Chris took over the StarFury squadrons. He loved the feeling. Using his mind to take control of the starfighters was exhilarating. And even though this was his first dogfight, he was very proficient in flying the squadrons, and he soon got rid of enemy fighters by the dozen. He decided to use every one of the StarFuries’ drones as a single entity, granting the full squadron the biggest firepower outside the destroyers engaged in the battle.
Meanwhile, his mother was approaching the shields of the Zarlack target they needed to board and hack. He vectored his remote squadron to make a hole in the opposing heavy resistance her wing was facing while in approach. For the last part of the approach, she would use the cloak to avoid as much heavy defensive fire as possible from the destroyer’s laser batteries.
Once he had successfully carved a path for their own StarFury to make its final approach towards their target, Argos did his part and created a hole in the ship’s shields. Soon they landed at their target coordinates aboard the Zarlack destroyer and exited their StarFury.
They encountered resistance in the form of Zarlack guards the moment they exited their now-cloaked starfighter.
Chris was the first to exit and it didn’t take long to take out the guards with fireballs. When the firing stopped, Sarah exited the ship.
While they moved towards the data point where they needed to install their hacking device, Chris kept flying the remote StarFuries in order to provide the other three teams with support, so they could also land their ships and accomplish their missions.
It took only a few minutes to reach the location Argos had given them for implanting the device.
“Cover me,” said Sarah as she deployed the device according to Yanis’ instructions.
The ship’s internal alarms wailed all around them and two platoons of Zarlack foot soldiers converged on them. Chris erected a shield big enough to engulf his mother while he dispatched the Zarlack soldiers with a mix of shockwaves and fireballs.
“How much longer?” he asked.
“I’m almost done.”
“The sooner we go the better.”
“Done. Let’s go.”
Chris easily dispatched the foot soldiers on their path while they retraced their steps towards the StarFury, only to find something they didn’t expect waiting for them in front of their starfighter. A Fury stood there in full combat armor.
“This wasn’t part of the plan,” said Sarah.
“No, not to mention that the other teams don’t have the firepower to take even a single Fury, should one of them await them on board as well.”
Chris sent a telepathic message to inform Chase of this new development and then engaged the Fury blocking their way out.
Fortunately for them, he was nowhere near as powerful as the Shadow Hunter Chris had fought earlier.
But Chris had lost a lot of juice repelling wave after wave of Zarlack troops, so he needed to make this fight short. And short it was. The Fury clearly underestimated the young boy, and when he sent three fireballs to get rid of him, he lowered his guard, thinking the battle was over.
When Chris emerged from the smoke of the explosion made by the Fury’s weak attacks, he caught the enemy off guard. Chris unleashed a series of ultrafast combos and finished with a beam of energy that consumed the Fury’s head.
When the attack ended, the headless Fury fell on its back, smoke still rising from his neck.
“That wasn’t a pretty kill,” said Sarah, disgusted by what she saw.
“We didn’t have time for pretty. Let’s go.”
Soon after receiving Chris’ mental message, Chase left the bridge of the Hope and was flying in space. He needed to lend a hand to the other teams in case other Fury fighters awaited them on board the Zarlack destroyers they were tasked to hack.
He sent a telepathic message to his brother.
Argos, there seem to be Furies on board the Zarlack ships. Chris dispatched the one on board their target ship, but we need to assist the others. They’re not prepared for this.
Very well; how’s the battle going?
Don’t ask. Let’s just say we need these ships more than ever.
Alright, I’m going after Keera’s then. I just opened the path to her target ship’s shields moments ago, so she’s the nearest.
Chase flew past the utter chaos that this space battle had turned into while still remote piloting the Hope and many other ships in his battlegroup. Soon he reached Daniel’s StarFury, which was approaching his own target’s shields. Chase fired the pulse of energy that created the needed hole in the shields for Daniel’s StarFury to pass through.
“Daniel, I’m coming with you.”
“Chase? Aren’t you supposed to be on board the Hope?”
“Change of plan. There are Furies on board these ships. I’m coming to deal with them while you deploy your device.”
“Roger that, landing now.”
Chase arrived on the deck of the landing bay before Daniel was out of his cockpit. He felt a fireball coming towards him from a mile away. He dodged by teleporting away and reappearing in front of a Fury fighter. His senses immediately told him that these were lower class fighters. The Fury tried to punch Chase with a powerful hook, but he caught the incoming fist in his own hand with ease. Applying little pressure, he broke the Fury’s hand, who fell to his knees. Chase slashed the Fury in two with a swift upward kick. Both halves of the dead Fury splashed to the ground on their sides.
Chase teleported away.
When Keera landed the StarFury on her designated Zarlack destroyer and jumped out of its cockpit, she was greeted with a fireball that sent her crashing to the ground. Fortunately, her super-suit had taken most of the damage, but its shields had been heavily taxed. She wouldn’t be able to take too many of those. When she turned around, she saw a Fury coming at her, ready to strike her in the face.
She used her suit’s super-speed ability to get out of the way and then turned around and shot both her repulsor weapons back at her opponent, hitting the Fury in the shoulder. But he didn’t budge or register any significant damage, except a little burn to his skin, which didn’t seem to bother him much.
