“Let me see if I can get his attention, then.”
“But Alara, at this distance he’ll never see you—”
“Quiet.”
Alara was gratified to hear Ethan shut up again. At least the bot did as he was told. Alara studied her wingman a moment longer, taking time to appreciate his youthful features. He appeared to be concentrating intensely. As she watched, his lips began to move, and she frowned, trying to figure out what he was saying.
“Ethan, can you read lips?”
“Of course.”
“Can you read what my wingman is saying?”
“That would be a breach of fleet regulations. ISSF reg. #743 officers are entitled to their privacy whenever said privacy does not conflict with—”
“If you can’t do it, Ethan, you could just say so. You don’t have to lie about your capabilities.”
“Lying is against my programming, Alara.”
“So you say. I’m going to have to get the service techs to take a look inside your brain. I have a bad feeling you might need a memory wipe. It pains me to say that, Ethan, but it is what it is.” Alara had to work hard to keep her tone and expression serious, but it paid off. Without another word from the AI, a glowing green transcript appeared on her comm display.
We are green to execute, Commander. . . . Are you sure about this? . . . The overlord isn’t going to like it. . . .
When the transcript didn’t continue scrolling, Alara scowled. “Hoi! Where’s the rest of it?”
“I trust that’s sufficient proof for you that my statements have been accurate.”
“Ethan . . . bring the transcript back right now!”
“What transcript?”
Alara growled deep in her throat. “Ethan!”
“Yes?”
“You know what transcript! Bring it back now!”
“But you told me to shut up. Perhaps your capricious and contradictory wishes stem from some type of emotional instability. I think I’ll have to recommend you for a psychiatric evaluation when we get back to the Defiant—in case you need reconditioning. It pains me to say it, but it is what it is.”
Alara blinked incredulously at her displays. Great! A touchy AI! And he’s tracking when I have PMS . . . She sighed and tried another tack. “I suppose I deserved that, Ethan. I apologize.”
“Apology accepted.”
“Do you have any idea what Captain Reese and Commander Adari were talking about? I thought we were in a comms silence.”
“Clearly that does not apply to everyone in the squadron. Or perhaps it just ended.”
Alara frowned again. “Perhaps . . .”
Suddenly her comm crackled to life. “Contact, contact! Bearing T-13-60-57!” The speaker was Guardian Twelve. Alara had no idea who that was. What kind of contact? she wanted to ask.
“Twelve, this is Lead—my scopes are clear. Please confirm contact.”
“I . . . hold on . . . it’s gone now. Must have been a glitch in the grav.”
“Roger that. Eyes and ears people. We’re just about—”
“Hoi! Bogey’s back! Same coordinates!”
“Lead, this is Five. I can confirm contact. The planet must be interfering with your scanners.”
Alara saw it now, too—a neutral yellow contact approaching their formation at high speed, coming at them directly from the planet. Alara felt her pulse quicken. Out here in Sythian Space an unidentified contact could only mean one thing—
A Sythian.
“All right, listen up, greenies! Disengage your autopilots, power up weapons, and increase power to forward shields. Target profile suggests cruiser analog, so switch to Silverstreaks and try for a lock! Your AIs will help you with the fire control systems.”
The blip turned red on the star map, and an enemy contact siren screamed through Alara’s cockpit. Red brackets appeared around the target on the HUD, giving a distance to target of 846 km.
“We’ll try to get back to you as soon as we can, but for now, Captain Reese is in charge. Follow his orders exactly and hopefully we’ll all get out of this alive.”
Just as Alara was about to trigger her comms to reply, she heard—“Defiant, this is Guardian Leader, we have an unknown enemy contact, bearing T-13-60-57. Bogey is cruiser analog. We are moving to engage.”
The comms crackled a second later with another, more distorted message. “Roger that, Guardian Leader. Extreme caution is advised. Defiant is retreating to the cover of the nebula now.”
This can’t be real, Alara thought, her eyes wide with disbelief.
“Guardians,” Captain Reese began, “we need to reset forward momentum and get closer in order to engage. Power up your SLS drives for a precision jump. Sending coordinates now. We’re going to meet them head on. Click your comms to confirm jump coordinates received and set. Time until coordinated jump is six minutes, starting . . . now!”
