by Andrew Beery
“Here we go!” Stone yelled as he and his wing man fired their energy weapons at their first target.
The beams converged and illuminated an energy shield that surrounded the enemy fighter with a sparkling aqua blue nimbus. As fast as they fired the two scorpions reversed their momentum and backed out of engagement range. The enemy fighter fired his plasma beams but the beams arced through empty space.
Several of the surrounding fighters also attempted to nail the two GCP fighters but the AI built into the Scorpions was built to detect targeting systems and automatically take evasive maneuvers. The result was the nimble little crafts were exceedingly hard to hit.
“Bank right and follow my lead,” Stone yelled at JJ.
The Rogue Nation shifted as commanded and the Betty Boop fired a combined spread of KEWs and plasma beams. Moments later his wingman followed suit. The shields on the enemy fighter went white hot and then suddenly burned out. The result was immediate as the Ashtoreth craft exploded in what could only be described as a miniature super nova. The blast was so intense it actually overwhelmed the shields of his nearest compatriot.
“Wow a two-fer!” JJ yelled over their private comms.
“Did it strike you that their shields seemed stronger than the last time?” Ag asked his friend.
“I won’t know, Boss. I’ll I’ve had to fight were simulators but yeah they seem stronger than what we seeing in the sims.”
“The sims were configured to replicate our first encounter. Based on that fusion explosion I would say they have upgraded their power systems.”
“That would seem like a good bet Sir. Switching to secondary target.”
The pattern of their attack remained the same for several minutes. Soon though it became harder to kill the enemy as their numbers decreased. It seemed these pilots were learning from the mistakes their compatriots had made or it could have just been they were better pilots which is why they were still in the mix.
Stone heard a cry over the squadron channel. It was from Knight Rider. “Daugkin’s just bit it! I’ve got six of them on my tail. Every time I jit or jog it seems like they are already firing on my position!”
“This is what I warned you about Knight Rider,” Stone yelled. “We all have the exact same skill training so we are becoming predictable. Mix it up. Do something unexpected.”
“I’m trying sir! The bloody bugger…” The Channel went dead.
Stone checked his LiDAR. Of his original thirty six fighters he was down to thirty three effectives. Daugkin’s Creek and Knight Rider were dead and Meat Wagon was limping home on one partial and banked up engine. The enemy was hurt even worse though. They were down to just sixty one fighters. The odds were only two to one now but it seemed like the fight was just getting harder.
Chapter 20: You Can’t Keep a Good Man Down…
The battle raged on for the better part of an hour. Lieutenant Stone knew his men must be spent. His newly enhanced replicant body was stronger and faster than anybody he knew aside from Admiral Kimbridge and he was getting tired.
He was down to ten scorpions. About half of the ones he had lost were straight out and out kills. Those pilots would be coming out of the bio-generators as new replicants in the next few hours. The rest were in disabled fighters that would need to be rescued by the Aircraft Recovery Teams. Sadly JJ and the Rogue Nation were among those that would need rescuing.
It had hurt him to leave his friend behind but the enemy was now less than a light minute from their destination. The only good news was there were only four enemy fighters left. While much of their ordinance was spent, each enemy fighter was itself a fusion bomb. Stone’s MAC team had learned the hard way that the Asktoreth did not allow their fighters to be disabled or captured. They were apparently set to explode in an attempt to take out their attackers as a weapon of last resort.
“Sir, LiDAR has sixteen new targets coming up fast,” Corporal Walker flying the Chasing Tail reported between exhausted grunts. The young man was proving to be quite a pilot in his own right. Lieutenant Stone had already decided the man needed to be promoted and put in a leadership position to see what he could do with it.
Stone checked his own LiDAR scanner and confirmed the incoming. His computer changed their designation from unknown to green friendlies as he watched. His squadron comm-link crackled.
“Betty Boop this is Gold Wing Leader. Word has it you have unwanted guests. Permission to join the party.’
