“Roger that, Control,” Three replied. “Guardians on me!”
Ethan disengaged his thrusters and flipped his fighter to point it in Three’s direction before reengaging thrust. He spared a quick glance at his gravidar and found that the enemy fighters at 9-7-11 were more than 10 klicks distant. “We’re never going to get to the Defiant in time, Lead.”
“Orders are orders, Five.”
“With respect, these orders are stupid. We need to defend the Avengers or this will all be for nothing.”
“Stay the course! We defend the Defiant first. That’s final, Skidmark.”
Ethan gritted his teeth and shook his head. By the time they caught up to the Defiant, they’d be too far from Avenger Squadron to provide cover.
When the range to target had dropped from ten klicks to four, and Ethan was beginning to acquire a missile lock on the nearest fighter in the enemy squadron, he saw them erupt with a staggered wave of torpedoes. “We’re too late, Lead!” Once their torpedoes were away, the enemy fighters angled off, skillfully jinking to avoid missile locks. Try as he might, Ethan couldn’t get a solid tone. He watched the Defiant deploy a glittering cloud of EM flares, and half the torpedoes blossomed into blinding fireballs as they collided with the flares. The other half went around and through the cloud, angling for the Defiant’s thrusters.
“Krak!” Ethan said, and then the torpedoes exploded. When the explosions cleared, they saw the Defiant cruising on, still alive, but one of her thrusters was trailing smoke and flaming debris.
“Frek!” Guardian Seven chimed in. Ethan thought he recognized the voice as belonging to the curly blond-haired pilot he’d once briefly met in a rail car—Taz. “This is a suicide mission! We’re all going to die.”
“Hoi, if those had been navy-grade munitions, the Defiant would be venting atmosphere!” Ithicus shot back. “She’s still OK. We don’t stop flying until they clip our wings. We’ve still got a good chance of pulling this off. Ruh-kah! On me, Guardians! Let’s show these kakards they can’t draw our blood for free!”
“Ruh-kah!” The rest of the squadron chorused over the comm. Ethan stayed silent. He privately agreed with Seven, but he didn’t want to hurt morale any further, so he stayed in formation and fired his afterburners to keep up.
The Guardians rushed up behind the squadron which had attacked the Defiant and began raining torrents of red dymium pulse lasers on the enemy fighters’ tails. Ethan lined up his target and pulled the trigger. One laser bolt hit with a blue splash of shields, and then the enemy fighter jinked out of the way, letting the next six bolts miss. Ethan worked hard to bring the aggressively jinking target back under his targeting reticle for a solid lock. Briefly attaining a lock, Ethan pulled the trigger again, and this time he held it down, trying to track and anticipate the enemy’s movements. He felt his ship vibrating subtly with the rapid release of energy as his pulse lasers cycled at maximum speed. The sound in space simulator (SISS) in the cockpit screamed with the continuous laser fire. One in every ten bolts hit home, eliciting a blue flare from the enemy’s shields. Ethan tracked his target expertly, drawing on simulator training from his youth. Moments later the blue ripples of shield impacts were replaced with chunks of debris spinning off into space. A split second later, he hit the junker’s reactor and his target exploded brilliantly. Ethan grinned and started through a slow, arcing turn to find a new target. He saw a series of three more explosions blooming in the dark as other Guardians cracked open their targets. They were making the enemy pay.
A vast backdrop of stars sparkled all around Ethan’s head, just on the other side of the nova interceptor’s thin transpiranium cockpit canopy. The stars seemed so close he could touch them, but Ethan couldn’t allow himself to be distracted by the view. He targeted the next nearest enemy fighter and brought the red brackets under his crosshairs. His ears picked up the soft click of a laser lock even before his eyes registered the crosshair turning green. He pulled the trigger and held it down, pouring another continuous stream of bright red pulse lasers into his target. Then the laser charge gauges began flashing red on his HUD, and that stream of fire diminished to a slow trickle. Ethan eased up on the trigger and switched over to missiles just as his target began jinking out of line. Enemy ripper fire sizzled off his rear shields, and Ethan broke into an evasive pattern, forgetting about his target for the moment. The sound of ripper fire hitting his shields stopped, only to start again from another angle when a second junker swooped down onto his six. Ethan craned his neck to get a visual reference on the enemy fighters. They were converging on him from completely opposite directions—a pincer maneuver that was sure to get him killed.
