Alpha Wing

by Marco Frazetta

  “Space Commandos!”

  Teru and Harley stopped to look. Sure enough. So, they were the ones behind the attack. But why? I couldn’t believe that the Federation actually had the resources to spare to send a regiment of Commandos.

  “It doesn’t make sense, why the hell aren’t they sending everything they have at the Gix?”

  “Maybe the Wings of Dawn have become a big enough thorn in their sides.”

  “So how did they get here so fast? We’re four clicks from the nearest jump gate out here.” It didn’t fit. The attack was premeditated and we just happened to get caught in the mix. There had to be something else they were after.

  “Derringer,” Celeste’s whisper startled me as much as it had been a yell.

  “Celeste, stay calm. We’re getting you out of here.”

  “They’re after me. That’s why they’re here. I have information, and they’re afraid of it leaking.”

  “Commander, what are you saying? The military sent the commandos to attack the reprogramming station just for you? Why?”

  “I know something that could challenge their entire authority over Earth. The Unity government itself is at stake. Get me out of here and I’ll tell you everything.”

  “Those soldiers are between us and our way out. We’re gonna have to take them before we can do anything.”

  “I can help out,” said Doyle, reminding me that he too was now in on this thing.

  “What’s your speciality?”

  “I’m a mechanic.”

  “Can you shoot a gun?”

  “I went straight from a jail into a mind-fucking prison cell for weeks on end so I didn’t think to bring one, but if you’ve got one handy I can hold my own.” Teru handed him the single pistol he brought along for himself.

  “We should split up,” to my surprise the suggestion came from Harley. “I’ll stay back with the Commander. You three go.”

  “I’m not leaving you,” said Doyle.

  “I can take care of myself,” she spat.

  “I have no doubt that you can. I’m just thinking that I’ve got the best chance of staying alive if I stay with you. And I’m obligated for what you did for me back there. Pulling me out of that pit I was in.” Harley almost seemed to blush at this, but then she shrugged, “do what you want.”

  I looked to Teru, “let’s move.” I expected to turn around and thank Harley but she and Doyle were already helping Celeste off before I got the chance.

  We ran down a spiral staircase, me covering Teru’s back since he was now fighting with just his laser sword. Those big fuckers were well armored. But there wasn’t any armor in the universe that could save you from a laser sword in the hands of a man who knew how to use one.

  Two Commandos stood at the base of the stairway, covering each other. We slowed to a crawl and I clipped the first in the head before he saw me. The second didn’t miss a beat, just sprayed the staircase with fire as he swivelled around, but Teru leapt up, clearing the spray of fire easily, bringing his laser sword down across the second Commado’s throat. He rolled as he landed. A perfect execution.

  I hopped as I ran to keep up with him. Though Teru could have been twice my age he was unbelievably agile. We got the jump on three more of the thugs as they were trying to pass. Teru sliced one across the leg, felling him instantly. I shot another square in the chest in three quick spurts, penetrating his armor. Before he could collapse to the floor, I grabbed the butt of his rifle, redirecting his fire straight into his buddy. The heavy duty ammunition ripped through him like he was made of wet tissue paper. Blood was everywhere, and the smell of it made my heart race. I leaned down, pulling a small silver node from behind the ear of one of the dead Commandos.

  “What section is the shaft?”

  “8C,” he said.

  I shouted into the node, “EIGHT IS ABOUT TO BLOW,” trying to imitate the Commandos’ meathead style of speech, “GET THE FUCK OFF THE FLOOR!” then, I tossed the node aside.

  Teru smiled. “Not bad, Alpha Wing.”

  We ran laterally, reaching the service shaft. My faint had apparently worked. No Commandos in sight.

  “Let’s double back and get the girls. And that mechanic guy. If we have to.”

