by Letts,Jason
“It’s too bad for them I already know what an insecure wreck I am.”
Each step took more effort than the last, but eventually they made it to the top of the hill and got within sight of the Hudson. The ground shook as more bombs landed in the area, forcing them to hurry. One shot to the ship would’ve left them stranded forever.
They waded through more scrub trees and brush to where they could see that something was different about their ship. It was hard to tell exactly what at first, but as they got closer Loris could make out the shapes. His mouth dropped open.
The children were everywhere. Many had tied themselves to the landing gear. Others had climbed onto the top of the ship. Dozens more were standing directly behind the ship’s jets, where they would be burned to a crisp as soon as the engines were turned on.
“Are you kidding me?” Loris gasped.
There were at least a hundred of them around, and finding a way to clear them all out would not be an easy or quick task.
“You’re not going to hurt us, are you? I thought you were a good person.”
But by now Loris’s sympathies were all used up. He felt like he didn’t care about anything, and he wasn’t going to waste a single second getting back to the Magellan. If being intelligent meant being fatalistic, he’d take stupidity any day.
“All aboard!” he called.
The hatch opened and they all marched into the ship. Loris handed their injured guide off to Redhook and headed for the cockpit to initiate the launch sequence. The voices in his head were incessant, many of them disguised as his own thoughts directing him to perform counter-productive actions. Somewhere deep inside the cacophony of voices Loris could tell they regretted trying to obstruct him because it was not going to work. They had a reverence for the Detonans that defied understanding. They were powerless to help themselves and could only envision helping their murderers. The boy they met was different in some way, troublemaker or no.
The only way Loris could hit the ignition button was to forget what it was and slap his hand against the console. As soon as the engine roared and the jets fired, control over his mind gradually returned. He tried not to think about how many he’d just killed or when those tied to the ship would die. His focus instead was on the battle taking place up above, around the Magellan.
Flipping open a com channel, he asked for an update and told them they would be storming in with guns blazing. It was a comfort to hear his father come in from the helm of the Balboa.
“The shields are holding and we’re fending them off for now, but shit has hit the fan out here and it’s do or die. There are too many of them and nothing seems to work against them for long before they adapt. Even the Cortes is running out of tricks.”
It was a difficult prognosis to hear, but Loris held out hope they’d find a way to win.
“I’ve got some good news for you. It might not seem like it, but the Detonans are scared that we’re going to beat them. They’ve never faced anything like this before. One of the life forms on the surface says he knows what we can do to hit them hard. We brought him with us,” Loris said.
“That’s great. What is it?” Stayed asked. For some reason it hadn’t immediately occurred to Loris that this line of discussion didn’t have an ideal conclusion.
“We don’t know. He was knocked unconscious before he could tell us.”
“Oh, well let’s try to get that out of him,” Stayed said.
“Good idea. Will do.”
The Hudson breached the planet’s atmosphere and headed directly for the Magellan. Already they could see flashes of light, explosions, and crashes swirling around nearby. The station’s gunners were on their game, blasting anything that got close, but it seemed like they were in the midst of a never-ending onslaught.
Loris pushed the thrusters to maximum but it wasn’t long before they drew the attention of a few enemy fighters that separated from the larger pack. These were larger and clearly better armed than the needle fighters he’d encountered earlier. The console pinged when a report came in on them that detailed their design and known capabilities, which ranged from particle beams on the offensive end to shrapnel decoys for defense. The fighters had a strange “U” shape to them that reminded Loris of flying magnets.
“Redhook, did you say you were looking for target practice? We got a few coming in hot. Let’s save the missiles for the bigger fish, if we can,” Loris said to his gunner on the lower deck.
“These guys look mostly dead anyway. I’m happy to finish the job,” Redhook said over the com.
While Loris preferred to do the gunning himself, he had a few tricks up his sleeve piloting a mid-size vessel as well. The first fighter came up for a pass above them, and Loris pulled up on the nose and did a barrel roll right towards it, forcing a sharp deviation from its course. Struggling to regain velocity, the fighter managed to fire a few scattered shots before Redhook picked it off with the photon blaster, cleaving the U-shaped ship in two right down the middle.
“What good is driving a truck if you can’t use it to bully the smaller cars?” Loris said, grinning.
“I’ll need a souvenir to send home to Mom!” Redhook gloated.
Their celebration came to a quick end as the Hudson took enough fire from the other ships to cause a temporary dip in the shields. Much more and they’d have nothing other than the metal sheets over their heads to defend them. Loris pulled the ship around, trying to find a way to get out of their line of fire. Redhook continued to fire but had difficulty landing more shots. All of a sudden they had a handful of fighters trailing them.
Another shot brought the shields even lower, worrying Loris. He poured over the ship’s console, trying to put something together to help.
“Divert more power to the rear shields,” Loris said. “I’m slowing down.”
Incredulous remarks came over the com that Loris struggled to ignore. Speed was one of the few things the Hudson had going for it. But he cut the thrusters and even went so far as to begin dumping fuel as the rear shields took a beating. Loris kept a close eye on the radar and maxed the thrusters out once the enemy fighters were in range. The ship’s jets ignited the stream of fuel and caused an explosion that consumed two of the enemy fighters. During the resulting chaos, Redhook shot down a third.
