Then, suddenly, something terrible happened.
The clouds were lit up once more with flashing light, and Shondar felt an uncommon stab of fear. His upper lip curled, and his brow wrinkled with confusion.
“My Lord! The drivers report their ships are being fired upon!”
“This is not possible! They cannot detect us! Have the drivers evade!”
“They do evade, My Lord. The enemy strikes us still!”
“Have them activate flash shields! De-cloak the Gasha and do the same! Get us away from the planet!”
The operator at the helm began turning the mighty Gasha away from Avilon. Mere seconds later Shondar saw the blinding speck glaring up at him from the planet suddenly swell to twice its size and brightness, unleashing a terrifying beam of light. Shondar watched it slice through the kilometers-long bow of his ship, and his glowing white eyes widened with shock.
“How do they see us?!” Shondar demanded, his voice sounding suddenly shrill. The bow of his command ship cracked away in a molten ruin.
“Flash shields active!” the operator in charge of engineering called out just a moment too late. Fortunately, the Gasha could live without its bow, but now Shondar’s shame was magnified.
“Get us away from this place—now!” Shondar hissed.
“What of the fleet?”
“Leave them!”
* * *
Atton saw the Avilonians open fire on the invaders at last. Dazzling white beams crisscrossed the sky. Hundreds of starfighters rose to greet the alien swarms. Red lines of pulse lasers streaked out from them, reaping the sky, and the alien armada began raining down everywhere around him.
A ground swell of hope buoyed his spirits and a grim smile began tugging at the corners of his mouth. Sweet revenge. Serves the kakards right! It was beginning to look like Avilon might pull victory from this massacre. Atton had to force himself to stop gloating and focus on his immediate surroundings. Whether or not they won, it was still imminently possible for him to die. A pair of Shell fighters roared by, running from the Intrepid, which they had been bullying just a moment ago. They cut down across his flight path at an oblique angle, followed by twice as many Avilonian fighters spitting streams of bright red lasers at the enemy shells.
A moment later those two Shells exploded with synchronous booms and Atton’s Nova rocked in the shockwave. Racing up toward the Intrepid, he mentally toggled his comms for the command channel and sent a message: “Control, this is Guardian One, what’s your status?”
No answer.
He followed the Intrepid’s flaming ruin across the sky, hoping that they could hold out just a little longer. The Avilonians were scraping the Shells off them like bugs from a hover car’s windshield.
“Guardian One, this is Control, we—skriss . . .”
Whatever the comm officer had been about to say was cut off with a burst of static. A flash of light followed, and suddenly the Intrepid’s thrusters were gushing fire and smoke. The ship took a sudden dive toward the planet. A quick look at the grid showed the cruiser going dark. It was running on low power, but Atton was sure after the explosion he’d witnessed that it wasn’t by design.
Mere seconds later, he saw a flurry of escape pods jet away. They were abandoning ship! Frek, he thought, still rushing up to greet the Intrepid, as if he could somehow stop the cruiser’s suicidal plunge to the city below.
“Sara, plot a trajectory for the Intrepid,” he said, speaking to his AI.
A moment later, a curving red vector appeared on the grid, reaching out from the doomed cruiser to the tallest tower in the city below. The Zenith Tower, Atton gasped.
It wasn’t even another minute before the Avilonians responded to the crashing ship. Blinding beams of light converged, and Atton saw the Intrepid begin breaking up into flaming chunks.
Then it flew apart with a terrific boom, vaporizing all but the smallest specks of debris. Atton gaped at the explosion now blossoming a few short klicks from his fighter. Then came the shockwave and his Nova began to buck and twist under him. He battled with the flight stick for just a second before the shockwave passed. In its wake came a hail of superheated grit and small, molten debris that hissed off his shields and stole a few percentage points of charge. That was all that remained of the once majestic cruiser. Atton’s gaze dropped to the grid to look for the escape pods he’d seen fleeing the ship.
There were just three left.