  I turned the latch, throwing the service shaft open. The light inside was an angry blood red cast on everything. We crawled through until the lights went out completely, and I remembered Teru’s cave analogy all over again. WAAAP! WAAAP! WAAAP! WAAAP! The earsplitting noise kept thrumming through my skull. I heard a groan of metal above us.

  “It’s pieces of the station.”

  “Somebody’s jettisoning them into space, or else the computer network is trying to purge all the inoperable components to try and seal the air leaks,” said Doyle.

  “How do we know what’s ahead of us isn’t going to get blasted into open space.”

  “Start by looking without your eyes!” called Teru from behind me.

  The narrow little passage twisted and turned several times before I finally touched something solid in front of me. I pulled and twisted open the latch, and the door fell outward. We were above a hallway that lead back to the docking bay where we’d breached from. I waited. No sign that we were about to be ripped apart by laserfire. I grabbed the crouched, turning my body so that I could use the lip of the shaft to propel myself out. All those hundreds of hours of gymnastics we’d had to perform as part of our required military exercises suddenly didn’t seem so silly.

  I landed on my feet. Bodies were strewn across the floor. Some ours, some theirs. I recognized the Sphree among the dead sprawled on the floor. I couldn’t exactly have called him a friend, but at least he was a comrade in arms. As the others joined me, I went to investigate the Whiplash. The bay door that we had crashed through was forced open. No lights were operable inside. I tried again to raise anyone on the comm., but still there was was nothing.

  “We’ve lost a lot of our brothers,” reported Teru stoically.

  “But not nearly all of them.” I said. “So, where are the rest?”

  “I don’t know. But look at how many guards are there. The Commandos only a few dead, but the regulars got completely decimated” said Harley, taking note of the sheer volume of dead reprogramming center guards. She was right. It wasn’t even close. Then, I noticed something about the way that the bodies were arranged.

  “These ones here died in the fire fight,” I said pointing. “But these ones, all arranged in a line, they look more like they were executed.” Teru and Harley followed me over to where twelve or more Unity guards lay sprawled all over each other. Their weapons were missing, and the uniform head and chest shots, the precision of the kills, made it clear that this was the work of the Commandos. Fucking savages.

  Doyle climbed through the Whiplash, holding a flashlight that Harley must have given him. “Your ship’s been sabotaged,” he said, throwing the light on large gashes made in strategic points.

  “Think it can be salvaged?” Teru asked. Doyle clicked his tongue.

  “Nah, not a chance. Whoever did this knew what they were doing. It’s not just a matter of bypassing the control circuits. All of your major power centers are blown. There’s no way you can fly this thing out of here.”

  “How about emergency life support systems?”

  “They would have jettisoned them already,” said Celeste evenly. “That’s standard operating procedure.” No way to escape, at least not without a fight.

  “Then our only way out is in one of their ships,” I announced, “They breached the hull themselves, so that means they must have found some entrypoint somewhere here.”

  “Derringer, that’s suicide. We’re going up against a larger, better armed force.”

  “I’m not suggesting that we meet them head-on with just the five of us. But we know that there must be Wings somewhere we can join up with to push them back.”

  “We’ve faced a lost worse odds before and won,” intonned Teru.

  “Doyle,” I
called, “Imagine you’re a Space Commando. Where would you plan your attack from to use the layout to your advantage?”

  “Any station this size has a field generator to protect it from offensive energy blasts. If they landed a small cruiser underneath the generator section, they could have cut a hole in the hull, then worked their way up from the bottom.”

  “Can we target the power generator?”

  “Target it how?”

  “Deactivate it, or force an overload?”

  “Now there’s an idea. But we’d have to get out of their fast. The core is radioactive, so if we cause it overheat then—”

  “That’s perfect. Once we get in there we won’t have long anyway, and we’ll need the element of surprise. Any chance the field generator is that way?”

  “Seems about right,” he said scratching his beard.

  “Alright, then. We’d better follow the bodies.” I went over to where one of the few Commandos had bit the dust and took the fucker’s N6-Canon as my own. The others salvaged the best weapons they could find. Teru closed the Sphree’s eyes respectfully, and we were on the move again.