AG smiled. “Jax, it’s about time you guys got out of bed… sir. We left a few of them for you… if you don’t mind taking over. I’ve got some boys out back in banged up birds I want to check on.”
“No worries Betty Boop. We will have these guys mopped up in a few minutes. Go do what you need to do. We’ll handle this. You guys need a rest.”
AG saw that two of the enemy fighters had already self-destructed… leaving just two left. It was truly over.
“Thanks Gold Wing Leader. Before you go do you have a sit-rep on the rest of the rest of the battle?”
“We just finished up with the last of the incoming fleet. Seems these guys don’t like to surrender. The ten ships we disabled self-destructed once their crews recovered and discovered their drive systems were offline. The Mador and Relentless are trying to negotiate with the Asktoreth flagship DorKra to see if we can’t get them to stand down with anything short of releasing the containment fields on their fusion power plants.”
***
Lord Captain Asdartu spat green blood on the floor. His left arm was broken. The bridge was a smoldering wreck. The enemy had pounded his ship without mercy. Of course none was asked for. He had remotely detonated each of his disabled ships earlier in the battle. He had waited until GCP boarding parties had approached those of his ships which had surrendered. The GCP, and humans in general, had no concept of what surrender meant to his people. Death Before Dishonor was more than just a glib statement. It was their way of life.
He was not going home. That he knew in every fiber of his being. His mission had all but failed. There was still one move he could make. He pressed the engineering communications button on his command chair.
“Engineering, this is the Captain. Report your status.”
“Lord Captain, this is engineering mate Ttylee. The chief engineer is dead. There are three of us left. We have restored partial hull shielding but that is it.”
“Engineering mate Ttylee, you are now Chief Engineer Ttlee. Do we have a working jump drive?”
“Lord Captain, we can jump but our higher order hyperfield resonator was disrupted by the enemy’s attacks. We would be rendered unconscious.”
“Nevertheless, we can jump this ship… correct?”
“Yes Lord Captain.”
“Excellent Chief Engineer. I want you to red-line the thrusters. I need this ship to have every ounce of momentum possible. Once you think the drives are at their limit I want you to jump the ship to the coordinates I’m going to send down to your console. My helm is disabled up here. Can you do this for me, Chief Engineer Ttylee?”
“Lord Captain, I live to serve. If it takes my last breath I will make this happen.”
“It most certainly will,” He said to himself after he closed the channel. Asdartu began to enter the coordinates for the engineer on his command console. He had one last surprise for the enemy.
Slowly his ship began to pick up speed. The battered inertial dampeners strained to suppress the effects of the acceleration. Asdartu gritted his teeth. The shaking was violent and his broken arm felt every tremor. After several minutes of torment he considered hailing that young fool in engineering and telling him to engage the jump drive.
Before he could reach the communications button, a Violet-blue hyperfield vortex formed in front of his ship. He felt one final stab of intense pain as the extradimensional planes that represented sentient consciousness were perturbed by the hyperfield his ship was passing through.
***
Jason Ruck shook his he
ad. He had been trying to reason with the commander of the Ashtoreth flagship for the past twenty minutes. The man, who called himself Lord Captain Asdartu, indicated that a negotiated truce was possible but only if the GCP forces surrendered completely to his sole surviving vessel.
“Commodore, the DorKra is powering up her engines,” Ensign Topen reported from his sensor station.
“Lord Captain, we are detecting a power build up in your engines. I do not want to fire on your vessel again. Please stand down and let us continue our conversation.”
A rasping voice filtered through a severely degraded communications system answered him. “There is nothing more to talk about Commodore. I am as good as dead but you have ultimately lost... Our conversation is at an end. You fought well. Be proud of that little victory.”
“What the...,” Ruck began.
“COMMODORE!” First Officer Marlena Nash suddenly yelled. “The DorKra just jumped!”
“Jumped? Jumped where?”