Targeting the nearest one, he hailed it saying, “Pod vee nine sixty six dash four, this is Guardian One, what’s your status?”
The comms crackled with a familiar voice—that of the Intrepid’s XO, Deck Commander Delayn. “Good to hear from you, Guardian Leader. We’re all right, but a bit shaken up. We have the captain with us. Where’s the rest of your squadron?”
“I’m it,” Atton replied.
“Kavaar. . . .”
Atton felt the same dull shock coursing through him. Out of over one hundred men and women who had been aboard the Intrepid when they’d set out from Dark Space, they’d be lucky if a dozen had survived.
“Mind giving us an escort to the surface?” Commander Delayn asked, interrupting his thoughts.
“It would be my pleasure.”
Atton brought his Nova around until he had the glowing blue thrusters of the escape pod under his crosshairs. When he drew near to it he saw that it was charred and blackened on the outside, revealing just how lucky it had been to escape the explosion that had taken out the Intrepid. Atton kept half an eye on the grid to make sure no enemy fighters were vectoring their way.
“Sara,” he said, “Set the TDS to maximum sensitivity and add pod V966-4 to our watch list. I want to know the minute a Shell so much as wobbles onto our flight path.”
“Yes, sir,” the AI replied.
A moment later the TDS screeched with a warning and Atton saw a Shell Fighter ahead of them begin flashing on the grid as it banked toward them. Sara had auto-targeted it for him. Pushing the throttle up past the stops, Atton surged ahead of the captain’s escape pod, and then thumbed over to lasers. Lining up for a shot, he brought the red brackets of the target under his crosshairs. The targeting reticle flickered green and he held down the trigger. Lasers screeched out in a continuous stream toward his target, and its shields began to drop. Then came the beep-beep-beeping of an enemy target lock, and an alarm screamed out a warning as a glittering pair of Pirakla missiles leapt out toward him. The Shell fighter’s shields dropped to 46% and then it dove away, breaking out of the head-to-head and leaving Atton to deal with the missiles now vectoring in on him. A moment later his TDS blared with another warning just as a group of Shells angled in on him from his starboard side and began firing dazzling violet streams of pulse lasers across his path.
He began yawing erratically from his straight-line course in order to throw their aim. The missile lock alarm grew progressively louder until his ears began to ring with the sound. “I get it!” Atton roared. “Sara turn down the volume on the TDS!”
The alarm diminished and then the missiles were upon him. He nosed down and hauled back on the throttle until the glittering purple stars of two Pirakla missiles appeared to shine down into the cockpit like twin suns at their zenith. As soon as he’d judged they were just about to hit him, he triggered his afterburners and pulled up hard, letting the alien missiles skate by behind him with bare meters to spare. Strident purple light continued to flash around his cockpit—
Then it suddenly ceased.
Atton deduced that the Avilonians had taken care of those fighters for him. A muffled clap of thunder applauded their demise a split second later as the sound of the explosions reached his ears.
He let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding and checked the grid for the captain’s escape pod. It was still cruising on behind him, unmolested. Either the Sythians hadn’t noticed it, or they were prioritizing targets by threat level. He knew better than to think they had spared the pod out of mercy. Hauling back on his th
rottle so the escape pod could fly past him, he keyed his comms and said, “Commander Delayn, you need to set down as soon as you can. Things are going to get worse before they get better up here.”
“Agreed, but for now we’re safer in the air.”
Atton was forced to agree as he peered over the nose of his fighter to the inferno raging through the city below. The shimmering cascades and lush, shadowy green of the city’s rooftop gardens were now a distant memory. Everything was black smoke and curling orange tongues of flame as far as the eye could see. He considered that at least the planet-wide city was too vast for the destruction to have spread very far.
As if to confirm his look-on-the-bright-side attitude, he saw the smoke begin to thin out up ahead. A few minutes later, his Nova punched through the fading black haze, and pristine gardens raced by once more. The captain’s pod flew past him and angled for a grassy garden which lay at the foot of a giant skyscraper. Not waiting for them to touch down, Atton began banking back the way he’d come.