  “What the fuck does this say?” The Commando held the torn-off patch from the sleeve of his uniform in front of Crazy Larry’s brusied and swollen face. He was on his knees with a half a dozen Commandos standing all around him. Dozens more were crowded watching, far too many for us to take out on our own. Not until the time was right.

  From below him, in the service gulley that ran underneath the reprogramming station’s power supply station, we could only watch and wait for Doyle to come through.

  “Hurry the fuck up already,” I whisper-shouted. Doyle held up one finger. It wasn’t his pointer.

  “It says Semper Fidelis, you fucking animal.” said the Space Commando’s captain. The others jeered loudly, all eagerly intoning their agreement. Their thirst for blood was palpable even from where we were watching.

  “So I’m an animal? What does that make all of you? You’re not soldiers, you’re butchers. The only thing that changed about me is that I decided to stop pretending and admit to being the same ruthless son of a bitch I always was. That’s the only difference between you. The rest of you may not have figured it out yet, but that’s who I’ve always been and you’re no different.”

  Larry coughed blood as blows reigned down on him from three of the Commandos at once. I saw teeth flying out of his head through the grate in the floor. I eyed Teru, who lay prone across from me just a few meters away. I prayed silently that he wouldn’t get an itchy trigger finger before the time was right. We couldn’t afford to give up the element of surprise.

  Finally, after knocking the bound and tied former Commando to the floor twice, the captain signed for him to be pulled up. He drew his gun.

  Teru silently set his sights on the Commando’s heart. Goddamn it, Doyle. I said in my head, though I realized that were lucky to have him in on the plan in the first place. We needed a meltdown and we were running out of time. “I hold the weight of responsibility as Captain, and that means I have to make difficult decisions in the line of duty. This idn’t (sic) one of them.”

  A flash from a laser rifle, blood splatter, and the Captain fell to the floor. Fuck. There went the element of fucking surprise. Arrrgaaah! I pushed hard on the section of grate and it swung open. Beside me, Harley sprung up and started spraying the surprised Commandos with lasgun fire.

  The power of their own Cannon M6s on their own armor did some heavy damage, but even so the brutes were on us quickly. All around in a circle around the main power platform, Teru and Harley and even Celeste were throwing open the grates in a surprise assault.

  “Now! NOW!” I called up to the few Wings we’d managed to find on our way to the reactor core, the survivors from the base assault. All of them together were tearing apart those fuckers, but there were dozens more now falling back on their positions, including the ones still in their ship. But they didn’t remain hapless for long. Larry, still too dazed to stand and bound from behind the back was shot through the side of the head in the crossfire. I took cover behind the shiny steel casing protecting one of the power generator’s three turbines. The bastards tear through that without killing us all.

  WAAAAGGGGGUHHH! WAAAAAAGGGGGUHHH! Oh, right. The power generator was still melting down. The plan had been to overheat the engine, then while they were scrambling to tear them apart as they streamed out of the ship and breach it. A crazy gamble, I have to admit. Not surprisingly, it wasn’t going to plan. The Space Commandos were too disciplined to go to pieces, especially when met with a smaller, less organized force. But the overload was the trump card. Now they would have to be playing defensively and couldn’t just mow us down like fighting in the open.

  I ran up flights of stairs towards the ship. Our best bet was to secure the saw Charmer and Throx sniping from positions around the turbine casing, blasting three of them with precision shots. I tore through three more and scanned the catwalk above me. Teru had fought his way up and was cutting down the motherfuckers, hacking off limbs like a machete cutting through kudzu. I wounded one as he shot at Teru, but the strapping old goat moved too quickly, darting and dodging in a serpentine pattern that they seemed to always miss him until he was within striking distance and it was all over. The old guy was much more than a pilot, and more than some mumbo jumbo guru. He was also a peak fighter.

