Ep.#6 - Head of the Dragon (The Frontiers Saga)

by Brown, Ryk

  “Course and speed are good,” Josh announced. “Killing main drive.”

  “Twenty seconds to jump point,” Loki reported as he scanned his instruments. “Jump field emitters ready. Reactors at one hundred percent. Turbines are armed and ready to light. Ten seconds.”

  “Good luck, gentlemen,” Talon two-one’s pilot wished them over the comms.

  Josh couldn’t help but wonder how he had ended up here, on the far side of the Pentaurus cluster, more than twenty light years from the world on which he had been born and raised. He thought about his parents and his sisters. They, just like most people on his homeworld, would probably never leave the continent on which they were born, let alone get out into space. But flying had always been Loki’s dream as long as he could remember.

  His parents never could have afforded to pay for his flight training, so he had taken a loan from a man of less than perfect repute. It had seemed logical enough at the time, but just as he finished his training, the Ta’Akar had restricted all interstellar traffic, allowing only Takaran ships to ply the interstellar routes. That had caused an immediate glut of qualified pilots seeking employment. An eager young pilot fresh out of flight school hadn’t a chance of landing a job.

  And so his loan had gone into default. Despite his promise to take any job he could find in order to pay his debtor back with interest, he was turned over to the judicial system, his servitude sold to a harvesting outfit on Haven in order to satisfy his debt.

  Ironically, just after his arrival, the last in a string of fed up copilots had just quit after growing tired of Josh’s reckless antics. With a large contract to fill and no qualified pilot’s available on short notice, the timing couldn’t have been more perfect. Loki found himself riding shotgun with Josh in the harvester, and his life as a pilot had finally begun. Of course, he hadn’t expected it to lead to this.

  “Ten seconds to jump point,” Loki reported as he started the jump sequencer. “Sequencer running.” Loki paused for a moment. “Hey, Josh, you ever miss flying the harvester back on Haven?”

  “Uh, no.”

  “Yeah, me neither,” Loki agreed. “Five seconds.” One last glance across his instruments told Loki that everything was in order for the jump. “Four…”

  Josh scanned his own instruments. Their course was perfect, heading on a line that would put them flying parallel to the surface of Corinair at twenty thousand meters above the ground when they came out of their jump. Their current speed, although agonizingly slow for a space vessel, would be perfect for atmospheric flight. It was just enough to give them sufficient lift to glide long enough to fire their air-breathing jet turbines, but not so fast that it would rip their ship apart… or so they hoped.

  “…Three…”

  Josh lowered his auto-visor on his flight helmet and carefully placed his left hand on the throttle and his right hand on the flight control stick.

  “…Two…”

  He placed his right thumb on the button on the side of the flight control stick to switch from space mode to atmospheric mode.

  “…One…”

  It dawned on him that it would have been a good idea to write a script that would automatically switch flight modes and light the jet turbines for such a jump.

  “…Jump.”

  Through his darkened auto-visor, blue-white light quickly spread out from the emitters on his interceptor’s hull, creating a glowing blue-white sheen that surrounded his tiny ship. Almost immediately, the glow brightened and became so overwhelming that he had to close his eyes tightly despite the automatic darkening of his helmet’s auto-visor.

  It was not their first jump, but usually, once the jump flash subsided, they would find themselves once again in the blackness of space. In many cases, the stars would not even appear to have changed. That was not the case this time.

  The jump flash subsided and the cockpit was instantly filled with the bright sunlight of Corinair. At this high of an altitude, the sun was much more intense than when on the surface, and Josh was thankful that his auto-visor was down and working.

  When the jump completed, there was a brief instant where everything was calm. His engines were all off and, for a split second, there seemed to be no sound of wind rushing past the outside of their canopy. A moment later, the sudden mounting of air pressures on the outside of their interceptor as it plowed through the atmosphere gave way to a thunderous boom. It felt like they had just crashed through a stone wall, and the interceptor began to shake more violently than he could ever remember.

