Death Drop (The D-Evolution)

by Sean Allen

  The columns sprayed and rattled as fluid and chain links flew through the air and painted the sky with purple and metallic silver. The remnants of the ruptured sleeves swung down and rapped against the hull of the Triton with loud clacks before jostling back out into the air and then bouncing toward the ship once more. The tow chains finally stopped their awkward dance and lapped gently against the flank of the pirate vessel like lifeless, broken limbs swaying helplessly at its side in the high wind.

  As soon as the last column collapsed, the Ghost dropped and Dezmara let out a panicked gasp. She watched in terror—one hand pushed hard against the pod bubble, the eyeports of the kranos boring into the clear protective barrier—as it fell with its tail pointed slightly downward. But the portside engine sputtered and then glowed a familiar blue that instantly melted her horror and replaced it with a smile. Her heart filled with something she didn’t feel very often as Simon peeled away and rumbled east to freedom: she was happy.

  “We did it,” she sighed.

  BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

  The Triton turned to chase down its prize and sent a barrage of cannon shells in her direction as she stared trancelike out of the bubble at Simon’s escape. The Firebug shook and bounced as clusters of black smoke exploded and marred the sky around her. The big ship had completed its turn before she came around, and now it rocketed toward the Ghost. Dezmara hoped the single engine that Simon had repaired would be enough to outrun the three trails of red exhaust that streamed from the Triton’s swirling fairings as she punched her throttles to full.

  The three remaining shell-pods had circled around in attack formation, and now they charged straight at her. Dezmara could see the muzzle-flash lick through the perforations on the lead fighter’s guns like the red-hot tongues of a thousand bloodthirsty demons raging inside. She yanked back on the stick and climbed. The soft blue gave way to the bright white of sun-filled clouds that crowded against her pod like countless spirits hoping to glimpse the rare, helmeted creature inside. The last of the cloud cover flitted by and was gone, but The Firebug continued to gain altitude, speeding into the rays of Clara’s sun. Dezmara knew that flying into the light would make it hard for the shell-pods to get a bead on her in the blinding glare.

  She reached the pinnacle of her ascent and made her move. Dezmara raised the front of her jet higher and throttled down as she kicked the rudder. Suddenly, the frenetic sounds of the battle disappeared, all but the soft whistle of air slipping around the body of The Firebug as it glided sideways and then turned completely around, falling silently back toward the clouds. Dezmara engaged the engines and gripped the trigger—ready to sling hot lead into the attackers close on her tail now blinded by the sun—but there was nothing there.

  “Where the hell’d they go?” she said, frantically looking left and right for the unmistakable shape of the enemy fighters, but they weren’t to be seen.

  BRRR-BRRR-BRRR! Tracers streaked by her from somewhere below.

  “Firing blind from the clouds?” she thought. “That’s a little amateur, even for these guys.”

  BRRR-BRRR-BRRR! CLACK! CLACK! CLACK! Another burst of rounds zipped from beneath her position and slammed into the left fuselage. The Firebug shuddered from the impact and Dezmara rolled quickly to the right. “Where the hell’d that come from—wait a damn minute,” she said as she tapped the kranos and engaged the thermal vision. “You little sonsofbitches!”

  The shell-pods, stopped in a line just before the top of the cloud bank, not only had the capability to hover, but also came equipped with the same strange camouflage the Triton had used to ambush Rilek and Saraunt and hijack the Ghost.

  She locked onto the bogey on her left and let loose with a single shot from her horizontal cannon. The Firebug jerked back from the powerful recoil and surged forward again. Dezmara flared over the decimated shell-pod, fanning the flames with her powerful jet engines as she swept left and took aim at her next victim. She gripped the trigger and squeezed.

  “Come in, luv!” Simon said frantically, and his timing, along with the distress in his voice, shook Dezmara’s concentration. The cannon barked again but the shot missed, and as she leveled out, the last two shell-pods gave chase.

  “Copy, Sy!” Dezmara said.

  “That bloody pirate ship’s almost got us, luv!”

  “Open fire an’ keep ‘em off ‘til I get there!”

