Mako (The Mako Saga: Book 1)

by Ian J. Malone

  Steepling his hands to his chin, Lee thought hard for options, while his annoyed driver jabbered on in the seat next to him.

  “This is just fantastic!” Link muttered. “I could be at home right now, sitting buck-naked on my $5,000 leather couch, halfway through a case of Pabst and watching Porky’s in high-def on my 65-inch flat screen, but noooooo! I’ve gotta be out here, getting shot at by a bunch of trigger-happy fascist pricks in gray pajamas, trying to save the friggin’ galaxy! This is just so awesome! I’m so happy to be here right now!”

  “Hamish, how many of those hangars did you manage to take out in the depot blast?” Lee asked, staring ahead at the rapidly approaching plume of black smoke.

  “Two of the three, but I didn’t have time for the one at the end of the tarmac,” Hamish explained, pulling the pin on a grenade and lofting it through the shattered windshield of an oncoming truck, which tumbled in a fireballing wreckage down the dirt road behind them.

  “Alright, Link, we’re making a pit stop,” Lee told him.

  “What?” Link asked in bewilderment. “What on earth for?”

  “I’m gonna run interference while you guys prep for the jump to hyperspace,” Lee said, reaching for a gun-filled duffel behind his seat and locking eyes with Mac, whose sour expression suggested she knew exactly what he was thinking.

  “There is no way you’re doing this,” she declared. “No way.”

  “This ain’t up for debate, Mac. Once you guys break orbit, I’ll draw the Destroyer’s fire long enough for you to make the jump.”

  “The hell you are, Lee!” she persisted, her voice rising. “You don’t even know how to fly an Alystierian ship!”

  “I’ll be fine,” he tried to reassure her. “Alystierian tech was derived from the same stuff as Auran tech, so I oughta be able to figure it out.”

  “You could be left behind,” Mac concluded, her voice trailing off to a near-whisper this time.

  It wasn’t as if he hadn’t considered this—quite the contrary, actually. Something inside him had known since he stepped foot on this planet that this could be a one-way trip. But regardless of how much that reality scared the living hell out of him, the fact of the matter was that he’d made a promise to get his people home safe, and this idea—outlandish as it was— gave him the best chance to do that.

  Still, hearing it from her gave Lee pause. There was so much he desperately wanted to tell her, about how he felt, and the endless regrets that haunted him for having never spoken of it until now. But unlike before—when he’d seemingly had all the time in the world to sort it all out, in preparation for that one, shining moment when he’d finally tell her these things—now there was a very real chance that he’d never have the opportunity. He hated himself for that.

  Feeling the Sand Tiger come to a stop on the tarmac, Lee listened as Hamish held the last of their pursuers at bay from the weapons turret above. Then, stuffing a handful of extra mags into his vest and picking up his rifle, he leaned in and placed a soft kiss on Mac’s moistening cheek.

  “This is not over, you understand?” he said with all the confidence he could muster. “This is just gettin’ started. But right now, I need you to focus and worry about gettin’ your ass back to that ship, and airborne. Don’t you worry about me—I’ll be right behind you… all the way.”

  “You promise me, Lee,” she whispered. “You promise me you’ll be there.”

  “I promise,” he said warmly, brushing a strand of hair from her face and allowing his hand to linger there for a moment. “Besides,” he chuckled, “heroic blaze of glory or not, there’s no way I’d let you get rid of me that easy.”

  Mac gave a reluctant nod as her eyes fell away.

  “Hey Lee?” Danny leaned forward. “Watch your back out there, alright, bro?”

  “Will do, partner. Thanks.”

  “Way to kick ass out there, Top,” Link echoed from the driver’s seat. “Really, solid work.”

  “Thanks Link… and for the record, you can be my wheelman anytime.”

  Link rolled his eyes.

  “Alright,” Lee exhaled. “I’ll see you guys back on the Praetorian.”

  Then, locking a final gaze on those deep green eyes that a circumstance any less dire could’ve never in a million years pried him away from, Lee offered up a final smile to Mac and climbed out.