This is not good.
The Fury extended his hand towards her and sent another powerful fireball her way. But then someone jumped in front of her and blocked the attack.
“Go get the device installed. I’ll take care of him,” said Argos.
The Fury warrior looked at Argos with hatred in his eyes.
“Traitor! You’ll pay for your actions,” said the warrior.
“Perhaps, but not by your hands.”
Argos brought all his energy to bear and his powerful crimson aura shone all around him.
Before the warrior could react, Argos had traveled behind him, slashing his hand at neck level. Argos smiled as the warrior’s decapitated head fell from his body and rolled on the floor.
“It will take more than a foot soldier for that,” said Argos to himself.
Soon Keera returned and flashed Argos a thumbs up, signaling she had completed her objective. She flew her ship back into space, this time opening the needed hole in the ship’s shields by accessing the device she had just deployed.
Ryonna was the last to arrive at her target, which was the ship farthest away from the Hope when they launched. When she saw Chase open a hole for her to fly through the Zarlack destroyer’s shields, she knew something must be up. To make things worse, a red tractor beam hit Chase right after she passed through the shields.
She hesitated, turning back to help him, but decided he would not want her to abandon her main objective. So she kept her course, somewhat reluctantly, and landed her now-cloaked StarFury and exited it cloaked as well, thanks to her super-suit. If Chase had come instead of Argos, then something was amiss.
She immediately understood what that was. A female Fury guarded the landing bay. Defeating her in single combat would prove perilous at best, even with her super-suit, so she just grabbed her entire belt of magnet
ic grenades, activated them and locked them onto the Fury’s back.
By the time the Fury realized what was going on, Ryonna’s cloak had run out of juice, but the Fury didn’t have time to fire back before the grenades chain exploded on her back. Being a Fury she could probably survive that, so Ryonna activated her light-blade. When the dust settled, the Fury was on one knee with the back of her armor destroyed, but she was still breathing.
Ryonna left her no time to recover. She kicked her on the jaw with her knee, effectively catapulting the female Fury back into an upright position, where she impaled her with her light-blade. When she saw that the Fury was still moving her arms in an attempt to grab her, Ryonna slashed the blade upwards, cutting through flesh, bones and armor. The top half of the Fury warrior split in two like a flower opening its petals to the warmth of the sun.
At that moment, Chase teleported next to her.
“Nevermind,” he said with a big smile when he saw how Ryonna had gruesomely taken care of the Fury.
“Glad to see you got out of that tractor beam.”
“Oh that. It was unexpected, but proved useless. Give me the device. Now that I’m here I might as well install it myself.”
Ryonna wasn’t keen on not finishing her mission herself, but she knew better than to argue with Chase.
“Get back out there. Great job, Ryonna,” said Chase with a wink.
The moment he had the device in his hand he teleported away.
Then Ryonna understood that by teleporting he would achieve the objective faster than she ever could, even with her suit’s super-speed ability. Things hadn’t run according to plan if he was down here helping his friends, but Ryonna knew he would eventually find a way to make it work, so she climbed back on board the StarFury as ordered.
23
Chase was back on board the Hope in the blink of an eye. While he had successfully taken control of the Zarlack ships, which he could now pilot remotely as well, they still lacked the necessary firepower to overcome the Zarlack fleet in a timely fashion before the Fury super destroyer took the planet’s shields out.
When he checked the levels of power of his battlegroup and saw that most of the ships were down to around twenty percent shields, he knew things needed to change. He used the newly controlled Zarlack ships so that they took most of the incoming fire while feinting to fire back at the Alliance ships. That required a great deal of focus, but it was of paramount importance to Chase’s plan that Miseo didn’t realize he had lost control of some of his ships.
Since Chase had disabled communications on these vessels as his first order of business, he hoped that four ships no longer communicating would not arouse much suspicion in the midst of all the chaos.
His new tactic proved effective at giving his battlegroup the necessary rest to start recharging their shields.
When seventeen jump points formed on the starboard, Chase thought they might have been Zarlack reinforcements. Fortunately, they weren’t.
The new ships didn’t wait long to choose sides. That was when he realized they were of Brin design. The Brin had not been keen on the earlier attack and they added their firepower to those of the Earth Alliance. While their weapons were inferior, it was still a welcome addition and couldn’t have arrived at a better time.
But after a few minutes, seeing how inefficient they were at engaging Zarlack destroyers, Chase asked them to focus on eradicating the starfighter waves instead, especially the Furies’ starfighter wings, which had caused quite some damage by disabling the Droxian and Obsidian starfighters with their secondary pulse weaponry. The StarFuries were standing their ground against them, but they were beginning to be outnumbered.
When the Brin used most of their long-range batteries and torpedo firepower to bring that equation to a more manageable level, Chase knew it was time to take care of the beam currently hacking at Earth’s shields.
He brought about his crewless destroyer and had the four hacked Zarlack destroyers fly in formation and vector towards the Fury destroyer.
