by Ashanti Luke
When they had stopped inside the large chamber, Uzziah had spun the craft to face the entrance and had opened the door for Milliken. Uzziah had his doubts about the whole plan, but he went along with it because he could not think of a better one. He had dropped Milliken in the chamber to look for another unit that would start, and then he had flown to drop Tanner and Cyrus off a half K from the end of the tunnel. Uzziah had quickly scanned the crater outside to make sure their unknown attackers were not already upon them, and then he had flown backward at a dangerous speed while trying to set the autopilot at the same time. By the time Uzziah had returned to the chamber, Milliken had started and readied a small mining craft about the same size as the ship they had come in. Milliken had opened one of the side doors, and after setting the computer on a timer, he had leapt from Paeryl’s lev to the mining lev without waiting for it to set down.
Whether it had been luck or by design, the ship Milliken had chosen was perfect. The on-board systems included surveying equipment as well as an articulate holographic imager. As articulate as it was, it could not make out individual humans if the ship was moving faster than cruising speed, which meant, if this were the most advanced their imaging technology had become since this vessel was created, Cyrus’s plan might actually work.
Uzziah piloted the craft without lights, using the imager at its lowest setting so as not to give away their presence too soon. Milliken powered up the mining lasers mounted on the four corners of the front of the craft. Uzziah was too focused on flying with limited resources to pay much attention to Milliken’s treatise on how the lasers worked. He did gather two things from Milliken’s rambling though; these were not as strong as extraplanetary lasers, nor were they military grade, which meant they had to be fired within three hundred meters to be of use. That was too close to be up against trained pilots in gunships, but that was the hand he had been dealt, and folding would not do at this table.
To his dismay, this craft was not as fast as Paeryl’s, and as their original lev disappeared at the end of the tunnel, Uzziah had a sinking feeling that this Fringe-fuck was not going to go as pleasantly as the last.
The washed out colors on the visor imager were disorienting, and it took Cyrus longer than he would have liked to find the power switch. As he turned on the power, the computers powered up, but he kept the internal lights off. As soon as the holomonitor appeared, he was presented with a prompt, preceded by a record of previous logins. It was apparent that someone had powered up this vehicle at least once every ten gyres. Most likely someone had been refurbishing the vehicles during that time because the holograms still worked, and a standard hologram unit had an average lifespan of about ten years. Also, he couldn’t tell if it was a function of the visor imaging, but the resolution of the holomonitor seemed too high for the now antiquated controls, which, since he was in actuality now antiquated himself, he was rather familiar with. He was sure he could hear the assault vehicle next to him power up, so he cancelled the prompt and powered up the jury-rigged mining lasers.
His holographic imager came into view, zoomed out to its fullest range, and to his dismay, showed two fighters spreading away from each other as they descended on them. The controls of the lasers were somewhat odd, and as they were set up to cut through rock that could not maneuver evasively, included a rudimentary, and unfortunately completely manual, targeting system. Luckily for Cyrus, even in his own time, computer technology had progressed to a point where the line between hologames and reality was hazy. The Uni would not even allow holodecks to be taken to the Fringe for that very reason, and after years of watching Darius immolate alien spacecraft and blast enemy fighters from the sky—even blasting a few himself—Cyrus was not intimidated by the controls in front of him. He was intimidated, however, by the ships now careening toward them that were probably intent on imbedding Cyrus and Tanner in the quartz and granite beneath them.
As Cyrus moved the sticks that controlled the turret, the hologram twisted in the air in front of him, he pressed the button to open the door, and then another that sent the assault lev rising into the air. The hologram shifted with his movement, and he pressed the buttons over the control sticks as he moved them.