  Watching Hamish give a silent salute of appreciation as the vehicle vanished into the thick green curtain that would lead them back to the ship, Lee shot a thoughtful stare into the brilliant orange sky overhead, and prayed with everything in him that he would live to keep the promise he’d just made.

  Chapter 31: Incoming

  “Newbern class vessel, this is the Alystierian Destroyer Sylus,” the freighter’s intercom barked once they’d emerged from the planet’s atmosphere. “You are ordered to halt immediately and prepare to be boarded, or you will be fired upon.”

  “Wow, that didn’t take long, did it?” Link grumbled in the cockpit next to Hamish, whose fingers raced to communicate their desired coordinates for a hyperspace jump to the navigational computer. Meanwhile behind them, Mac re-dressed Danny’s wound using the passenger cabin’s first-aid kit.

  “Um, Sylus this is Enterprise,” Link keyed to respond. “What seems to be the problem?”

  “Enterprise, you have 30 seconds to disable your engines and prepare to be boarded; over.”

  “Whooooaaaa, wait a second Sylus,” Link delayed. “I think there’s been some sort of misunderstanding here. We’re just traders on our way back from a business transaction so if we could… oh, sh—”

  Ducking instinctively when the lone warning shot rattled across their bow, sending every instrument in the cockpit into a simultaneous shriek of distress, Link snapped back to the comm.

  “For god’s sake, Sylus, hold on a second!”

  “21… 20… 19…”

  “What the hell is taking you so long over there?” Link yelled to his navigator.

  “Screaming at me isn’t going to help,” Hamish defended. “The Nav-Com has somehow frozen itself up, and I need a minute to reboot it before I can pull up the proper coordinates.”

  “We don’t have a minute!” the other protested. “We don’t even have a half of one!”

  “13… 12…”

  “I’m sorry, Lincoln, but this stuff is ancient at best. Try and stall them.”

  Link growled and slammed a finger back down on the com. “Sylus, we’re not sure what’s going on, but if you’ll just tell us what the problem is then maybe we can—ah, screw this!”

  A loud sputtering cough bellowed from the ship’s engines as Link yanked the yoke hard to port, sending a creaking shudder through the hull, which groaned under the sudden exertion of force.

  “Link, are you insane?” Danny shouted, his head buried into the headrest of his seat.

  “This is me stalling… now shut it with the backseat driving!” Link answered, leveling out in time to see his instruments redline with a direct hit to the starboard nacelle. “At your leisure, Hamish!”

  “We’ve got a problem!” said the Scot, fraught with stress.

  “What now?” Link snarled.

  “That last shot knocked the coolant system for the starboard nacelle offline. If I don’t lock it down, we’re—”

  “Go!” Mac barked. “I’ve got this!”

  Jumping from his seat, Hamish disappeared through the rear of the cabin, replaced by Mac, who leaped to the navigational controls.

  Battling hard against the ship’s lack of maneuverability, Link did his best to keep it away from the Destroyer’s main batteries, though avoiding its weapons systems altogether was never an option. Feeling a trio of secondary shots land hard against the forward section, he cringed as Mac fought to stay on top of their situation.

  “Okay, starboard hull plating is down to 42%,” she began, “but port-aft is holding steady at 61. Angle around to 314 mark 6.5, and try to keep them there.”

  Acting as dir
ected, Link swung the vessel around, avoiding the brunt of another barrage, but still taking moderate damage.

  “Where the hell is Lee?” he fumed aloud.

  “He’ll be here,” Mac fired back. “Damn it, just give him some time… he’ll be here!”

  “Hamish, where are we with that engine?” Link shifted back to his headset.

  “Two minutes, maybe three!”

  “We didn’t have two minutes 30 seconds ago! Now get a move on before we’re all grease spots on the side of Spaceball One here!”

  Mac’s gaze jerked across the dash when a faint green blip pinged on her radar screen. “We’ve got incoming!” she announced with excitement. “Two o’clock high, and coming like a bat outta hell on an intercept course!”

  “C’mon, Lee,” Danny prayed in the back.

  “Please tell me that’s not a Phantom,” Link said, fearing the worst. “We cannot handle being picked apart in this thing!”