A handful of clicks came across the comm as the pilots figured out how to click them. Alara forgot to click hers as she said, “Ethan, start spooling for a jump to the specified coordinates.”
“The drives are already spinning up. They’re at 5%. Check the blue icon below your shield gauge.”
Alara looked up to her HUD and saw a new 2D icon had appeared there, this one a circular blue progress bar that showed a flashing 5% in the center, and a timer underneath which was now counting back from 5:28. Even as she watched, the flashing percentage increased to 6%. She nodded slowly and glanced at her speed to see it was at 7.9 km/s and falling fast. “Are we going to make it to an SLS-safe jump speed before the drive is ready?”
“We’ll reach the SLS-safe entry speed limit in less than a minute at current deceleration.”
Alara looked down at her throttle to check her acceleration and found that it was -145 KAPS.
“If I may point out, Alara, you don’t need to look down at the throttle every time you wish to see your current velocity and acceleration. These values are displayed along the bottom left of your HUD for ease of reference.”
Alara looked up to see a miniature version of the colored throttle display. At the top of that HUD overlay was a number showing her current acceleration, -145 KAPS, and at the bottom, her current velocity, 7.1 km/s.
Ethan went on, “Now would be a good time to go over the missile and torpedo systems, since we’re about to use those. Would you like me to begin the tutorial?”
Alara nodded absently as she studied the image of the enemy contact more closely on the right holo display. The vessel appeared to be long and streamlined. There were no obvious wings or control surfaces for atmospheric flight, and the target display estimated its size at a modest 104 meters long—just over a third the size of the Defiant. The hull was highly reflective with a faintly shifting blue and lavender pattern on the mirror-clear hull.
The AI went through a rapid tutorial of the nova’s missile systems and Alara listened with half an ear, figuring out how to manually set proximity fuses and timers, as well as how to attain a missile lock on a moving target and dumb-fire for stationary targets.
“One minute to jump,” Ethan told her, cutting short his tutorial.
Alara nodded and reached for the flight stick with a trembling hand. With a sweaty rush of panic, she realized that she’d forgotten how to use the flight controls. What was it Ethan had said about making turns in space? Should she use the rudder pedals or not? What about the afterburners? Would she blow the reactor by using them frequently?
She tried a bit of right rudder to see what would happen, and as soon as she did so, a hollow blue sphere appeared flashing at the top middle of her HUD. Inside the sphere was a small 3D version of her nova with two different colored vectors connecting it to the edges of the sphere like the spokes of a wheel. One vector was green and it pointed wherever her fighter pointed, while the other was red and didn’t appear to move with her ship. A number ran alongside the red vector, which at the moment displayed the symbol for infinity followed by an “s” for seconds.
&n
bsp; Alara frowned. “Ethan! What’s that gauge at the top of the HUD?” The gauge stopped flashing.
“Good, you noticed. That’s the heading indicator. The desired heading is green, while the old, or actual, is red. The number beside the red vector, currently reading infinite seconds, tells you how long until your ship’s desired heading and actual heading will coincide.”
Alara blinked, trying hard to remember all of that.
The comm crackled—“Get ready, Guardians!”
Suddenly, the two glinting specks which were the novas at the leading edges of the formation flashed brightly, turning to starbursts of orange and red light. The explosions reached her ears mere seconds later from the simulated sound system, and then space turned to bright streaks of light and star lines as her fighter was catapulted into SLS.
Alara blinked against the fading glare of those explosions, and her eyes found the blue SLS overlay on the HUD. The countdown to their jump was frozen at 17 seconds.
Suddenly, the star lines of SLS collapsed into pinpoints, and Alara was left staring wide-eyed at her displays. What happened?
“Red Alert! It’s a trap!” Captain Reese yelled over the comms.
Alara heard the red alert siren and saw her star map automatically snap to auto-scale, displaying just one theater at regular zoom. But even at that small scale, she could see hundreds of red enemy contacts all around them. There’d just been one a second ago.
“What the frek happened?” one pilot asked.