“Thanks for the escort, Guardian Leader,” Delayn’s voice returned. “Where are you going? The Avilonians look like they can handle things from here. You’d be better off keeping your head down with us.”
“I’m sure they can handle things, sir,” Atton replied, “but I have at least one friend down there somewhere, and I need to go back and look for her.”
Delayn hesitated to reply, as if he thought that was a skriff’s errand, but all he said was, “I hope you find her.”
“So do I. Get under cover as soon as you can.”
“We will. Thanks again.”
Atton nodded, but gave no reply. He raced back into the inferno, the smoke swallowing his Nova greedily. Unable to see, he snapped on a terrain-following overlay, and a jagged world of broken towers and twisted debris became visible, painted over the hazy black smoke in shades of green.
He scanned the grid, searching for the ping of an emergency beacon that would alert him to the presence of a downed pilot, but there was nothing. Gravidar was completely devoid of any active signatures, either friendly or enemy. Most of his pilots had crashed in the vast square at the base of the Zenith Tower, but Atton couldn’t find either the square or the tower through all the debris. Flying up higher to get his bearings, he saw the smoke clear just enough to make out a blurry outline of the gargantuan Zenith Tower. The tower lay off his port side. Banking that way, Atton checked the grid for emergency beacons once more.
Still nothing.
Then his shields hissed with a string of impacts, followed by the sudden appearance of a Shell Fighter on his tail. It must have been cloaked! he realized. His missile lock alarm blared out a warning, but the enemy was too close for him to evade. The missile hit with a deafening roar, and his Nova bucked violently. His AI screamed out, “Shields depleted!”
After that, a damage alert blared close beside his ears, along with a sharp whistling sound. Thick black smoke began swirling into the cockpit, giving him a clue about the whistling noise—there was a hole in his cockpit. In the next instant his flight suit auto-pressurized and sealed, cutting him off from the cockpit’s depressurized, contaminated air supply, but not before his ears popped with the sudden change in pressure or before he caught a lungful of acrid smoke.
Then a loud shearing noise drew his attention out the port side of the cockpit. He was just in time to see his wing sliced off by a lavender-hued flash of light. The Shell Fighter was still on his tail, intent on finishing him. Now unbalanced, his Nova began rolling over. Atton fought the controls for just a second before he realized it was futile. He pulled the red lever beside his flight chair, and explosive bolts blew his canopy into a netherworld of greasy black smoke.
Sudden acceleration squashed him against his seat, carrying him swiftly away from the doomed Nova. His spine compressed painfully, the chair’s inertial management system too weak to shield him completely from the g-force. Then the sudden acceleration eased as the booster rockets in his chair sputtered out. Atton drifted to the top of his ascent, his head poking out above the pervasive smoke for a murky view of his surroundings. He was high above the ruined square that lay at the foot of the Zenith Tower. All around him bits of flaming debris and ash fluttered to the ground. Overhead, bright white beams and red pulse lasers crisscrossed the sky, swatting at the Sythians’ fighters and fleeing cruisers. At the top of the Zenith shone a bright orb that Atton had somehow missed seeing before. It shone almost as bright as a sun, turning black of night to dawning day. As he watched, that orb seemed to swell, and then it shot straight up as the thickest, brightest beam weapon the Avilonians had fired thus far. His gaze followed that massive weapon up into seemingly empty space.
Feeling his stomach lurch as his flight chair began to slowly plummet to the ground, Atton turned away from the scene of the Sythians’ defeat to rather focus on his own survival. Using the controls on his armrest to direct himself as best he could, he headed for the Zenith Tower. Through the reams of smoke, he could just barely make out a gaping hole in the base of that tower. If he could get there, he might be safe.