  “No, it’s not even Alystierian,” Mac mumbled, confused at first by the unknown craft that failed to register on her outdated instruments.

  “Another smuggler ship?” Link pressed.

  “No, it’s…” Then it hit her. “Dude, it’s my Mako!”

  At that moment, a lone SF-13 tore its way through the planet’s atmosphere—its wings bladed completely back—its engines booming at a full, white-hot burn as the silvery machine screamed toward them, rocketing over their cockpit glass in a blazing blur of steel and heat.

  “Enterprise, this is Daredevil,” his voice carried through the comm, filling Mac’s face with relief. “Sorry I’m late to the party, but I got a little held up by our friendly neighborhood repo man downstairs.”

  Link laughed. “Yeah, I could see them being a little pissed with you for taking their prized new toy.”

  “That, or the fact that I blew up their last hangar of Phantoms once I was airborne,” said Lee. “We lucked out there, by the way.”

  “Hey, I’ll take any break we can get right now.”

  “Copy that, Jester,” Lee acknowledged.

  “Okay Ace, listen up,” Mac snapped back to her controls. “We’ve got our hands full with that Destroyer, and this thing can’t take much more of a beating. Something’s up with the starboard engine and Hamish is working on it, but we’ve gotta buy him some time.”

  “Yes ma’am. Already on it,” Lee announced, diving the Mako past a barrage of incoming fire before leveling out for a full throttle, strafing assault down the side of the Alystierian ship.

  “Nav-Com reboot is complete,” Mac called out, sending Link lurching back to his comm.

  “Hamish, what’s our status?”

  Two sections back in engineering, Hamish worked through the chaos of decompressing air hoses and fried components to finish his repairs on the core.

  “I’m almost there,” he replied before being thrown to the deck with another pounding of their hull.

  “Hamish!” Link roared in his ear.

  “Don’t rush me, ya stumpy little bastard!” The Scot jumped back to his feet. “I’m movin’ as fast as I bloody well can!”

  “What’s the holdup, Jester?” Lee yelled from his Mako, landing a destructive blow to the Destroyer’s communications array and rolling away from a retaliatory strike to set up for another offensive pass.

  “We’re working on it, Lee,” Link responded, his eyes locked on the “Engine Core Offline” reading in front of him.

  “Well, whatever it is, do it faster! I really stirred up a hornet’s nest with that last shot and I do not have much time left up here in a fighter by myself.”

  Link slammed a fist against the dash. “Newsflash, Hamish, we’re all about to die here!”

  Straining to remember everything he’d learned from both the game and his time with Wyatt, Hamish scrambled through a few last-minute tweaks before hunching back over the console, and his face ignited when all three meters spiked hard in full green.

  “Alright, she’s as patched up as I can make her!” he declared over the waking engine. “Now get us the bloody hell outta here!”

  “Maaaccccc!” Lee screamed over a bone-jarring explosion.

  “Hyperspace in three… two… one… JUMP!”

  Chapter 32: War of Ages

  Emerging from hyperspace on the outer rim of the Dulaston system, Lee propelled the Mako into the lead position ahead of the cargo ship, his eyes shifting quickly from the navigational controls to the dazzling spectacle of the war zone ahead. From this distance, it was almost beautiful, like something out of a fireworks show… filled with brilliant flares of red, blue, and yellow, all dancing through the cosmos in an endless web of exquisite, spiraling light.

  But this wasn’t the fourth of July, and no one in this group could have ever seen it for anything less than what it was: a brutally violent exchange of awesome firepower between two enemy fleets, totaling some 60 cruisers, destroyers, and carriers, plus hundreds of fighters, all flown by tens of thousands of fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters—each one of them committed to the last in a bloody civil conflict that had been generations in the making.

  Hearing his comm flooded with voices—all trampling over each other with frantic command after frantic command—Lee scanned his displays for a quick analysis of the battle.

  His face went pale at what he saw.

  Of the 18 ASC ships called to join the Praetorian, six had sustained heavy damage while another three were nowhere to be found. Meanwhile, 18 paltry squadrons of Threshers did their best to hold four Destroyers and a legion of Phantoms at bay, while the damaged ships limped back onto the line.