  “Used up all the bangers already, luv! I’m in the blue spikes an’ dodgin’ the best I can, but looks like they’re gonna try more snatchers first chance they get. I could do with that promise you made to show up an’ save my furry arse!”

  “I’m comin’, Sy, just hold on!”

  The two remaining shell-pods pulled behind her, and their powerful engines chewed up the distance to The Firebug’s tail end at an alarming rate. The lead fighter let loose with several bursts of well-aimed machine gun fire, and Dezmara found herself struggling to avoid being hit for the first time since launching The Firebug. “Looks like there’s a pilot in the crew after all,” she said nervously. She swept her mount left and then right in a pendulum motion, interspersed with a barrel roll here and there, to avoid being shot down and to keep her pursuers guessing as to her next move. Dezmara spun to her right over the next salvo and then banked into a hard left turn. She could feel her sight dim as she pushed the throttles for more power and the G-forces pulled the oxygen-rich blood away from her brain. Her head lolled forward, bobbing on her neck as she started to pass out, and then snapped up as she leveled out again. The shell-pods had a speed advantage, but The Firebug had a tighter turning radius. And Dezmara leveraged it perfectly.

  The three craft looped around an invisible track that expanded and collapsed as every pilot jockeyed for the brass ring—a clear shot at the backside of their opponent. As she pulled out of her second turn, Dezmara had already come three-quarters of the way around on their tails—one and a half more turns and she would be chasing them. And then it happened. After coming out of its turn, one of the shell-pods cut hard across her nose from left to right with both guns ablaze. She banked left and the two odd craft raced toward each other in arcs of havoc: mirror images of death.

  The attacking shell-pod passed so close she saw the liquid glimmer of its skin fail and glimpsed, for the briefest moment, its pilot, standing beneath a cockpit bubble, guarding his face with his arms and twisting in pain as her bullets passed through the ship and his body like they were paper targets floating in the wind.

  The tail of The Firebug swept over the clouds and the red jet of fire from the last shell-pod glowed dead ahead and perfectly centered in her gunsight. The maneuver worked better than planned, and Dezmara was grateful: every second brought the Triton closer to the Ghost and the pirates closer to killing her friends. It was a perfect move—almost. But before she could understand what was happening, she had become the target.

  The shell-pod spun around its spiral center, and with its engine now pointed in the opposite direction, the craft hovered in mid-air in front of her. The long guns at the machine’s sides rotated down and then swooped up, coming to bear on The Firebug and sending a barrage of projectiles screaming at her head-on.

  “HOLY SHIT!” she yelled, slamming the stick forward to avoid the surprise attack. A tremor in the left fuselage shook The Firebug and an alarm rang in the kranos as it flashed, Left Engine Failure—Left Engine Failure—Left Engine Failure. She was hit.

  Dezmara rolled left and right, barely escaping the relentless fire from the shell-pod on her tail as she dove for the clouds. A storm of lights and sirens swirled in the cockpit, and her body ached from the constant jostling and G-forces. Dezmara sat at the center of a maddening riot, a chorus of sickly voices conducted by bloody death itself, and the cacophony dulled her senses.

  The clouds drifted apart and long wisps of white tendrils caressed the clear bubble as she passed into pockets of open air between them. She rolled over again to avoid more gunfire and something flashed into her vision from below. It
blinked so fast—there and then gone—that it couldn’t have been real. The image had to be a cruel trick of the mind playing on her want, her desire to save Simon and Diodojo, but the picture of her ship—the Ghost—moving at speed with both engines alight just below her was burned into her synapses. “Did that crafty sonofabitch get the other engine up? I told him to break east! Did he come back to help?” she thought as she turned the fighter right side up and pulled out of her dive. She tapped the kranos to kill the alarms and then hit it again to engage the com.

  “Come in, Sy. Sy, are you there?”

  “Barely, luv! Still in the rocks—can’t hold out much longer!”

  That settled it—she was seeing things. Simon was still headed east with the Triton in pursuit. She shook her head to fight back the fatigue and tried to focus on how to down the last fighter on her tail and get to Simon.

