Back into the fire, p.30
Back Into the Fire, page 30
“Look out!!!”
Agnes’ shriek was swallowed in the pummeling din of the tail gun firing. Alarms wailed and Jerry had a glimpse in the tactical of a pair of icons lashing up from a course hugging the ground, carrying them right into their formation. Shields flared and the Hog shook as particle beams chopped between the Hog and the Basilisks, terrible thunder as energy seared holes through the air.
One of the Valkyries veered off, shields savaged by Agnes’ wild fire. The other shot straight through the Assault Group to starboard, jostling ships apart with the shock of its passage. Jerry caught the crimson flicker of its trim before it was gone. These guys again!
“Get clear!” he barked. “Get out of here!”
The Basilisks banked away to starboard, slow and lumbering compared to the terrible speed of the Valkyries. Jerry pulled back on the stick and kicked the thrusters, rose above them as despair thickened in his blood. He wasn’t going to be much more effective. But maybe he could give these guys a nice, fat target to chase, instead of Josie and the others. Desperately, he keyed the Jesters’ general channel. “Watkins, where the hell are you?”
The hostile targeting alarm blatted. The Valkyrie that’d shot through had put himself into a high-speed stall, far above, had let himself drop back, and was diving straight for them. Azure fire rained down. A bolt crashed off the ventral shields before Jerry could throw the Hog into a starboard bank. Two more walked across the port side as it did so.
The fighter shook, then jarred again as something exploded. The systems displayed snowed over in red. Jerry smelled smoke but couldn’t pay it any mind. The forested hills were rushing towards him as the Hog tumbled. Alarms doubled, re-doubled. Lighting flashes followed his lurching course, dashing instant forest fires from Fury’s countryside.
“Shields gone,” the AI reported with its maddening lack of inflection.
“I noticed!” Jerry shrieked as he put the Hog into another bank to avoid one of those bolts from finishing the job. Agnes tore away with a long burst from the tail gun to aft, but by her wild curses wasn’t drawing a solid bead.
A particle beam skimmed the starboard wing, twitched the Hog, blackened ablative plate. Scorched paint peeled away.
“Help!” Jerry howled. “Anyone, help!”
Cyan fire joined azure glare in the sky, was suddenly all around, and someone was whooping like a maniac across the tactical.
“We’re here, Rodann!”
THE VALKYRIE, INTENT on Jerry’s tail, couldn’t have lined itself up any more perfectly as Tim dove for it. Crimson targeted halos were unnecessary. He could see the hits, even before he crushed the trigger.
His Hellhound’s full energy salvo clawed into the other starfighter’s ventral shields, doused them in white. Already taking fire from the Hog’s tail gun, they blew out with the signature sparkle-flame of overloading generator coils. Those flames went from pale yellow to orange-red to a crashing blossom of superheated gasses that shook Tim as he wrenched out of the dive, barely missing the miniature cataclysm. A million fiery shards of Valkyrie rained across the hilltops of Fury.
“Yeah!” Tim barked. But glee faded quickly as he scanned the tactical. “Where’s the other one? Anyone see him?”
“Running!” Li replied. “Just shot off to the southeast like he’d been kicked!”
“Watch for him.” Tim keyed up the Assault Group’s channel. “Rodann, you all right?”
“You took your sweet fucking time!”
Tim couldn’t help a grin. He’d never admit it to the old hauler pilot, but the Valkyries had surprised them all. Rodann’s exasperated relief was Tim’s, too.
That relief evaporated as he took in the horrific panorama of the mushroom cloud, now distending out of any recognizable shape as it unraveled over the mountaintop and the ongoing frenzy of blaster fire. But even as it did, the battle was coming apart in the valley below, as though drained of its ardor by the sheer volume of destruction. As the flight of Hellhounds and Basilisks reformed and drew near, Tim could see the Alliance attack in collapse, like a kicked anthill suddenly splashed in petrol. Flights of Hellhounds screeching in from the north lit it and the ants writhed and burned.
Hell of a thing, he thought, but gave himself a shake, wasn’t going to dwell on it. Not in the middle of this stinking war. The Alliance had brought such apocalypse to his homeworld of Loudon, except on a global scale. Fury had nothing on that that atrocity.