  “Oh my god,” Mac gasped across a secondary channel. “Never in all my life have I…”

  “Yeah,” Lee agreed, equally as speechless.

  “So now what do we do?” she asked.

  Searching his scopes for the Praetorian, Lee soon found her on the far side of the battle, flanked by the Gearhart and the Gentry, and taking heavy fire from a pair of Alystierian cruisers.

  Clearing his throat of nerves, he keyed up a priority frequency. “Praetorian, this is Daredevil. Do you read?”

  No response.

  “Praetorian, this is Daredevil. Do you copy?”

  Static.

  “Praetorian, come in. This is—”

  “Summerston, is that you?” Katahl’s voice broke through the traffic, and Lee could feel the relief wash over him.

  “Yes sir, it’s us.”

  “I’ve gotta hand it to you, son… you’re the last person I expected to hear from today,” the admiral admitted over the chaos of the bridge behind him, and Lee got the distinct impression that this might’ve been the only decent news he’d had all morning. “Was your mission a success?”

  “Yes sir, Admiral. All members of the 82nd are present and accounted for.”

  “That’s outstanding news.”

  A massive, explosive boom bellowed across the comm, and Lee could hear the Praetorian’s bridge crew screaming to compensate as the flagship carrier reeled hard from the blast in his display.

  “Sir, you alright?”

  “Stand by, Daredevil,” Katahl instructed, breaking from the conversation to bark orders at his crew. Then he was back. “What’s your position?”

  “We’re about 350 klicks out on the edge of the system.”

  “Confirmed, Daredevil, what’s your fuel status?”

  Lee frowned at his gages. “Just under 36%, but I’m running on Mac’s original load from the Revlyn exercise. The cargo ship is in a lot better shape than I am.”

  “That’s alright,” Katahl assured him. “It’s enough to get you back to Aura. Set a course and proceed there immediately. There’s a civilian transport standing by to take you and your team back to Earth.”

  “Copy that,” Lee said through a sudden rush of mixed emotions. “It’s been an honor, Admiral. Really.”

  “The honor has been ours, son. My only regret is that we can’t be there to send you off personally, but I’m afra
id that just wasn’t in the cards today.”

  “Understood. Good luck to you, sir.”

  “And to you, Eight-Two,” Katahl said gratefully, “Praetorian out.”

  Programming the coordinates to the Auran homeworld into the Mako’s Nav-Com, Lee couldn’t escape the uneasy feeling that boiled at the pit of his stomach. Leaning his head to rest on the back of his seat, he billowed a deep sigh of contemplation and stared out at the distant specks of flame littering the space around the planet ahead.

  “I know,” Mac said after a solid 30 seconds of silence.

  “Know what?” Lee asked.

  “Despite the fact that every intelligent brain cell in your head is telling you to go home, you can’t shake the feeling that you’re somehow ducking out in the middle of a fight,” she surmised. “I get it, we all do. But this old beater has minimal weapons, and you’re one fighter running on less than 40% of a fuel load. I mean, how much good do you honestly expect us to be in something like this? Besides,” Mac huffed, “don’t you think we’ve tempted fate enough in the last 24 hours?”

  “Yeah, I get it.” he grumbled, throwing a final switch to lock in his flight plan. “It just sucks, ya know? I mean, we’re supposed to be—”

  “Shiner, Shiner, Shiner, this is Katana!”

  Lee winced as Ryan’s words came like rapid fire over the comm.

  “We’re getting killed over here in three! Where the hell are you guys?”

  “We’re trying to get to you Katana, but we’re cut off,” a frazzled pilot explained, and Lee’s gaze jerked back to his display to see the embattled Hit Squad all but overrun by Phantoms.

  “I am completely out of heavy ordinance,” said the pilot, “and railgun reserves are down to 18%. I’ve got Kinzer on my wing, but she’s not much better off than I am—the rest of the 43rd is dead.”

  Lee’s eyes squinted shut, his grip tightening around the stick as his thoughts swirled with the possible fates of Ryan, Noll, Reiser, Reynolds, Wyatt and everyone else who’d stood by them up to now… and for what?