  She couldn’t out maneuver the shell-pod in the open on one engine. She needed to find some obstacles to fly through; fortunately, that’s exactly where she was headed.

  Chapter 38: Revenant

  “Goddamit,” she said, flipping and dodging gunfire through the clouds. “Why is the last guy always the best?!” Her engine churned as fast as it could, but the shell-pod was gaining. The only thing keeping her from being shot down was the patchwork of clouds that sporadically hid The Firebug, appearing and then vanishing again like puffs of gray-white smoke as she sped eastward.

  CLINK! CLINK! CLINK! CLINK! Bullets peppered her tail but didn’t hit anything important. They pierced the right fuselage and were stopped cold by the already dead engine. Dezmara craned her neck around to both sides as she swayed her fighter left and right, trying desperately to counter her attacker’s moves and swing wide of his gunsights, but her luck was about to run out. The clouds were failing, and in the widening patches of open air, Dezmara’s hobbled craft had become an easy target. Her pilot-bubble drifted dead center into the shell-pod’s targeting arc, and it opened fire.

  The Firebug broke free of the clouds as slugs leapt from the shell-pod’s guns. Dezmara yanked the stick right, skimming a thick column of smooth, blue rock with the belly of her fighter and sending a small avalanche of loose debris tumbling to the ground in her wake. She whipped her head around and hoped to see the shell-pod slam into the rocks, but the pilot swerved out of the way and bolted after her.

  “This one’s good!” she said with a hint of apprehension; but before she could start doubting her chances, Clara 591 gave her a gift. As she leveled out, she could see the terrain more closely, and the devilish grin appeared on her face again—her luck was still holding.

  The landscape had been swept clean of vegetation and polished smooth by erosion. Dezmara had thought the columns that towered on both sides of her were pure blue, but they had bands of gray in varying shades—lighter at the top and darker toward the bottom—that sparkled in the light. A river, deep green with stretches of frothing white, glistened far below the two seemingly endless lines of totem-esque hoodoos that were to be her saving grace.

  She banked left and angled toward one of many stone arches spanning the huge gap between the closest columns. They curved up and down, in and out in one of the grandest and most strangely beautiful displays of nature Dezmara had ever seen. Some sections of stone spiraled around each other; others were flat on top with holes of different shapes and sizes bored through their thick, crack-lined sides; still others were perfectly shaped vaults, as if they were crafted by a master architect and placed with a calculated precision that Simon would have been proud of.

  Dezmara shot through the crisscrossing network of bridges as bullets from the shell-pod chased her, pounding the stones and sending clouds of blue and gray dust glittering through the air after her. The enemy pilot was undaunted by the tight quarters and charged on. He was navigating the labyrinth of rock as easily as Dezmara and, worse, he was gaining. She hoped there weren’t any indigenous creatures living in or around the columns, as bolts from the shell-pod continued to assault the landscape around her at every turn. She couldn’t see any openings or caverns where anything might live, but then again, she was weaving in and out of the columns at dangerous speeds, and she wasn’t exactly on a sightseeing tour of the flora and fauna.

  Dezmara swept right to pass the next column, and as she flew out into the open air of the canyon, she spotted the Ghost. Simon was a few clicks ahead of her with the Triton off of his right quarter. She watched for an agonizing moment as the pirates drew even, but before they could fire their snatchers, Simon banked left between two spires of rock and disappeared out of sight. Dezmara let out a sigh of relief and then refocused. She had to waste the guy on her tail and catch up or she’d never forgive herself.

  She curled around the next column, passing so close she could have counted the number of sparkling granules in the gray band of rock if she had looked up. Then she dove to her right, ducking beneath a thick arch stretching out to the next pillar. Dezmara kept the nose pointed down as she weaved around arch after arch in dizzying succession. So many horizontal byways packed the chasm of rock that she imagined the two flanking columns could be the torso of a giant blue monster that was ripped apart and the myriad of archways were the sinewy fibers of connective tissue and muscle still clinging to each ravaged half. She was falling downward, twisting the controls with every ounce of concentration and piloting prowess she had to keep from being blown to bits or smashed against the rock face, when something flitted past her vision. Her green eyes flashed and she tapped the kranos and waited—then she pulled up and charged for open air. This time she didn’t head down the line of columns. She was gaining altitude for another pass through the harrowing gauntlet she had just barely escaped.