With only two remaining fighters, it gave the Hudson some breathing room. Loris worked the controls and brought the ship nearly within point blank range of the fighters. Redhook shredded them and they sailed on into the greater conflict.
“How many more times are we going to have to do that?” Redhook asked. Loris looked over the screen monitoring the health of the ship. They’d already taken many more hits than Loris would’ve liked and they weren’t even in the thick of it yet. Also in his mind was that the boy from the planet could use some real medical attention, and there was only one place to get that.
“Is there any chance we could make a quick pit stop at the Magellan?” he asked while watching lights flash in the firefight ahead.
“Commander Roderick,” Yamaguchi’s stern voice came over the channel. “The Cortes is in dire need of assistance. Can you make it there?”
Loris glanced at the radar, which showed the Cortes was nearly encircled from every angle by enemy ships. It had crossed his mind that the Cortes could’ve been the weapon the boy referred to, but even if it wasn’t he sure wasn’t going to let it go.
“Anybody who lays a finger on Panic and Lopez gets strapped to the hull,” Loris said, changing course in the direction of the Cortes. Redhook continued to fire at enemy vessels on the way. One blew up right in front of them, but it turned out that had been the handiwork of one of the Magellan’s gunners.
They came within sight of the Cortes, which seemed penned in by square shields that each fighter projected in its direction. They seemed to perfectly block all incoming fire, leaving the Cortes to try to grab and smash them with its spidery legs. But the Detonans were keeping their distance and trying to pepper the sh
ip with photon fire from afar.
“What’s the read on their shields?” Loris asked.
“I don’t know, but it looks like they can only point them one way at a time,” Panic said, sounding like she’d been through hell. Even just hearing her voice spurred him on. The Cortes wouldn’t be able to take much more before it became Swiss cheese.
“They’re going to be on the wrong side of those shields in a second,” Loris said.
The Hudson came charging into the area, swooping just off to the side of the Cortes, forcing the tightly packed enemies to scramble. Photon fire streamed from below, and it looked like Redhook even set off a few missiles to further clear the field.
Some of the ships switched their shields to block the Hudson’s incoming attacks, but those Detonans were simply deleted by the Cortes’s plasma cannons. Though they’d disrupted the siege on the Cortes, there were still a lot more enemies around and more coming in all the time. The Cortes was rightly being considered the Detonan’s primary target.
The Hudson continued to run laps around the Cortes, destroying enemy fighters left and right on each pass. It took on more fire as well, putting even more stress on the shields, which were now down to razor thin margins.
It helped when the newly equipped but still lumbering Space Mole looped into the area as well. The ship had only a few guns but was a tank capable of withstanding loads of enemy blasts even without shields. Its hull was thicker than the average man is tall and was intended to tolerate intense pressure and heat in planet cores.
But having too many USF ships in the area put them at increased risk of collisions and friendly fire. The Hudson nearly crashed into an enemy fighter until the Cortes plucked it out of space and ripped it apart. As it did so, a well-aimed shot struck the extended leg and seared it off.
“That’s the third leg I’ve lost!” Panic growled.
They decided to move closer to the Magellan and spread out in its vicinity, giving the station’s gunners a chance to deal a greater share of the damage. Loris worried that meant inviting the larger Detonan spacecraft carrier closer as well. It had been hanging back, spewing forth its fleet of small fighters on a continuous basis. When he took another look, he saw something beginning to glow above the top of its triangle-shaped mouth.
“Is that command ship charging something?” Loris asked, barely getting the words out before others noticed it as well.
“We’re taking evasive action. Someone needs to prevent that cruiser from firing,” Yamaguchi said.
“The Balboa is on it,” Stayed replied.
“Give me a chance to fend off these pests and we’ll flank you,” Loris said, wondering how quickly he’d be able to close the gap between them.
“No, we don’t have time,” Stayed said. “If anything happens to the Magellan…if we lose this fight, it’s over for all of us and the people on Nova. I’m not taking any chances.”
Loris continued to steer the Hudson through the thicket of enemy fighters it was in, but he activated the 3D radar to keep a better eye on the Balboa as it made an abrupt turn and began to arc toward the large Detonan carrier, drawing about a dozen small fighters with it. The Balboa was the nimblest ship they had, and its dorsal jet ports allowed it to shift directions on a dime. It made a few twists to avoid enemy fire that surely made everyone aboard lose their lunch.
Stayed pulled a tight loop de loop to circle back and shoot at some of its pursuers, but mostly it went straight for the carrier while juking and jiving to dodge incoming particle blasts. Considering some of his pursuers had those strong projection shields, getting the best of them was an unlikely prospect anyway.
The carrier continued to belch ships, many of which now went straight for the Balboa, which approached from a high angle along the starboard side. The glowing tip of the weapon protruding from its head increased, leading to more nervous chatter over the com that it would fire soon. It wasn’t hard for Loris to imagine some giant blast boring a hole straight through the midsection of the Magellan. Stayed had been right to go after it immediately.