The lasers streamed out from the top of the tank, much farther than guns normally fitted on a tank would have ever reached with any effectiveness. The ship shuddered from the power drain, and a chill shot through Cyrus’s body, causing his right hand to shift slightly. The two white beams stretched into the sky like fiery lines drawn by some celestial being. They stretched on either side of one of the fighters, which dipped to its right into a spin, but a combination of Cyrus’s adjustments and twitches crossed the beams in an awkward pattern, slicing in an angle through the middle of the ship as if it were a hot sweetbar. The hologram showed detail that would never have been visible in the night sky. The rear end separated from the ship and continued on its normal path, but the front end dipped forward slightly, hanging as if it was about to drip from the sky. It wobbled strangely, and then, as it must have slipped outside the grip of the gravity drive, flipped beneath and behind the rear end, which seemed to stay on its original course, continuing to spin as it descended. Cyrus was sure these systems could not image individual humans at this distance, but he swore he saw a body fall from the front piece of the fighter as it plummeted out of range. Evidently, the lock-on warning systems of this craft were also still intact and operational, because even as he leaned forward to get a better look at the hologram through his visor, a shrill beeping and a pulsating red light alerted him to what was coming next. Cyrus dove out of the door of the tank, falling farther than he had expected too, but the padding in the suit and the lower gravity made the collision with the ground less traumatic than his mind had expected. His shoulder burned from the shock of the impact, but he was beginning to get used to the pain. Before he knew it, he was on his feet. Tanner had left the door open on his lev, and he began lifting it from the ground as soon as Cyrus reached the door. Just as Cyrus jumped in, an explosion rocked the ground beneath them, temporarily lighting the immediate area. Either Tanner jinked the lev to the side, or the blast of the explosion moved the lev Cyrus had left, or both, but the first lev moved toward Cyrus as he pulled himself inside. As Tanner moved away, Cyrus saw the outside light up again as the tank he had just jumped out of on fire and smoking as it settled slowly to the ground, and then was hit again by another missile.
And then, before he knew it, he was in the laser control seat, aiming in the hologram again. This time, he activated the left laser first, hoping to catch the fighter that had obliterated the other tank with the first shot. He missed, and the ship evaded. As it spun, he moved his left hand, carving a fiery swath in the sky as the fighter dipped and spun. This pilot could only have been used to dodging weaker planetary lasers. The war had been half a millennium before, but in simulators he must have trained on being fired upon by an extraplanetary laser. The warships Cyrus had seen in the holocasts were usually equipped with several laser batteries with autolocking systems as well as trained gunners. No, using this type of weapon against fighters would be like using an assault rifle to kill a mouse; but the mouse, no matter how many times he practiced, would have difficulty adjusting once the bullets grazed his hide—especially when his friend was just obliterated. So as the ship dipped to the right of the hologram, Cyrus fired the right laser and pulled it toward the left stream as if he were bringing his hands together to swat a fly.
But the ship dipped downward and dropped beneath the two streams as they crossed, firing a missile as it fell. Tanner moved the lev into the air, but the motion of the modified assault craft was jittery. It was clear he was not used to moving such a large vehicle, and the lag in its movement, although slight, was enough to stop them from being able to move out of the path of the missile. The missile exploded against the side of the lev and forced it to dip left, throwing Cyrus from his seat.
Tanner was strapped in but the blast dimmed the controls for a moment an
d his command inputs would not register. When the hologram faded back into clear view, Cyrus saw the fighter leveling off as Milliken and Uzziah’s craft sped above the lumbering assault lev. Cyrus dove back into his chair to fire the right laser, but he missed again, sending a bright colored stream through the sky wide left. Cyrus knew his next shot would be his last chance because he was sure this assault lev could not take another blast like the first one.
A sharp twinge seized Uzziah’s insides as he flew out of the cave entrance. The burning husk of the assault lev was deeply worrisome, but as the hologram gave him a clearer view of the outside, he could see the other assault lev rising toward a fighter that was evading and dipping toward them. Cyrus’s plan included diverting their attackers’ attention, and most likely he had survived the diversion, but there was not time for Uzziah to worry. He opened up the throttle and sped over the rising tank toward the fighter. Using these outmoded, underpowered mining vehicles to fend off fighters that had undoubtedly superior technology was virtually suicide, and judging from the way the tank beneath him shuddered on the hologram, it had already been hit at least once. Neither evasion nor a dogfight was much of an option here. The only chance for survival was to catch the fighter in a Fringe-stampede and hope this dumpy mining lev could get inside the arming range of the fighter’s missiles before it fired again.