“Ah, a little help over here? I’m caught in a vice!”
“Roger that, Five,” Seven said.
Ethan tried to hold it together as enemy fire sizzled off his shields, turning them dark green, then yellow, and finally red. Now shells plinked off his hull as the shields were unable to completely dissipate the energy of those projectiles.
The streams of enemy fire on his port side ceased, followed by, “That got him!” from Guardian Seven. Now, with only one fighter attacking him, Ethan strengthened his shields on the starboard side and circled around to line up on the enemy fighter’s tail. A few moments later he poured freshly charged pulse lasers into the twin hulls of a blocky junk fighter whose starboard maneuvering jet was already flickering dimly. Unable to evade him, the junker took heavy fire. One of his shots punched through to the reactor, and the enemy fighter suddenly exploded, sending the twin hulls flaming off in opposite directions.
“I need help!” Gina screamed.
Guardian Three came on saying, “Four enemy fighters just broke off from the main group! They’re lining up for another pass on the Defiant! Get them before—” The comm died in static.
“Lead?” Ethan quickly checked his scopes.
A second later Ithicus came back saying, “I’m all right. Got winged by a bit of shrapnel. No major damage. Those four fired off a volley of torps at point-blank range. Dumb frekkers.”
The command channel sounded in the next instant with, “Guardians, we need a better screen than that!”
“Doing the best we can, Control,” Three shot back. “We’re down by five and there are at least two enemy squadrons out here. Where are your gunnery crews?”
“Cannons are coming online any minute.”
We don’t have a minute, Ethan thought to himself. “Six, where are you?” he asked, remembering that she’d called for help. He spent a moment checking his scopes for Gina without any luck. A cold fist seized his heart, but then he found her on the grid, cutting an evasive pattern toward the Valiant. A pair of enemy interceptors chased after her pouring golden streams of ripper fire on her tail. Those two were fast for junkers, and she was having trouble shaking them.
“I’m right where you left me, you dumb kakard! I don’t suppose I still have a wingmate out there somewhere?”
Ethan grimaced. He wasn’t used to working in teams. “Sorry, on my way now.” He came about and boosted with the last of his afterburners to catch up to the enemy interceptors. Once in range, he switched to Hailfire missiles and quickly dropped one on the enemies’ tails. A second later he realized his mistake as he noted the proximity between the enemy interceptors and Gina’s own nova. “Gina, get out of there! I just fired a Hailfire on your pursuit.”
“Frek you! My afterburners are tapped out! What do you want me to do?”
Ethan thought fast, even as the blue trail of the Hailfire’s primary thrusters winked out. The enemy fighters realized their peril and broke off from Gina to go evasive, but they were still too close.
“Reverse thrust!” Ethan said.
“They might lock on to me if I do that!”
Frek, Ethan thought. “Hold on!” He thumbed over to pulse lasers and targeted the distant missile, hoping he could get it before it exploded into its four smaller warheads. At this range his targeting computer refused to lock ont
o the missile. Desperate, Ethan raked blind laser fire over the target brackets. Nothing happened. An instant later, the Hailfire exploded in four separate directions, and Ethan felt a stab of fear. Sweat trickled into his left eye and he swiped at it with the back of one hand, blinking to clear his vision. The smaller warheads flared to life and boosted after the enemy fighters.
“They’re too close!”
Ethan could hear a tremor in Gina’s voice. “Give me a second!” he said, switching fire to the warhead arcing closest to Gina. He hit it with a lucky shot, and the resultant explosion tore into the nearest enemy fighter, drawing flames and debris from its thruster pods. Gina’s fighter rocked in the shockwave. Then the other three warheads found their marks, and the remaining two enemy fighters exploded in blinding fireballs. Ethan heard Gina scream, and then her comm cut off in static. “Gina!”