  CLINK! CLINK! CLINK! CHUNK!

  Bullets hit The Firebug again, and the left engine chugged for a horrifying moment before catching. She eased back the throttle to lure the attacker closer as she looked out over the twin nose cones at the clear blue of forever. “It’s been fun, but it’s time for you to die,” she said as The Firebug tipped over backwards and she pegged the throttle. The engine forgot its little hiccup from just moments ago and growled ferociously in response to Dezmara’s demand for maximum speed. Now girl and machine were barreling straight down and ripping past solid stone with no room to spare. Dezmara didn’t need to look behind her—the audible chug of machine gun fire told her that the shell-pod was exactly where she wanted him—right on her ass.

  The topmost span was broad, and it blocked the view of the deadly maze of stone lurking beneath like a protective barrier or a warning that Dezmara ignored without a second thought. She was repeating the run exactly as she had the first time, only faster. Archways passed in front and behind by the dozen, like the blurred arms of giant blue-gray monsters unfurling to swat her from the air as she barrel-rolled left and right, back and forth between them. The gunfire from behind droned out in one long cadence of frustration as the enemy pilot tried to put an end to Dezmara’s running so he could head back to his ship to share in the spoils of their prize. He would have been surprised to know that at that very moment, Dezmara thought the very same thing: it was time for her to stop running…but she planned on becoming the pursuer.

  The arch she needed was five more down and slightly off of her course. She crested the first arch so the belly of The Firebug slid past and then she rolled over again, passing the next in the same fashion. Dezmara kept on spinning and passing in a corkscrewing death spiral that inched closer and closer to each archway until she felt the underside of her fighter scrape across the edge of the fourth.

  The shell-pod pilot had followed suit and wasn’t impressed by Dezmara’s acrobatics in the least. He followed her through every dip, dive, turn, and spin and she couldn’t shake him. He was so close, he didn’t need to line Dezmara up in his gun sight: The Firebug filled his entire view.

  The edge of the fifth arch raced up at her, and as the shell-pod turned its guns loose, Dezmara eased the stick up and The Firebug nudge
d over the center of the stone bridge at the last possible second so that the salvo sailed wide. The enemy pilot was so close and so focused on Dezmara’s tail, he didn’t see it—a long slash eroded in the center of the archway, most likely from the pooling of water over tens of thousands of years.

  The thought of creatures living around the columns had sparked Dezmara’s subconscious, and it had started looking for openings in the rocks. When she spotted a dark shape out of the corner of her eye on her first pass, she checked the kranos to make sure The Firebug would fit through the opening and her uninvited guest would not. It was close, but she could manage it. Perhaps the most fiendish part of her plan was that the shell-pod would fit through the opening on top but couldn’t pass all the way through. The hole became narrower at the bottom.

  All at once everything was dark, all but a slit of light in the distance that grew bigger and bigger, brighter and brighter, until suddenly it exploded around Dezmara as The Firebug scraped through the other side of the chasm in a shower of sparks. She turned her head in time to see the lower half of the shell-pod spill from the cavern and fall, ricocheting from one vault to the next in sprays of shattered pieces as it smashed its way to the ground. The top half of the enemy fighter was smeared against the inside edge of the hole in a gooey paste of metal and gore.

  She looped back and swept into the canyon at full throttle. The two ships in the distance were swerving in and out of sight as Simon used the columns to block a clear line of fire and the Triton tried to counter.

  “Simon, I’m almost there—loop around the next column and head back to the west!” There was no reply, but Simon must have copied because the Ghost banked around and was now heading straight for her. She was counting in her head as all three ships rocketed toward each other on a collision course. “Now turn back around and keep over the canyon!” she said as she jetted inland, slipping between a tight cluster of hoodoos. She flicked the fingers of her trigger hand out one by one, hoping the inside of her glove would absorb some of the sweat, and then firmly placed her first digit over the half-moon shaped sliver extending from beneath the top of the grip.