The Balboa fired a few shots from the photon cannon at a distance but found that the carrier’s exterior was too tough to take any serious damage from those blasts.
“There’s only one way to do this. I’m going to have to get in close,” Stayed said.
More fighters replaced those that Redhook had dispensed with, but even if they had nothing but empty space, they wouldn’t be able to meet the Balboa in time. Some of the carrier’s weaponry came online, requiring even more fancy footwork from Stayed to remain unscathed. Loris couldn’t help but smile when Stayed made a sudden juke that resulted in a carrier blast destroying one of its own fighters.
When Stayed said he was getting in close, he wasn’t kidding. The Balboa raced along the edge of the carrier, disappearing behind its opposite end. The radar screen pinged as the ship came up and dropped a few charges near the weapon before swooping down along the other side. The charges blew, resulting in an explosion that combined with the destabilized energy from the weapon to demolish the ship’s head. Sighs of relief came over the com.
“While we’re here, let’s see what else we can do. It’d be rude to eat and run.”
Loris began to get a sense of the snarky, irreverent style Stayed maintained as a pilot. It reminded him of himself and the tactics he used to keep his crew in a positive frame of mind. A little optimism was often enough to salvage a mission from the jaws of defeat.
The Balboa continued to fly circles around the cruiser, which had virtually stopped firing back after suffering such a severe blow. Stayed deposited charges like a wreath, venturing even close to the carrier’s mouth before breaking away and setting a return course for the Magellan. When those charges went off at once, it created a dazzling flash of light that faded to reveal that the bulk of their opposition was in shambles. Not only that, but it also put a stop to the influx of new enemy fighters, which were suddenly stranded far from home.
Loris could tell that the equation for the Detonans piloting the fighters had changed drastically. Instead of continuing to bombard the Magellan’s fleet, they gravitated toward a central location to swarm together and hide behind their shields.
“Now it’s our turn to take the offensive. Let’s move in,” Loris said, searching the cluster of ships for vulnerabilities.
“Not so fast,” said Yamaguchi. “Taking out that carrier has gotten the attention of the ships around the Detonan planet. They’re sending a massive armada in our direction that could mean fifty times the opposition we just faced.”
Loris clenched his teeth, knowing that this had been but an opening gambit in a larger fight. He was sure he wasn’t the only one getting exhausted, and their weapons stores were close to fully depleted. More than that, he needed to buy time to find out what their injured alien passenger could tell them about how to win. Time was running out for him to be helpful.
He glanced again through the window in the direction of Detonus, but of course the system’s large sun was right in the way.
“I’ve got an idea,” Loris announced. “If the Detonans are shifting the bulk of their forces out here, this could be our chance to advance right to their doorstep. Let’s dock the fleet and then move the station in their direction before shifting around the opposite side of the sun. If we time it right, they’ll have no choice but to chase us around its back end. We head straight for Detonus and knock out that gamma station, disabling their controls.”
“It’s better than trying to slog through every fighter they’ve got,” Panic said.
“I’m in,” Stayed added.
“Right. Let’s restock and execute. There’s a very small window for this to work,” Yamaguchi said.
As excited as Loris was to carry out his plan, it made getting some rest seem like the most difficult part. Leaving the swarm of stranded fighters to savor their survival, he turned the Hudson around and prepared to dock. After the battle they’d just been through, he knew that everyo
ne back in the cabin had to feel riddled with nerves. Once they attached to the airlock, Loris hopped out of his seat and went back to check on them.
He found Brina alongside the boy. He was pale and still unconscious, though they’d gotten his bleeding under control. She was steely eyed and focused. If the ride had rattled her, she didn’t show it. She nodded and gave him a sense that she was holding up fine.
“How is he doing?”
“He’s hanging on. There was very little in the way of medical supplies on board here that we could use to treat him. Mostly we tried to keep him still. There were a couple of bumps that made that difficult,” she said as she flattened out a long seat and prepared to use it as a stretcher.
“I’m sorry about that,” Loris said, but she shot him a look.
“Don’t be. I know you did what you had to do. We made it. That’s all that matters.”
Loris helped Redhook carry the boy through the airlock and into the docking bay, where a cart waited to shuttle their companion to the medical wing. The docking crew immediately got to work replacing everything on board that had been used during the fight.
A hand on Loris’s shoulder made him look around. It was Stayed, who had a big grin on his face.
“You did great out there,” he said.
“Me? You almost single-handedly won that fight.”
“They learn fast. I have a feeling a stunt like that won’t work again. I was lucky to get under their skin there.”
Panic and Lopez emerged from one of the other docks, both of them looked dazed as if they’d been struck by lightning. But they were standing under their own power. A couple hours’ rest would do them good. If they didn’t all take advantage of this time to properly prepare for the next fight, it could be over very quickly.
CHAPTER 16
As the Magellan set off in the direction of the sun, Loris finally found a chance to sneak off to the mess hall and refuel. He hoped for a few moments of solitude in which he could contemplate what they were up against, but he’d barely been able to take a seat on a bench before Yamaguchi, Reid, and Firth accosted him. Reid had a smile on his face that seemed incongruous with the grim situation.