“They had a wormhole ship cloaked along our flight path, and they’ve dropped us right where they want us!” Captain Reese replied. “Evasive action and engage! Stick to your wingmates, Guardians!”
Dead ahead Alara could see no less than a dozen red bracket pairs on the HUD, and her scopes were similarly crowded. The nearest enemy had been auto-targeted for her and it now appeared on the right holo display. She saw that the enemy target was shaped like an open shell with glowing red portals in the opening between the gleaming top and bottom halves of the shell. Alara assumed the glowing portals were some type of weapons. The ship type read Sythian Shell Fighter, and the scale was 35 meters long by about 20 meters high.
Even as she watched, the ship’s central red eye flashed brightly, and she looked up to see purple stars begin spinning out of the darkness toward her, arcing off in all directions at once. Suddenly a missile lock alarm began beeping in her cockpit, accompanied by a warning from Ethan that one of the enemy fighters was trying for a lock on her. A second later Alara heard, “Guardian Four, break!” followed by the piercing wail of another siren.
It took her a moment for her to realize that she was Guardian Four, and that the siren meant a missile had locked on to her, but a moment was all she had before the first spinning star hit her, and Alara’s eyes were overwhelmed by the brilliant flash and deafening roar of the explosion.
Chapter 14
Somehow Alara’s fighter emerged from the fiery wake of the explosion without any damage, but forward shields were critical, as displayed by a red bracket at the top of the shield gauge with the number 12% above it. A word began flashing below the shield display—equalize—and Alara told Ethan to do exactly that, bringing her overall shields to 78%.
“Ethan, set shields to equalize automatically!”
“As you wish.”
“Frek, there’s too many of them!” Alara heard Gina Giord, Guardian Five, say. “Help! I can’t—” Her voice died in static.
“We’ve lost Five! Watch yourselves, Guardians!” Three said. “You can’t shoot the enemy warheads, but jink hard just before they hit and you’ll lose them. Enemy fighters are slow and not very maneuverable, so get behind them and stay there to keep them from getting a lock on you!”
A stream of affirmative clicks came over the comm, while Alara focused intently on the spinning purple stars that were still streaming toward her. When the next one drew near, she did as she’d been instructed, pushing the stick down and firing a quick burst from her afterburners to accentuate the maneuver. She saw the enemy missile flash by close overhead, and she let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. Bringing her nova’s nose back up to hover her targeting reticle over the nearest enemy fighter, she found she could already make out the gleaming silver top and bottom halves of the shell. The largest of the cluster of red portals in the center of the fighter glowed ominously at her.
Then her reticle flickered green and emitted a soft tone. She pulled the trigger, and three bright lances of light shot out from her nova, momentarily illuminating her cockpit in a bloody light. The lasers hit and elicited a brief spark of flames from the shell as a big piece of it broke off and spiraled away. The shell’s central red eye flickered out, and Alara pulled the trigger again with an accompanying skrish.
Her lasers hit home once more, and the target exploded with a flash of light. As the light faded, the debris quickly turned as cold and black as space as they sped off in all directions—a deadly hail of invisible projectiles. Two of the larger pieces collided with the shell’s wingmate, knocking it sideways and provoking a stream of flames before the fighter exploded in another blinding flash of light.
“I nailed two shells!” Alara crowed into the comm.
“Good! Get another, and cut the chatter!” Captain Reese said.
Alara watched another fighter line up on her. She heard the warning beeps of a missile lock and quickly moved to target the enemy before it could fire. Just as her reticle flickered green, she saw the shell’s central red eye flash a brighter red, releasing another of the spinning purple stars. The missile lock alarm squealed. Alara gritted her teeth and pulled the trigger, sending a fire-linked burst flashing out toward the enemy fighter. Two of the laser blasts made glancing hits, carving deep black furrows in the top, while the third bounced off into space.
Now the enemy fighter was just 1.5 km away. The missile it had fired at her swelled brightly, filling Alara’s entire view. Her missile lock alarm screamed out a solid tone, and Alara jammed the stick forward. The missile flashed by close overhead, and Alara thanked her luck that those warheads, whatever they were made of, didn’t have proximity fuses.