The static hissed on and Ethan felt a horrible chill creeping down his spine.
Frek! His heart pounding, Ethan checked his scopes, but they’d fuzzed out due to the proximity of the explosions. He flew through the expanding fireballs and ignored the sound of debris pelting his fighter. His forward shields quickly dropped into the red, and he feared what that meant for Gina. “Gina!” he tried again.
Then he saw her, one of her three engines still glowing, the other two flickering. Her starboard stabilizer fins had been knocked off, and he could see her cockpit canopy was striated with fractures. “Gina, for Immortals’ sake, answer me!”
A moment later her voice came back to him, but she sounded weak. “I’m alive. Took a hit through my canopy. My suit’s pissing air.”
“Krak, how badly are you injured?”
“Not much blood, but breathing hurts like a motherfrekker. Maybe a few broken ribs.”
“Fly back to the Defiant. I’ll cover you.”
“I’ll never make it, not on half thrust. . . . Too many enemy fighters.”
Ethan gritted his teeth. “Well, frek it! You’re just gonna give up and die?”
No answer.
Ethan watched the hull of the Valiant growing large before them. In his periphery he spotted the Defiant's beam cannons opening up as the cruiser made her first pass on the Valiant’s port hangar. Eight blue dymium beams shot out, drawing rippling waves from the hangar’s shields.
A few seconds later, Ethan saw nova fighters tearing out of the carrier’s launch tubes.
“Are those our novas coming from the Valiant?” Gina asked.
Ethan shook his head. “We don’t have anyone left on board. We took everyone except for the sentinels with us.”
“So those are enemy novas. Frek!”
Ethan had no reply for that. By now Brondi had overwhelmed the six sentinels in the concourse between the carrier’s ventral hangars and he was taking control of the ship—including its considerable complement of nova fighters and interceptors. Gina’s right. We won’t make it back to the Defiant.
No one will.
Chapter 19
Alec “Big Brainy” Brondi watched from the bridge of his corvette as his soldiers overwhelmed the ISSA mechs on the other side of the hangar with dozens of their own smaller, less powerful mechs. Brondi’s own mechanized forces streamed into the hangar, firing their shoulder-mounted rockets while the corvette’s and transport’s turrets laid down covering fire. In just five minutes, those six pitiful ISSA defenders were eliminated—although the concourse was left a molten, debris-strewn ruin after that.
As soon as the enemy forces were reduced to steaming slag, Brondi instructed his troops to secure the shattered concourse on the other side of the hangar, and he ordered the rough dozen pilots he’d brought aboard to go see if they could steal some novas and help defend against the pitiful resistance that the Imperial Star Systems Fleet was mustering. Near as Brondi could tell, the cruiser that had been shadowing them didn’t even have enough crew aboard to man its guns.
But even as Brondi thought that, he heard one of his bridge crew exclaim, “The Defiant is opening up on the hangar bay shields! Blue dymium beams. The shields won’t last long under that assault!
Brondi scowled. “Give our fighters a new target. Tell them to disengage the novas and blast the Defiant to scrap. Have them launch all their remaining warheads.”
“Yes, sir.”
Brondi smiled and walked back from the bridge viewports to the captain’s table. He swiveled the command view to see the Defiant running in a slow, looping attack run on the hangar. The enemy’s fighter screen was now just 10 novas strong—down 14—while Brondi’s forces had lost no more than two squadrons. That was a reasonable kill-to-death ratio. Brondi’s fighters now outnumbered the enemy by more than 10 to one—and that was soon to increase with the addition of stolen imperial novas. Brondi smiled a big, gaping smile. “So this is what it feels like to be supreme! Thank you, Dominic, for stepping aside so graciously. I think it’s time to take command of my new ship.” Brondi turned to address his bridge crew. “Shall we, then?”
* * *
“We’re making headway,” the gunnery chief said. “The hangar bay shields should be down in just another minute.”
Supreme Overlord Dominic watched out the viewports as the Valiant’s port hangar shields glowed bright blue with sustained fire from the Defiant’s beam cannons. It was a pity his command chip implant didn’t work to control the Valiant at this range. If he were able to take remote control of the Valiant’s systems, he could simply lower the shields.