“Sir… she jumped thirty light seconds out from the planet. I think she means to ram it!”
“How fast is the DorKra traveling?”
Nash checked her board. “Sir… she’s managed to push her engines to 0.016c… she will hit the planet with enough force to rip away half the atmosphere.”
“Try to raise them!” Ruck screamed as he raced towards the communications station.
“Sir, our hyperfield jamming nodes were in full operation. That crew is either dead or completely incapacitated,” Nash said in a soft voice. The sense of impending doom was ominous.
***
AG Stone was redlining his scorpion in an effort to get back to JJ Hammond. He was up to a full 0.1c when two things happened that would severely impact his day. First, a massive Ashtoreth vessel emerged for a hyperfield conduit fifteen light seconds away. Second a call came in to all ships in the area to attempt to intercept, destroy or deflect said Ashtoreth vessel. Sadly, he was by far the closest ship.
“Computer, arm our nuke. Authorization code: AG loves a hot shower… Enable. Enable. Enable.”
“The nuclear missile is armed. Shall I engage its cloaking field?” the computer responded.
“Negative. Launch missile on a course that will intercept the enemy vessel to my port side.”
“Missile away.”
Lieutenant Stone counted of the seconds to himself. One-one thousand, two-one thousand, three-one thousand. Suddenly the forward viewscreen filled with a blinding white light. AG hoped this new body could handle a few extra RADs because he was pretty sure he just absorbed a boat load of them.
“Computer, report?”
“The enemy vessel had minimal shielding in place. The shield is now down and the vessel suffered a catastrophic hull breach. It is venting atmosphere in six locations.”
“Its course! Its course! Did we change its course?”
“Affirmative.”
“Will it still impact the planet?”
“Affirmative.”
“Query. If the containment field on a scorpion-class fighter were to be dropped would the resulting explosion be enough to deflect that vessel enough to miss the planet?”
“Affirmative, if certain conditions are met.”
Lieutenant Stone looked at his ship’s computer interface. He hated to ask the next question but he knew he had to. “What are those conditions?”
“Condition one: The explosion must occur no closer than fifty meters to the main body of the Ashtoreth ship and no further away than five hundred meters. Condition two: The explosion must occur within the next 48 seconds.”
“Damn,” Stone mumbled to himself. “Time to go to hell and regroup. Computer set a timer on the fusion containment field drop it when this ship gets to within seventy five feet of that other ship or when thirty seconds have gone by… whichever comes first.”
“Acknowledged sir.”
Those would be the last words Lieutenant Anthony Grant Stone would hear… in this life.
***
Doctor Janice Pulaski was startled by a sudden noise from outside her office. She raced out of the room and into the main medical bay. The noise was coming from the newly installed Bio-generators. It seemed the equipment had begun an automatic regeneration cycle. Unlike the units that were installed on the Mador, Relentless and Exeter, this particular machine, which was the prototype, currently only had one set of engrams stored in it. That meant that Lieutenant Stone must have gotten himself killed again. She sighed.
For a man who had managed to avoid killing himself for twenty six years, to die twice in as many weeks must be some type of record. She shook her head again. Of course it was a record. Aside from Admiral Kimbridge, coming back from the dead was not something human beings did without divine intervention.
She checked the various control surfaces and readouts. Everything looked fine. She adjusted some of the fluid levels to make sure there would be adequate supplies for the 3d tissue printers that were even now rebuilding the handsome young Lieutenant.
Doctor Pulaski knew Cat Kimbridge would want to know what was happening. But she also knew that the Admiral was on the Alpha station attempting to secure it so that the Uruk AI could not use the weapons platform to attack Earth.
She decided her best move was to inform Captain Kirkland. Within a few minutes of her call he walked through the door of the med bay.
“Good evening doctor,” he said in his characteristically cheerful voice.
“Good evening Captain. Sorry to interrupt you when there is so much going on.”