Blaster bolts winked up from the ground, snapped through the formation and sent the Basilisks wobbling in either direction, even as the Hellhounds settled defensively into their midst. A bolt splatted off Tim’s forward shield and he juke to avoid a fitful follow-up burst. There wasn’t a lot a fire, but the Basilisks were pretty beat up. Some of us, too. He remembered Li.
“There’s nothing left for us, here,” Tim called across the tactical. “Rodann, you heading for the homestead?”
“Not without some arguing,” he griped, “but yeah.” The Hog banked and led the Basilisks in a wide turn away from the edge of the fight, giving the blaze plenty of distance.
“Second Squadron,” Tim said, “follow ‘em down. Make sure none of them stray!” All the Hellhounds save one peeled away from him. He looked to the one remaining on the scanner, found it, limping and increasingly falling behind. Li’s engine signature visibly fluttered and so did Tim’s guts to see it. He touched the icon, opened the personal channel. “You coming, old buddy?”
“Yeah, she’s dragging ass,” the Squad Leader replied, “but she’ll make the finish line.”
“And I’ll be right with you.”
“Don’t linger on my account.”
Tim chuckled and let his Hellhound decelerate till it pulled alongside Li’s wounded machine. “I’ve got nothing else going on.”
“Thanks, Tim.”
The pair of Hellhounds banked away from the expanding blot of the fusion blast cloud, now blackening and smearing back across the mountain as winds punished it. Hellish flames glimmered about its base, at least one fierce inferno still vomiting from what looked like one of the cave mouths leading into the Union complex. Tim could see lesser blast patterns where the explosion had followed the path of least resistance, belched out through sub-tunnels and exits and actually cleared patches of the airfield of Alliance attackers more thoroughly than any Union defense could have done.
“My god, what a mess,” Li breathed. “This shit’s never going to end, is it?”
“Oh, it’s going to end,” Tim replied through gritting teeth. “One way or another.”
The skies above the Hole, to the north of the aerodrome were cluttered with the returnees from the failed rescue mission. A faint haze was rising from its inadequate landing field, Tim saw as he and Li drew near. Crash. A Hellound was smoldering on the tarmac and Jester crews and drones scurrying to put it out. Tim glanced at his roster display. It didn’t look like it was one of Second’s. He felt a twinge of regret that the rest of his Wing had been here, in the midst of this anarchy, fighting for its life without him. But he shook it off; they’d all had it rough, this day.
For the first time in hours, he let himself think about Kelly.
“Speaking of messes...”
“Yeah,” Tim replied. Checking the display, he added, “Jester control’s signaling that the north field is open.”
“Where?” Li squawked back incredulously. “I guess I see it.”
“I’ll follow you in,” Tim said. He eyed the damaged Hellhound to starboard. “You think that thing’s up for this?”
“Won’t be for much longer. Let’s get this done.”
“Right.”
The pair nosed down as the former mining complex and its surrounding complex and landing strip spread below them. Tim dropped back, let Li coast ahead, wings wobbling a little, a fleck of something flying off the Hellound’s blast-marred spine. Sensors showed energy fluctuations from the starfighter’s engines.
“Tim...”
A jolt went through him and he couldn’t help a smile as he recognized Kelly’s voice, badly distorted by static, but as welcome as a late summer rain on Loudon after a long drought. He keyed his comm. “Hey, lady! Came to welcome us—”
“Tim” no static masked her words now, and the terror was clear “look out!!!”
His brow was still crinkling in confusion when the hostile targeting alarm blatted, joined instantly by the proximity warning. A glance at the tactical showed him a red icon streaking up across his aft quarter, insanely low to the surface, nosing up just as he and Li were coming down, at their most vulnerable. Blue-white death crashed across Tim’s starboard shield, slammed the Hellhound sideways.
“Shit!”
Reflexively, Tim hit the maneuvering fields to brake. That slammed him forward into his restraints hard enough to send pain-lighting shafting through shoulders and ribs. The Hellhound took another hit, rocked. Everything was alarms and red lights. He fought the stick, steadied the starfighter only to see the attacking Valkyrie sear past at two o’clock, energy weapons blazing as brightly as the red trim on its wings.
Particle beams clawed up Li’s tail. The Squad Leader howled something over the tactical that distortion swallowed. Flames swallowed his Hellhound an instant later.