Dominic frowned and turned away from the viewports to study the holographic overview of the battle at the captain’s table. His XO, Deck Commander Loba Caldin, stood beside him, shaking her head. “We’re down to just 10 fighters. We should recall them now, before they all die.”
Dominic gritted his teeth. “Another minute. We’re almost through the shields.”
Caldin turned to him with a scathing look that he wasn’t used to getting from anyone. No one dared to look at him like that. “Sir, most of the enemy troops are already aboard. We can’t do anything to further our cause by staying here, whether we bring down the shields and destroy their transports or not.”
Dominic looked up with a hollow-eyed expression. “We have to do something!”
She shook her head. “We need to retreat, or we’re all going to die.”
“Hoi!”
Dominic recognized the voice of the gravidar operator, Corpsman Goldrim, and he turned to face the man.
Goldrim was working furiously at his station. “We have enemy novas launching from the Valiant!” he said.
That decided it for Dominic. He took one look at the captain’s table, and then sighed meaningfully. “Helm, bring us about. Set a course which will take us close to the Dark Space gate, but not directly there. We don’t want the enemy to guess our intentions. When we get close, we’re going to head for the gate at the last minute.”
“Yes, sir,” the officer at the helm, Petty Sergeant Damen Corr replied.
The deck commander turned to him, her eyes wide. “Sir, we don’t have a cloaking device aboard the Defiant. If we encounter Sythians—”
“Then we’ll die, the same as if we’d stayed here to make a run for the more distant Chorlis gate.”
“We could make a blind jump deeper into Dark Space.”
“With the Firebelt Nebula between us and Chorlis?” Dominic shook his head. “You know as well as I do that’s suicide. There’s a reason the route through the nebula is seeded with SLS interrupter buoys.”
Caldin looked away, and she nodded. “Yes, sir.”
Dominic watched on the captain’s table as his ship came about. It lost its firing angle on the Valiant’s hangar, and stopped shooting. “Deck Officer Gorvan, tell your gunnery crews to focus on shooting down missiles and fighters and cover our retreat.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Helm, bring us up to full speed and fire the afterburners.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Engineering, give me more power to shields and engines! Ro
b energy from the comms, sensors, weapons, and nonessential shipboard functions, but keep pulse lasers strong enough for missile defense.”
The glow panels on the bridge abruptly darkened as the engineering officer complied, setting the ship’s systems to a low power mode.
“Comms, tell our fighters to cover us to the gate and then get aboard in a hurry.”
The comm officer nodded.
“You made the right choice, sir,” Caldin said.
“Hmmm,” Dominic rubbed his chin. “Then why does it feel like the wrong one?”
“You’re abandoning your ship. That never feels right.”
“ETA to the gate, 18 minutes,” the helm reported.
“Good,” Dominic replied. “Let’s hope we make it.”
As if to punctuate his words, an ominous rumble sounded through the ship as a lone enemy torpedo escaped the Defiant’s pulse lasers and slammed into her starboard maneuvering thruster.
It’s going to be close, the overlord thought.
* * *
“Gina, you don’t have a choice! I’ll fly in with you, but it’s now or never.”
“Frek, Adan, this is the worst bad idea you’ve ever had.”
“They’re not going to expect us to land with two lone fighters. That’s suicide. But we’d better move fast if we’re going to make it before they raise the shields on the starboard hangar.”
The overlord had dropped the Valiant’s starboard hangar shields in order to fly out in the Defiant, and as far as Ethan knew, they were still down. It was just a small piece of luck that at the time Brondi hadn’t realized he could fly his landing party around and land inside the unshielded hangar, but now that oversight would be of great use to Ethan and Gina.
They cruised underneath the belly of the massive warship, staying as close to the hull as they dared, so that no enemy fighters would easily pick them up on scopes. So far they were clear, but Ethan had throttled back to 51% in order to keep pace with Gina’s nova and its badly damaged thrusters. At that speed they were practically sitting ducks.
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