“Nonsense,” he said with a wave of his hand. He walked over to the bio-generation chamber and tried to make out what was happening inside the semitransparent cylinder. He looked back at Doctor Pulaski. “Didn’t we just do this last week?”
“Indeed we did. It seems our Lieutenant Stone has gotten better at getting himself killed.”
Chapter 21: Cat in a Cage…
Cat ran as fast as her legs could carry her. Given her Heshe enhancements, that was quite fast. Sergeant Moore was not happy to see her take on this specific mission but it was those very Heshe enhancements that gave Cat and Cat alone the only chance of carrying out the mission.
Behind her a series of three repair droids flew in a close formation pursuit. She had previously destroyed over a dozen of the pesky flying machines. She knew very well that even now more were on the way. The Alpha AI was in full control of this sector. Unfortunately there were seventeen VASMR drives located in the immediate vicinity. They were the essence of her mission.
These thrusters operated by sending a powerful laser beam into a gas, stripping the electrons out of the gas and then using powerful magnetic fields to superheat the resulting plasma. By modern standards they were inefficient plasma thrusters but they had the advantage of being easy to build and amazingly robust. That last point was probably the reason they existed on the Alpha platform. The Uruk believed in building robust, highly redundant systems.
If the Alpha managed to get them back online there was a real possibility that it could use those thrusters to steer the giant weapons platform back into a collision course with Earth. That was something Cat could not let happen. Several shuttles attempting to drop off the WhimPy’s nanite packages to take control of the area had been successfully driven away by the Alpha’s defensive systems in the general area. WhimPy-101 had calculated that the Alpha would be in position to use those thrusters well before the Yorktown team could deploy the nanites needed to suppress them. Thus Cat’s one-woman mission to hand-carry the nanites through the interior corridors of the massive ship.
Her goal was still a good thirty kilometers away. She was averaging a little over twenty kilometers an hour because of the various distractions the Alpha platform was putting in her way. It had apparently deduced her intent and was actively working to thwart her. It was in these moments that she really wished Senior Fleet Admiral Imera had met with an accident at birth.
If she couldn’t reach her target in time for Wh
imPy-101 to take action then the Earth would very likely pay the price for her failure. Somehow she suspected Imera would find a way to be on a ship headed out of the system long before that happened.
“Admiral, you will need to take the corridor on your immediate left. There is a blockage in the corridor you are in about half a klick down the way. You will not be able to clear it before those drones pin you down.”
“Thanks 101,” Cat huffed as she vaulted over a meter wide, three meter high elbowed pipe that was protruding from a wall directly across her path. Fortunately the ceilings in the part of the weapons platform were well over five meters.
As she jumped, one of the drones fired a welding laser. The beam struck her right shoulder and burned a four centimeter hole clean through her body. There was a brief flash of pain before her medical nanites blocked the nerve endings in the affected area. As a result of the injury however she dropped the pack that contained her supply of nanite cylinders. It fell to the floor with a crash and she was forced to stop and collect it.
This allowed the pursuing drones an opportunity to catch up and begin a coordinated assault. They began firing on her position and she was forced to seek cover. The massive pipe was the only cover in the area.
She fired her assault rifle using just the left arm. Fortunately its automatous targeting system was able to take its cues from her optic nerve. She simply had to look at a target and pull the trigger in order to hit it.
In short order she had eliminated the remaining three drones but they had cost her valuable time. She grabbed the backpack with the nanites and headed out again. Already in the distance she could hear with Heshe enhanced ears the sounds of additional flying service and repair drones.
Her bad arm was recovering and her medical nanites knit flesh and reconnected sinew. Still it would be several minutes before she had full use of the arm back.
She raced around the corner that WhimPy had recommended she take and immediately ran into a problem. A force shield had been erected in her path. She could tell by tell-tale flicker of dust particles hitting the field and disintegrating that this was not a field that she would want to touch.