The chair’s grav lifts controlled his descent as best they could, but the power supply wasn’t nearly strong enough for powered flight across the odd kilometer between him and the Zenith. With that in mind, Atton traded altitude for speed and used that speed to get as close as he could. When he saw the ground rushing up too fast beneath his feet, he pushed the grav lifts to their limit, buoying himself up at the last possible second. The resultant force threatened to flatten him against the seat of the chair, placing an almost unbearable pressure on his spine, but then that pressure eased and his chair slid to a stop, still upright and hovering a few inches above the ash-covered ground.
Atton hurried to unbuckle his flight restraints and then he set out at a run to cover the remaining distance to the Zenith. Thick black smoke clogged his way everywhere he looked, disorienting him. Giant black flakes of ash pinwheeled from the sky like snow. The ground shook with the periodic thunder of debris crashing all around him. The limited sensors inside his helmet were equally blinded by the smoke, and he was left groping in the dark, trying to steer clear of the blurry orange light of raging fires.
Desperate, Atton tried the comms as he ran. “This is Guardian Leader to anyone who can hear me, I’m on the ground at nav point Epsilon, looking for cover. Can’t see a frekking thing through the smoke . . .”
The comms crackled ominously with static. Either everyone was dead, or they were too far out of range to hear him.
But then a gruff voice cut through the static, and a light appeared, bright and shining through the gloom. “Commander, this is Mech Captain Alpha One—hold your position, I’m on my way to you now.”
Relief flooded through him, but rather than stop running, he ran faster, heading toward the light. All of a moment later, a dark shape came swirling out of the chaos—faceplate blue and glowing in the light of holographic displays. It was a Zephyr light assault mech.
“Frek, it’s good to see you, Captain!” Atton said. “Have you found any other survivors out here?”
“Why don’t you come see for yourself,” the captain said as he reached Atton’s side. “Follow me.”
Chapter 31
Atton hurried up the stairs to the entrance of the Zenith Tower. He saw a glimmer of green beyond the gaping hole in the doors. That hole had been covered with a portable shield generator to keep out the smoke. He walked through the diaphanous blue membrane of those shields, passing from the nightmare of the burning city into an ethereal dream. A lush garden stretched out as far as the eye could see. The distant walls of the tower rose like glittering mountains of crystal. A bright blue sky sprawled overhead, etched with a faint spiral dotted with stars. The eye-shaped center of that spiral shone like the sun. White-robed people walked calmly through the garden, seemingly oblivious to the chaos and destruction beyond the walls of their tower.
Atton unsealed his helmet and removed it. The air was fresh and honeyed
with nectar. He took a deep breath and slowly let it out. “What is this place?”
“It sure is somethin’ ain’ it?” the captain replied. “But you can gawk later. There’s someone here who’d like to see you. Come on.”
“Who?” Atton asked, following the captain down a glittering pathway. They didn’t get far before he spied a small knot of people gathered in the shade of a tall, blue-flowering tree. Most of those people were armored Avilonian soldiers, but Atton thought he noticed a few who stood out. They wore neither a shining suit of armor nor the white robes of the people in the garden. What they wore instead were ISSF flight suits. As soon as he saw that, Atton took off at a run, quickly outstripping the sentinel who was escorting him there.
Standing in front of the group were a pair of blue-caped Avilonians, and between them hovered a bright light. As Atton approached, he heard a voice like thunder speaking to the group of people.
The light turned toward him, and Atton was abruptly blinded by it. He fell to his knees in the grass, clutching his eyes.
“Atton!” a gruff, familiar voice called out. A moment later he felt himself yanked to his feet for a crushing hug. Now partially shielded from the light, he opened his eyes to slits in time to see his father withdraw to an arm’s length. “Glad you could make it,” Ethan said.
Atton took in his father’s salt and pepper hair, his grizzly growth of stubble, and care-worn features, stretched now into a smile that crinkled the skin at the corners of his eyes. He gazed into the piercing green eyes set within those crinkles and returned his father’s smile. “How did you get here?” he whispered.
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