  “What the hell!” Loki exclaimed. “Did we hit something?”

  “Start the turbines!” Josh screamed over the suit comms as he struggled to get control over the aircraft. He knew they were probably not experiencing any more turbulence than normal at the moment. It just seemed excessive compared to the normal smoothness of spaceflight.

  “I already tried!” Loki answered. “They’re not lighting! The sensors still think we’re in space!”

  “Recycle them!” Josh screamed. He could feel his nose wanting to dip in the drag of the atmosphere. “Shut them down completely and restart them!”

  “I’m trying!”

  “Make it fast!” Josh insisted. “I can’t keep our nose up!”

  “Falcon one, Talon two-five! You’re losing airspeed rapidly!” someone advised over the comms. Josh glanced at his radar display, suddenly remembering that there were a few fighters out there keeping the area clear for their test jump. “You need to add power,” the voice advised calmly.

  “Really?” Josh responded smartly. “Gee, thanks! I never would’ve thought of that!”

  “Our jet turbines didn’t light!” Loki reported to the pilot on the comms. “I’m recycling them now!”

  His interceptor was a lifting body, but it required a lot of speed in order to experience any significant lift. Josh quickly scanned his options, trying to figure out what to do to avoid falling from the sky like a rock.

  “It’s no good!” Loki reported. “They still won’t light!” Loki scanned his instrument panel, paying particular attention to the readouts coming from the jet-turbines. The ship was still bouncing around violently, forcing him to squint in order to keep his eyes on the readouts. “The oxygen sensors are not showing high enough levels to light!”

  “We’re at twenty thousand meters!” Josh exclaimed. “There should be plenty of oxygen at this altitude.”

  “Falcon one, Talon two-five. Pitch down and dive!” the pilot’s voice called over the comms. “You’ve got too much turbulence around the intakes. You need to dive to increase your airspeed and force air into the turbines so the sensor will read the oxygen levels!”

  Josh didn’t need to be told twice and immediately pitched their nose down. It was easy enough, since the nose already wanted to point downward. He watched as his airspeed indicators began to rise. “Try again!” he started to call to Loki.

  “I’m on it!” Loki answered. He was already watching the oxygen level indicators on the jet turbines. He had it figured out now. He had to wait until the air pressure rushing into the turbine intakes was high enough for the sensors to work properly.

  Josh looked at his altimeter. They were already passing fifteen thousand meters and falling. “Anytime now, Loki.”

  “Just a few seconds more,” he answered. He, too, had glanced at the airspeed indicator as well as their rate of descent. If he didn’t get the turbines to light this time, there might not be enough time to recycle them a fourth time before they slammed into the surface of Corinair.

  “Passing ten thousand, Loki!” Josh exclaimed.

  “Lighting turbines!” Loki answered. He watched as the system cycled. Despite the turbulence, he could feel the turbines spinning up as the intake vents sprung open and allowed the oxygen rich air to rush in.

  “Passing eight thousand!” Josh reported. He was trying to pull his nose up to decrease the angle of their dive, but without the jet turbines to compensate for the poor lifting capabil
ities of the interceptor, the aircraft’s response was sluggish at best.

  “They’re lighting!” Loki exclaimed as the turbines began to whine.

  “Passing six thousand meters!” Josh reported.

  “Turbine power coming up!” Loki reported. “Stand by to throttle up!”

  “Passing four, Loki!” Josh’s left hand had been on the throttles the entire time, but he knew that if he tried to apply power before the jet turbines were up to full power, they might stall the engines out. “Oh shit! Passing two!”

  “THROTTLE UP!” Loki hollered. “NOW! NOW! NOW!”

  Josh eased the throttles forward a bit. He didn’t want to apply full thrust, as they were already in a steep dive and too much power would make it even harder to level off. As he reached ten percent power on the throttles, he could already feel the interceptor becoming a little more responsive. Her nose started to come up slightly. “Ten percent power. Passing one thousand meters!” Josh reported.