Luckily, the fighter’s sights must have been trained on the tank, because it was slow to react to Uzziah’s approach. Unfortunately, the fighter had reacted by slowing its descent, and the ship Uzziah was piloting, even at full throttle, was too slow to close the distance. This ship had always been a mining craft and contained no early warning systems, but Uzziah knew the lock-on sound well, and imagined it in his own head as the fighter in front of them leveled to fire.
And then two thick white lines spread out in front of him like the fluorescent landing guides of a lunar spaceport. For a moment, Uzziah was confused until he remembered the ship-to-ship lasers mounted on the assault lev beneath him. He continued his course toward the fighter, planning to roll left if the lasers did not move, but as he closed on the fighter, the lasers stayed the same distance in front of him. The fighter dipped to its left, but because it had slowed to fire, it was unable to maneuver completely out of the path of the lasers. One of the blue-white streaks passed through the fighter, illuminating the side of the craft as it shaved off an appendage.
Uzziah charged the coring lasers mounted on the outside of his own lev. Milliken had informed him the lasers would have at least a ten second lag before firing. “Grab on to something!” Uzziah yelled back to Milliken, who was rummaging through the mining equipment in the rear of the craft. Milliken only managed to get to a seat in the center of the craft before gravity changed direction. As Uzziah passed over the fighter, the line carved in the sky by the extraplanetary lasers disappeared. The piece that had been excised must have been a stabilizer of some sort because the clipped fighter recovered, albeit slowly. But Uzziah assumed the fighter was most likely still just as deadly. Uzziah pulled the mining craft into a loop. The craft had obviously not been designed for that type of maneuver because the gravity drive and the thrusters seemed clumsy and out of sync. Even though Uzziah came out of the loop in the orientation he had planned, his descent still felt like trying to teach a turkey to dance. The contents of the ship were mostly tamped to the floor or the walls, but something hard, metal, and thankfully small hit Uzziah in the back of the head. He could hear Milliken yammering behind him, but Uzziah dared not look to check his condition. And then, as Uzziah closed the distance between his craft and top of the fighter, it fired its thrusters and began to move through Uzziah’s path of travel.
But whoever was firing the assault lev lasers was on top of his game. The white lines stretched out again, this time to the right of Uzziah’s craft, but directly in front of the fighter. The fighter’s thrusters died immediately, stopping it directly in Uzziah’s path of descent just as the coring lasers came on. The coring lasers fired and formed four blue lines from each of the four corners of the windshield. The lasers squeezed together at a point in the center of Uzziah’s view, and then spread back out again in less than a second. The coring lasers left a blue X etched in Uzziah’s vision as the fighter beneath him fell in five distinct pieces. Milliken was moaning in the back of the lev, and Uzziah turned to see him tossed face-down across the arms of one of the seats as the mining craft leveled. Uzziah checked the hologram and then spoke the command to radio Cyrus’s envirosuit. “The credits ain’t rolling yet. The fighters that chased Paeryl’s lev are coming back. Is everyone over there okay?”
“Still breathing at least,” came back over the sound transmitters.
“We should retreat back to the cave. If they lock their missiles, we won’t stand a chance,” Uzziah reported.
Milliken chimed into the radio stream, “The size and makeup of the cave should interfere with their long-range scanners just like it did ours.”
Uzziah turned the mining craft and dove back toward the floor of the crater. “I have an idea. You pull in behind me,” he reported to Tanner and Cyrus.
At the bottom of the crater, Uzziah flew into mouth of the cave and then slowed and spun the lev to face the entrance as Tanner pulled in the assault lev and also turned in front of him.