Two more green dots appeared on the theater-sized star map.
“Hoi! Glad you could make it, Lead,” Guardian Three said.
“Form up Guardians and head for 99-54-0. We’re getting out of here.”
Alara found the green diamond which appeared on her map and stomped on the left rudder pedal to turn toward it. She saw the flashing gray clouds of the Stormcloud Nebula swing into view, along with a solid wall of red bracket pairs. Barely visible behind that sea of red was the small green diamond which was her waypoint.
“There’s too many of them to fly through!” Alara said into the comm. “We need to plot another jump now.”
“Negative, Four. Drives are still cooling, and until we get clear, we can’t afford to decelerate for SLS or to stop maneuvering. Guardians, switch to Silverstreaks and set proximity fuses for 150 meters! I’ll assign your targets. We’re going to punch a hole.”
Alara’s target came in and appeared as a larger, bolder set of brackets than the rest. She lined it up under her reticle and thumbed over to torpedoes using the hat switch at the top of her flight stick. Just as the reticle turned red to indicate a solid lock, she heard the warning beeps of enemy missile locks start sounding through her cockpit. She ignored them and focused on the more muted beeping of her own target lock. As soon as her reticle emitted a solid tone, she pulled the trigger, sending a pair of Silverstreak torpedoes flying off on the fat, glittering silver contrails which gave the torpedoes their name. Thinking back to what Ethan had told her about dumb-firing torpedoes, Alara waited a few seconds and then fired off a second pair behind the first, these two without a target lock. Then her torpedoes were spent and she switched back to lasers. More torpedoes appeared trailing out all around her as the rest of her squadron fired off their volleys.
The beeping of enemy missile locks
suddenly turn more urgent, culminating in a pair of sharp wails from the missile lock alarm. In that instant she saw the enemy fighter wave erupt with dozens of purple stars, all of them spinning off in different directions. Two purple stars spun toward her, and Alara gritted her teeth, waiting for them to get close. Before the wave of enemy fire reached them, their torpedoes began to explode. Alara felt a flash of vindictive satisfaction, but as those explosions faded, she realized that the enemy fighters were still there.
“Frek!” The enemy was shooting down their torpedoes before they even got close. A quick look at the star map revealed there were dozens of enemy fighters still ahead of them, but even as she looked, a pair of enemy contacts winked out with tiny flares of light erupting on the star map to mark their explosions. Not all of the Silverstreaks had been shot down. The two she’d dumb-fired had found their mark, but by the look of it, those two were the only ones.
“Ahhh!” someone screamed, and Alara spared a precious second of attention to see another nova winking off the grid. She couldn’t see many green contacts anymore, but she guessed that was because the sheer masses of red enemy contacts were obscuring them from view.
Suddenly the purple stars were upon her, and Alara pulled another evasive maneuver with her afterburners. Both missiles missed, but then enemy missile lock warning tones sounded through her cockpit with renewed force, and three more alarms blasted at her in quick succession. She looked out through the top of her canopy to see more enemy missiles rushing at her. These three were much closer than the previous pair. Alara began a sustained-boost barrel roll, hoping the missiles wouldn’t track a tight spiral, but they followed her dizzy spin in lazy arcs. She shot through the center of the three spiraling missiles, but this time one of them hit her, exploding with a deafening roar and a blinding flash of light.
“Port shields critical!” Ethan exclaimed. “Equalizing.”
Alara looked up to see her shield display reading 77%, and then she saw the glowing red eyes of the enemy fighter wave glowering at her, seemingly just a few dozen meters away. They were too close for comfort. She thumbed over to lasers and fired off a quick burst at the nearest one. That blast hit, sparking brightly and shearing off a piece of the enemy fighter. The damaged shell broke formation and went evasive. Alara applied left rudder to swing her reticle over the next target, but the warning beeps of enemy missile locks began to sound once more. A second later, the warning beeps turned to screaming sirens, and Alara had no time to react; the enemy was too close; she looked up to see two more purple stars flashing toward her, and she executed a spiraling dive with full right rudder and afterburners to the max, hoping to elude the enemy missiles again—
Dark Space- The Complete Series Page 33