  “Pull up, Josh! Pull up!”

  Josh continued to slide the throttle forward as his nose came up even more. “Twenty percent. Passing five hundred.”

  Loki braced himself, sure that they were not going to make it and at any moment Josh would trigger the abort, causing them both to eject. “Anytime now, Josh,” Loki mumbled.

  “I’m not ejecting,” Josh mumbled back. “Fifty percent power. Passing three hundred meters,” he added calmly.

  “Then get our fucking nose up!” Loki demanded.

  “Passing one fifty.”

  Loki peeked out the side of the canopy at the ground. Although it appeared to be rushing under them far faster than it was rushing up toward them, they were obviously still falling.

  “You’re finally going to do it,” Loki mumbled. “You’re finally going to get us both killed.”

  “Seriously?” Josh asked, a bit shocked by his friend’s lack of confidence. “Eighty percent power. Passing seventy five meters,” Josh added calmly.

  Loki suddenly noticed that the ground was not coming toward them as quickly as before. He looked at the flight dynamics displays on his own console. They were coming up on full throttles, their airspeed was nearly maxed out, and everything appeared to be completely normal. That’s when he noticed something else… Josh was now cruising along at nearly full speed, only five meters above the ground, just as they had been practicing earlier on the training runs. “You son-of-a-bitch!” Loki exclaimed. “You meant to come in that hot the whole time!”

  “Not the whole time,” Josh admitted, “just the last twenty seconds or so.”

  “Not funny, Josh. Not funny at all.”

  “Oh come, on! That was very funny!” Josh laughed. “‘You’ve finally done it, Josh. You’re finally going to kill us,’” he mocked.

  Loki brushed off the antics of his pilot and friend, instead returning to his instruments to perform his duties. After all, they were skimming the surface of the planet at top speed. “Aurora, Falcon one. Jump complete,” Loki reported over the comms.

  “Falcon one, Aurora copies. Congratulations, gentlemen,” the flight controller on the Aurora answered over the comms. “Return to Aurora for debrief.”

  “Falcon one copies,” Loki answered. “As soon as all this is over, I’m putting in for a vacation,” he told Josh.

  Josh smiled, pulled the nose up, and headed back into orbit to rendezvous with the Aurora. Abby would undoubtedly want to go over all the data from their jump. They would have to make some tweaks to the software so the air-breathing jet turbines would light more quickly, but he knew that all those things would be corrected in short order. Soon, they would be back out, jumping down into the atmosphere, and arriving progressively lower with each subsequent jump as they perfected the process. Soon after that, the jump shuttles would begin practicing the same maneuver, and that would give them all a huge tactical advantage against the Ta’Akar forces, not only on Ancot, but on Takara as well. Josh was no military strategist, but even he knew the importance of what they had just accomplished. Now they had a real chance.

  Chapter Four

  Lieutenant Waddell watched as the men disembarked from the most recent shuttle to roll into the main hangar bay. In order to ensure victory on Ancot, he would need a force of no less than five hundred highly trained Corinari troops. At last report, there were several thousand Corinari that had been accounted for. However, it was taking more time to gather them and get them organized than they had expected. Resources on the surface of Corinair continued to be taxed as the people struggled to cope with the most recent bombardment. Despite the fact that the battleship had only been able to make a single orbit around the planet, she had unleashed considerable punishment on the Corinairans, leveling key military installations, communications and transportation infrastructure, power generation, major industrial plants, and most of the central seats of government. Had it not been for the assistance being flown in from the lesser inhabited worlds of the Darvano system, the chaos below would still be much worse.

  Lieutenant Waddell watched as his sergeants barked out instructions to the newly arriving Corinair troops, dividing them into four separate groups as they came off the shuttles. In order to speed things up, the shuttles were not even coming into the main hangar bay to unload. Instead, they would unload while still in the transfer airlock, their passengers entering through the smaller personnel hatchway built into the massive transfer airlock door. He could not imagine how much more difficult this would have been had the captain agreed to continue running with an open deck.