Tanner followed Uzziah’s instructions and waited a couple hundred meters inside the mouth of the cave. Cyrus powered the lasers and prepared for their attackers to give chase. He trusted Milliken’s assessment of how many meters of rock the lasers on the assault lev could cut through in a second, but he could not stop himself from going through the numbers in his head himself.
Tanner should have been afraid, should have been chilled to the center of his body, but he wasn’t. He was ablaze, enraged by the confusion that was now building in him like an artesian fount. He should have been overjoyed to see what they had seen in the cave, but everything about the strange city was wrong. Catastrophically wrong. And he couldn’t shake the feeling that everything he had ever believed, ever, was horribly and irrepressibly wrong as well. The idea alone reduced him to an automaton who followed instructions barked at him without complain or digression, even in the face of impending demise.
Tanner killed the throttle and set the assault lev to hover. It shuddered in protest. Something in its stabilization system had been damaged when the missile had hit, but it didn’t matter to him now. He just waited, trying his best to focus and quell the conflagration of doubt that threatened to tear him inside out.
And then the mouth of the cave exploded in front of them. Flames splashed against the windshield, rocking the lumbering assault lev. The visor of the suit compensated for the high contrast between the flames and the darkness of he cave, but Tanner eyes still ached as his pupils were squeezed to pinpoints too fast.
The flames died around the front of the cave, and Tanner expected a fighter to be sitting in front of him, but the smoldering assault lev at the front of the cave was the only thing visible in either the windshield or the imager.
Tanner’s system of beliefs had been undermined, but his martial instincts died hard. At its heart, a dogfight was not much different than a fistfight as far as he could tell; the same rules applied. A man who held a knife blade-downward often knew what he was doing. A man who threatened you with a gun within arm’s reach most likely did not. The missile strike had been the fighter equivalent of a blind technique—a wild attack directed at something the fighter could not see. It was not a good indicator of inexperience, but it was a definite indicator of a certain amount of desperation.
And that desperation might be enough to get them out of this jetwashed expedition alive. Tanner was surprised he even cared as the fire within him dulled and the flames in front of him dissipated. The anger did not go away completely, but he could sense that, despite the bile building up in the very depth of his soul, it may not stay forever.
And then the lev shook again, and the cave mouth was illumined by the massi
ve lasers on their roof. The rock above them glowed in a dismal orange glow and then gave way to the bolts of energy that bore through it. After Tanner heard Cyrus count one one-thousand, two one-thousand over the radio, the lasers moved in an arc. Tanner, despite his distress, felt eager as he waited to see if their counterattack had succeeded. Then the wall of the cave shook around them and Tanner saw the still sputtering booster of one of the fighters plummet to the ground outside the cave. As it hit the ground, a confetti of large metal and composite pieces of shredded fighter showered the crater floor.
Even through his disillusionment Tanner almost wanted to cheer. But his brief levity was squashed by the realization that the vibration had not stopped, and it was getting louder.
“Get the hell out! Go! Go! Go!” Milliken’s voice eclipsed the rumbling, but it took a cascading rock smashing against the windshield to whelm Tanner’s foot to the throttle. As the lev began to move, he saw Uzziah and Milliken’s lev in the imager so close it looked like the two ships were connected. Then, angular blobs began appearing in the imager around the two levs. The assault lev shook as it was bombarded by rocks falling from the roof of the cave that was slowly closing in on them.
And then the mining lev was on top of them, a slab of stone was on top of it, and they were all literally squeezed out of the mouth of the cave to the sound of metal and stone grinding. Another explosion spread around them as Cyrus and Tanner’s assault lev bounced across the floor of the crater.
The assault lev slid, smacked against the disabled tank, and then spun to its left as Tanner fought to resist the momentum. The lev collided with something jutting from the ground and tipped to the right, but the z-drive kicked in and Tanner lifted the lev from the ground before it could roll. It shuddered and shimmied as it rose from the crater floor, but quickly accelerated up toward the crater’s rim.