“Noooooo!”
Tim yanked the stick back, brought his targeting sights up over the Valkyrie’s tail as it shot ahead of him, still punishing Li. He squeezed the trigger with the selector flicked to all weapons and all the Hellhound’s claws flashed out. Particle beams rived across its aft shields, unraveling them in a polychromatic flutter of dying shields, then the fiendish flutter of plasma bolts walked up the fighter’s port wing, chewing into its fuselage.
And none of it was enough.
Li’s fighter screamed down onto the airfield in a ball of fire, one of its wings whipping free to frisbee through just-parked Hellhounds and kick off a chain of secondary explosions. What was left of the careening starfighter struck, screeched down the tarmac, pinwheeling in wild vortices of sparks and fire as the pursuing Valkyrie continued hammering it. A lucky shot finally ended the ordeal in a hellfire half-sphere of shattering fusion bottle.
The Valkyrie pilot’s moment of triumph ended with a slash from Tim’s particle cannon that took its port grav drive nacelle off at the junction of fuselage and spine. The port wing, deprived of the thrust and weight from the engine, lurched up and over, sent the Valkyrie into a spin. The violence of its tumble sheared off flaps of plate like feathers from a blaster-shot bird.
One of these, a full length of crumpled wing, spun across Tim’s nose, eclipsing his whole universe. “Jeanie, watch ou—”
Impact clacked his teeth together so hard he wasn’t sure they’d all remained intact. Sparks crashed across his instrument panels and holograms fluttered. The stick went syrupy and resistant as he clenched it in both fists and the Hellhound bucked around him. Guts rushed up into his throat as g-forces clawed. Inertial dampener’s gone! He could see the fire-wreathed landing field rushing below him, towards him.
“Dorsal shields are blown out!” Jeanie warned over damage alarm warbling.
“Don’t...need shields...” Tim wheezed as the force of the plunge crushed him back. “Cut the engines! Landing gears!”
“Linkage is blown, too!”
Li’s fiery grave at the end of the strip screamed towards them. They were going to shoot right through it, engines locked at maximum, like a titanic roman candle.
Tim had a last, desperate thought. “Surge all power to the ventral shields!”
“That will fry the coils and kill the engine—” Jeanie actually seemed to trip over her own cybernetic thoughts. “Oh!” Then, “Right!”
The Hellhound jolted once and seemed to hang in midair, the squall of its gravs cutting out. Tim felt them hang in midair, speed sloughing off all at once, a weird moment of microgravity. The tail began to drag. He felt the resistance begin to wobble the Hellhound over onto its nose. Tarmac lashed by, yards below, a wall of fire ahead. Dammit, we’re gonna tumble end-over-end!
Sparks and slag splashed up before the Hellhound, went white with the flash of deflector shields absorbing dozens of yards of blastcrete. Something cracked from aft and sparks blew through the cockpit, slathering Tim in a hundred speckles of pain, biting any exposed skin. He was too busy flinging forward into his restraints, once, twice, a third time as everything flashed again. A final crash of exploding shield coil gave way to a scream of blastisteel on blastcrete.
The Hellhound shivered and squealed, kicking up a last wake of shredding pavement as the starboard wing crumpled and folded under the sliding fuselage. The drag of this, squalling to such a high pitch Tim saw double, finally arrested the last of the fighter’s momentum and it spun on its belly, throwing off rooster tails of spark before finally settled in the midst of its own fumes.
Bolts of electricity leapt and bit from the smoldering instrument panel. Tim batted and flailed them off as flames lit on his synthe-leathers. Smoke blackened the cockpit. He popped the restraints and writhed to get free. The canopy cracked with a snap-snap of releasing clamps.
“Get clear, Tim! Get—” Jeanie’s voice fluttered out with a last cascade of sparks from the computer. Weirdly her voice echoed, then transferred completely to Tim’s wrist comm. “Get clear! She might still go up!”
Shoving free of the cockpit and kicking his way onto the blackened port wing, Tim slid clear of the smoke and down onto the torn, steaming tarmac. There, he paused sobbing for breath, hurting his lungs with air that was more toxins than any sustenance. Coughing, gagging, he staggered to his feet, lurched away from the wrecked starfighter.