  “Lieutenant!” a voice called from behind. Waddell spun around to see Lieutenant Commander Toral coming toward him, Toral having just stepped off the shuttle.

  “Sir,” Lieutenant Waddell responded, snapping a salute in perfect Corinari fashion.

  “How many men do we have so far?” the lieutenant commander asked.

  “Just under two hundred, sir.”

  “That’s barely a single company,” the lieutenant commander commented gruffly.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “This is going to take longer than we thought,” the lieutenant commander observed.

  “There just aren’t enough shuttles available, sir. Most of them are still evacuating the wounded civilians to hospitals outside of the primary impact areas.”

  “What about the jump shuttles that we will be using during the assault on Ancot?”

  “They’re practicing low altitude jump-ins, sir. The entire plan depends on it.”

  “Yes, it does,” the lieutenant commander frowned. “A hell of a plan. Never in a million years would I have thought we would be doing this, and on Ancot of all places.” Lieutenant Commander Toral looked around the hangar bay. The forward end of the hangar was packed with the remaining interceptors that had been gathered and flown up from Corinair. In the middle of the hangar, the men were assembling into platoons as they disembarked from shuttles entering the rear of the hangar. “Listen, Waddell,” he began as he turned to face him, “you and I are going to be company commanders.”

  “Sir, shouldn’t the company commander be…”

  “A major?” Lieutenant Commander Toral interrupted. “You see any of them standing around?”

  “But I’m only a lieutenant, sir.”

  “And I’m only a lieutenant commander. Hell, I was only promoted a few weeks ago at that. Neither one of us is qualified to command a company. But what the hell? We’ve got a flyboy major as our commander-in-chief.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “We’ll break into two companies, alpha and bravo. We’ll keep it simple for now. I’ll command alpha, and you command bravo. Since we’ll be attacking separate targets, we can probably do without a brigade commander, unless another lieutenant shows up before we jump off, in which case I’ll put him in charge of alpha, and I’ll take battalion command.” The lieutenant commander checked the time on the data image being displayed on the inside of the eye-shield hanging off the front of his battle helmet. “How long until
we get under way?”

  “Captain Scott promised to wait until we had sufficient resources.”

  “He did? Well, I like him already,” Toral joked. “What’s your take on the mighty Na-Tan?”

  “Hard to say, sir. I’ve only met him once, at the briefing today. He’s young; that’s for sure—younger than either of us. I get the feeling he wasn’t expecting any of this anymore than the rest of us. Doesn’t really seem like a captain, at least not like one you would expect.”

  “Well, he’s taken out three heavily armed, imperial warships and saved our world twice over, so he’s doing all right in my book.”

  “Yes, sir,” Lieutenant Waddell agreed as he followed the lieutenant commander toward the assembled men.

  “I know that garrison,” he told the lieutenant as they walked. “I was stationed there during my time in the imperial forces. If they are unsuccessful in taking out all their power, we will be cut to pieces by their turrets long before we are close enough to set our shield disruptors.

  “They plan to take out both the primary and secondary power sources,” Lieutenant Waddell reminded him.

  “That’s all well and good assuming they have no backup reactors within the garrison itself.”

  “Did they?”

  “No, not when I was stationed there. But that was a decade ago.”

  “A reactor powerful enough to run their perimeter shield would have shown up on scans,” Lieutenant Waddell pointed out, “even if it were powered down. Anything too small to be detected would barely be able to run a turret gun.”

  “Even if they don’t have backup reactors, we still have to get inside their walls, and that’s not going to be easy, even without perimeter shields and turrets.” Lieutenant Commander Toral stopped a moment, turning back to Waddell. “We’re going to have to drop men inside the walls,” he told him.

  Lieutenant Waddell saw the concerned look in Lieutenant Commander Toral’s eyes. “They’ll pick us off before we get down the ropes.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. We’ll jump the first group in front, draw their attention to one side. They’ll believe we intend to breach the front gates. It is the weakest point in their walls.”