The fact that it was not engaging the rest of the fleet told Chase one thing: it must have been using all its available power firing that beam of energy, as well as the occasional shield top-up. The Hope’s sensors registered a slight drop in power inside the beam every time it fired a shield recharging pulse, confirming Chase’s theory.
But time was running out. The shield around Earth would fail in minutes, and he couldn’t let that happen.
As soon as the quartet of hacked Zarlack destroyers, accompanied by the crewless Alliance ship, were in range, they all fired their weapons at the Fury vessel. Its shields blocked the incoming fire with scary efficiency. Even the Heracles gun on board the Alliance ship was unable to draw more than three percent away from the super destroyer’s shields. Soon the rest of the enemy fleet understood what was going on, and changed their targeting priorities, vectoring away from Alliance ships to attack the rogue ships.
Chase hesitated to sacrifice the crewless ship to give the others enough time to reach the Fury super destroyer. But he didn’t have to. Chris’s wave of StarFuries flew out of nowhere and ran interference by dancing in front of the barrage of laser fire currently raining on the rogues. Chase was amazed by how precisely Chris was flying them, and that included the drones, most of which were destroyed little by little, but it did provide enough cover for Chase to enact the next part of his plan.
When Chris’s squadron of StarFuries had lost most of its drones, he kept using strategic evasive patterns to make sure most of the firepower directed at the hacked ships was blocked by their rear shields. But they would soon fail, so Chris changed tactics and turned his squadron around, firing all of their remaining torpedoes towards the incoming ships.
It effectively diverted more firepower from these capital ships and, just before their aft shields failed and the StarFuries were destroyed, Chris overloaded their quadrinium chambers and micro-jumped the StarFuries towards the Zarlack destroyers in groups of four. All twelve micro-jumped and exploded, one after the other. The maneuver took out three destroyers, and their successive explosions damaged another two destroyers nearby.
Chase sent him a telepathic message.
Thanks, son, that was a great way to buy me the time I needed.
I’ve learned from the best.
He he. But this battle isn’t over. Thanks to you, now I should be able to take out that damn beam cannon.
Give them hell, Dad!
The Alliance fleet had taken out many of the Zarlack destroyers thanks to their abandoning their original targets to pursue Chase’s crewless destroyer and its four Zarlack rogues. Chase used every ounce of power from the Zarlack destroyers by redirecting all their life support and inertial dampeners to the shields, hyperspace engine and plasma cannons.
He fired the Heracles plasma beam at the Fury super destroyer once more and added the Zarlack plasma cannons’ firepower to it to drain the Fury’s aft shields.
They were still short of making the kind of dent that would allow the rest of the fleet to bring them down.
He informed the entire fleet to ignore their current targets and to add their own firepower and fire all their torpedoes towards the tip of the Fury super destroyer. He then started overloading all five ship’s engines and sent them micro-jumping to that point as well. The resulting explosion lit up space all around for a few seconds and drained the Fury’s shields enough so that the hundreds of torpedoes fired from the remainder of the fleet finished the job.
The beam of energy currently draining the Earth’s shield flickered as more torpedoes impacted its point of origin. After a second explosion the beam died out just seconds before Earth’s shield failed.
Chase sighed in relief.
But this was only half of the job. They now needed to bring the Fury monstrosity down. It veered to starboard the moment its main beam weapon was destroyed and it soon re-equalized its shields. Most of the fire it was enduring was again efficiently absorbed. Now that the ship
didn’t use so much energy firing the beam weapon, its shields seemed even stronger.
As difficult as it had been to bring their main weapon down, it would be even more difficult to defeat the ship. And Chase’s task remained challenging since he couldn’t take the risk of killing Aphroditis in the process.
When the super destroyer started firing its batteries towards every Alliance ship in range, Chase understood that it could prove impossible.
Within three minutes they had lost five ships. The Brin ships were the fastest to fall and that’s what the super destroyer was focusing on. Destroying the weakest ships first.
Then Chase received a transmission from the Destiny. It was Commodore Saroudis.
“We can’t keep this up much longer. At this rate this ship alone will destroy the entire fleet within minutes. We may have to consider sacrificing some more ships to take it out.”
Chase clenched his teeth. The commodore was right, but he wasn’t keen on sacrificing hundreds if not thousands of crewmen to reach their goal.
“I agree, but what if we take it out? Aphroditis is on board that ship!”
“I understand how you feel, Chase, but if we don’t defeat the Furies we’ll lose the fleet and perhaps even the planet.”
“I’ve got an idea. Give me a minute.”
Chase opened another channel to Yanis. “Please tell me you used the telemetry from those hacked Zarlack ships to find a weakness in their shields.”
“I have a lot of data but we don’t have the time to make the necessary adjustments to our weapons to make a difference. Plus, right now the ship causing most of the damage is that Fury super destroyer.”
“What about our tractor beams? Could we reprogram them so they could lock onto a Zarlack behemoth, even with their shields up?”
There was a pause.
“The way your mind works never ceases to amaze me.”
“Is that a yes?”
Universe in Flames – Ultimate 10 Book Box Set: An Epic Space Opera Adventure Page 166