Nearly drunk with smoke-inhalation, he took a couple tentative steps towards the fiery wreck of Hellhound at the end of the strip. But the face-shriveling heat of it turned him away with eyes tearing from more than irritation. He spat and gave himself a shake, started limping away. Damn-damn-damn...won’t even be enough left of Li to bury.
Grav drive wails filled the skies over head. Tim flinched, cringed low instinctively. But his still-watering eyes found only the vulpine silhouettes of Hellhounds coasting in for a landing on what remained of the Hole’s airfield. Smoke whipped into miniature cyclones at their descent, flames twining in amongst them demonically.
A popping and flutter of sparks to the left drew Tim’s attention as his balance improved and limping became almost-strides.
The wrecked Valkyrie had settled in a twist of metal and smoke seventy meters away, astonishingly close. Likely, it’d nearly collided with Tim’s Hellhound as the pair of them crashed out of the sky. The starfighter canopy cracked and slid forward with a grate of forced hydraulics. Fumes plumed out with a splutter of coughing and a flail of limbs.
A surge of red-hot rage pumped through Tim, brought all senses back to terrible clarity. His hand flew to his hip, found his B-5 Street Special still amazingly in the holster there and tore it free. Strides lengthened and a blaze of fury glowed crimson at the corners of his vision.
The Valkyrie pilot dragged himself clear of the cockpit, slid down the side of the fuselage, and landed on his buttocks beside the wreck. Another coughing fit convulsed him a moment. With a curse, he undid his bulbous helmet and ripped it from his head, cast it aside. Smoke purled from his pilot armor and he spasmed, started tearing it off in a frenzy. Clasps on the side of his clamshell chestplate popped loose and he shrugged out of the still faintly-glowing metal, was suddenly staggering to his feet, taking a few uncertain steps, limping out away from the fumes.
He froze at the whine of Tim’s Street Special priming a charge.
“Hey, asshole.”
The pilot twitched and half-turned towards him. A hand darted towards a cargo pocket on his baggy, gray flight pants.
“Hey!” Tim raised the blastpistol, aimed it at the man’s face. “Hey!”
The pilot froze completely. After a heartbeat, both hands slowly raised. His flight suit was charred and crisped on his flank, his left shoulder, his face blackened on that side, too, where aerosolized carbon had settled. Despite that, the bastard was an annoyingly good-looking sort, like a freaking Alliance recruitment poster, tousled auburn hair, blazing green eyes, and a blocky, arrogant jaw.
A glance past the pilot, at the wrecked Valkyrie showed Tim the kill markings etched alongside the cockpit—eleven in all. The bloody hue limning the corners of Tim’s eyes darkened. He could feel the heat of Li’s starfighter pyre on the back of his neck.
He wanted to shoot this bastard. He really did. The Street Special’s muzzle shook. “That’s better,” he managed. “Just keeps those hands up.”
“I’m unarmed,” the Alliance pilot said with jarring confidence. “And I’m surrendering.”
“Yeah, I noticed.” Tim adjusted his grip on the blaster. A Hellhound was squalling in for a landing a couple hundred meters away. Feet were pounding on the pavement, voices, shouts drawing near.
“By the Articles of War,” the pilot went on, almost smiling at him—smiling, the bastard, “re-ratified as of the 2306 Alliance Assembly, you have to take me prisoner.”
Tim snorted. “I’ll be deciding what I have to do, pal!”
The Valkyrie jock’s gaze flicked towards the business end of Tim’s blastpistol. The first hint of fear appeared in those oddly familiar-seeming green eyes. But it passed quickly, replaced by disdain, then a flash of obvious hate. “You’re one of them,” he sneered.
“If you mean a Jester; hell, yes, I am. And this sure as hell ain’t your Alliance!”
The man—young man, hardly into adulthood, early twenties, trim and fit in the prime of life—stiffened his back and threw up his chin defiantly. “You go ahead and do whatever it is you’re going to do, Jester.”
And what am I going to do? Tim couldn’t feel his fingertips, he was holding the Street Special so tightly. Only the index finger, poised at the trigger, had even a tingle of sensation. People were coming. People would know. But he thought of Li, scorched to subatomic particles behind him, and knew he could just do it. People wouldn’t care. God, after all the crimes we’ve all seen, been a part of...