  My Cannon was almost drained. I ran for a defensive position where I could pick up a new weapon. That’s when I saw her.

  “Harley!” She had retreated to the level below me and was pinned behind a steel turbine with Commandos firing as close as they would dare. I grabbed the guardrail and vaunted myself over it, missing their fire by inches. She grabbed my arm and steadied me as I landed on the platform.

  “My gun is low,” I said.

  “Gee, thanks a lot for the rescue,” she smirked, taking a pistol from her holster and tossing it to me.

  “How long do we have before the thing blows?” she asked.

  “Doyle promised us three minutes.”

  “We’re walking away from this, right?” she said. I honestly didn’t have any reason to think so, given the odds. But for some reason something flowed through me. An inner confidence that we’d get carried through somehow. Call it intuition. Hell, call it what it was. Faith.

  We turned and fired with bloody fury. The pistol didn’t matter much against the strength of the Space Commando’s battle armor, but I managed to catch one of them in the head with a direct hit. Then four more reinforced him and we were forced to retreat behind the casing again. The fight was getting hot, and so was the turbine.

  Harley turned and fired, we were running out of time. Then, something struck the silver cannister. A rupture? No, we’d all be dust supernovaing in all directions. There, on the side of the turbine was a high-powered retractable zipline.

  “Derringer!” called down Celeste. “Take the handle!” A rod long enough for me to grip it with both hands flew down the line, stopping just short hitting the cannister.

  “Grab on to me,” I told Harley. She grabbed my waist and wrapped her voluptuous legs around mine. Then, I took the handle-bar rod in my hands and the two of us were instantly lifted up. I gave one of the Commandos a swift kick in the face as we were pulled up to the catwalk above. Our feet touched metal and we carefully raised ourselves onto the platform, missing the fire of our confused enemies by inches. Another Commando appeared, and though he was massive, I acted on pure instinct and more than a little adrenaline I threw him over the side. We raced up to the hole in the hull where Teru dispatched another with his laser sword. The door closed in on itself again and we were in the Commando’s away vehicle. The Wings had made it. No Commandos in sight. From the corner of my eye, I could see Throx taking the controls with Doyle beside him.

  “Celeste!” I called, scanning the small craft of survivors. “Celeste!” I was frantic now. She had to be on the ship. She was ahead of us. It didn’t make any sense that she
wouldn’t be there. I rushed over to the ship’s controls.

  “We have to go back,” I insisted.

  “Can’t go back,” Doyle said, pulling up a rear-camera view and showing it to me on the view screen. The reprogramming center was a ball of hot gas and space radiation. No doubt about it. There wasn’t anything to return to. Harley was beside me.

  “Derringer.” She shook her head. For the second time, the woman of my destiny was gone.

  10

  My eyes opened and for a moment, I was sure that it had been a dream. I was lying on my bed with my hands propping up my head, but my mind was still back on that space station. Celeste calling down to me, “Derringer!”

  I closed my eyes again. There was a small chime. Someone was at my door. I rose and found Harley, standing there just as Drasheel had. I wondered what she had in mind. If it was poisoning me to force sex, I was really not in the mood.

  “Hey,” said Harley softly. “You okay?” she nudged my chin with her knuckle.

  “I’m alive,” I admitted to myself. Whatever else I was, I was still alive, and that meant I had a responsibility not to wallow. The dead could rest all they wanted, but the living had to at least act like they cared.

  “We don’t actually know that she wasn’t on another ship. The Commandos could have had more than one entry point. I mean, hell, the Commander managed to survive that attack by the Gix. We still have no idea how she pulled that one.”

  “Why was she even there?” I knew the reprograming that I’d experienced was wrong, but putting one of their own commanders in that prison after she survived an enemy attack? “What do you think she knew that would make the military care so much that they would be willing to reprogram her?”

  “Whatever it was, they obviously didn’t think that it was working if they decided to send in the Commandos to clear the place out.”