlefield, its brilliant, oddly tinged light flooded the bridge, eclipsing all other sources.
Thrakst exploded out of his cathedra, launching himself across the cavernous room. He slashed and pummeled his way through anything and anyone that blocked his path. Sparks flew from the steel-tipped talons of his feet. He crashed through the sensor board and its operator. Equipment and limbs flew as if thrown by an explosion. The warrior knew he'd already lost the rest of his fleet, but he had to live, had to avenge his family.
As he reached the weapon control station, he frantically entered a series of commands.
Too slow!
He was racing against time.
And losing.
The warlord's abdomen burned as if a million sletch-bugs were trying to dig their way out of his gut.
The Forebearers-damned Argonians had turned the gene weapon against him!
Move faster!
Moments slipped away from him, evaporating like wax in a blast furnace. As in his dream, the Zoxyth Lord felt as if he were wading through the thick mud of his home world.
He tapped out a final command and launched a specially configured missile.
Thrakst grinned through a grimace of pain as the weapon rocketed toward the Guardian. Then he lurched and doubled over as his body began to surrender to the reprogrammed gene weapon's molecular assault.
Around him, the rest of the crew writhed on the floor. Only the tough old warrior, Raja Phascyre, still stood upright.
Outside, ship after ship fell through the advancing wall of energy as its white curtain of insatiable light raced toward the Tidor Drof. But inside, the navigation panel still couldn't get a parallel-space lock.
No longer able to support his weight, Thrakst's legs surrendered to the ship's artificial gravity. As he collapsed, he saw the nav panel lock onto its fallback point. Still falling, the Lord fought to direct his body toward the navigation console. Black cave walls ate at the periphery of his vision. The whited-out control panel looked impossibly far away as if it sat at the end of a long, black tunnel.
His knees struck the stone floor, and Thrakst stretched out and swatted
at the distant drive activator.
CHAPTER THIRTY
"Oh fuck!" Jake whispered.
Somehow the gene weapon aboard the destroyed Zoxyth dreadnought must have survived the destruction of its ship. It had just fired. The weapon's energy wave blasted outward from the region where the melted dreadnought still hung next to the damaged Galactic Guardian.
"No!" Remulkin cried.
"Oh God!" Jake screamed. The weapon's ballooning sphere of light raced directly at the human-led task force. It closed the gap in milliseconds, too fast to evade.
Closing his eyes and grasping the console fiercely, Colonel Giard braced for the end.
Blinding light flooded through his closed eyelids.
Then it was gone.
However, to Jake's amazement, he wasn't.
Opening his eyes, Giard tried to blink away the blue spots that hovered in his vision, but as the external universe resolved, one of them refused to fade.
"What the hell?" Remulkin said in accented English.
Incredibly, all of the allied ships still appeared to be crewed. They continued to move in a controlled manner. However, each of the dreadnoughts now tumbled in an all too familiar fashion.
He wasn't sure what had happened to the enemy ships. But an educated guess told him that Tekamah had somehow turned the tables on the Zoxyth, had wiped them out with their own weapon, although a quick count revealed that another of the dreadnoughts had either been destroyed or had escaped.
Again, Jake tried to blink the last blue artifact from his vision, but it remained stubbornly present.
"That's a missile!" Remulkin said.
Jake blinked once more, and it resolved. The rocket had already crossed half of the enemy's dissolving formation. The blue fire of the rocket plume appeared to originate from the region of space previously occupied by the missing ship.
Inexorably, the weapon continued to accelerate past the last drifting dreadnought, the one closest to the carrier.
"It's aimed at the Galactic Guardian!" Jake said.