Contagion

by David Ryker

  Their strategy became all too clear. The main Centaurian fleet had abandoned this planet. Instead they had left this rearguard to take out as many of our main ships as possible.

  “Confirm attack orders,” Qiang said through the comm an instant before I asked the same thing.

  The reply came from the Chordatid commander a second later.

  “Orders confirmed. Escort missiles to designated targets.”

  So we would nuke the planet anyway to keep them from returning. After seeing the cancer that had taken over their homeworld, the Chordatids had decided it was better to kill it and deny it to the enemy than to try and save it. It was past saving.

  And we were past pulling back.

  My fighter squadron escorted the three nuclear missiles into the upper stratosphere as the Centaurian formation shot up to meet us.

  34

  The clam ships beneath us made evasive maneuvers, trying to dodge the smart missiles that streaked by us to hurtle into their midst. The Centaurians’ movements were erratic, inhumanly quick and unpredictable. Of the eight clam ships I counted, only two got hit, bursting apart from direct hits. The rest of the missiles flew harmlessly down into the atmosphere.

  Now we outnumbered them, ten of us against six of them, but they were far superior.

  A moment later, the Centaurians fired. A meteor swarm of green energy pulses shot at us, coming so quick each of our Shadow Fighters got targeted and had to duck and weave to avoid them. A warning signal told me one of my wingmen got grazed and put temporarily out of action, the strange energy these beings wielded overloading even our advanced systems. My readout winked off and back on as another bolt nearly got me.

  None of the bolts went for the missiles.

  Weren’t they even going to try and stop the nukes? Did they only want to kill us?

  If this was a trap, it was an odd one. Why work so hard to infect this planet only to abandon it? But as Valeria had said, it would be all but impossible to second-guess their psychology.

  I targeted a clam fighter, sent out a burst of autocannon fire from both turrets, and when the thing dodged, I let it have a burst from my bigger nose autocannon followed by a missile.

  The Centaurian fell for my trick, the nose autocannon slugs thudding away on its tough skin, chipping away at that protective coating around the hidden brain. A second later the missile slammed into it. It veered off course, then did a wide loop around to get back into the fight.

  Remarkable. Not even a Shadow Fighter could have taken that amount of abuse.

  I shot a missile at a Centaurian engaging with one of my wingmen and went after the wounded fighter. Cutting down on their numbers was the main thing.

  I hit the bastard with all three autocannons just as he came round, the force sent him spinning off again, then I kicked it in the butt with a missile that cracked it open like an egg.

  “Hell, yeah! These guys ain’t so tough!”

  I spun around to get back into the fight, and ate my words. Only one other clam fighter was down, spinning helplessly into the stratosphere on a path that would bring it to a fiery doom. Of my nine wingmen, three were incapacitated from near misses and another had been blown to pieces. The rest were fighting for their lives, pirouetting and firing in a weird dance around three nuclear missiles that plunged toward the planet, completely ignored.

  A brilliant flare from a higher altitude distracted my attention for a second. Another large ship had taken a direct hit from the Centaurian formations. Fuck. They were whittling our fleet down while I played tag with a bunch of flying clams.

  Let the fleet do their job. I had to do mine. We had to get these motherfuckers out of the way, deal with their second line of defense lower down, and complete the mission. I hit the thrusters and flew back into the action.

  Of the five pilots remaining in my Shadow Fighter squadron, only four were still flying by the time I made it there. A few from the other squadrons had been taken out too. I hoped the Dri’kai had more of these wonder weapons.

  I swooped in on a battered clam fighter just as it took out another of my people, giving it all three autocannons at point blank range. Chips of the hard black material flew away, and I literally dug a hole through the shell to pulp the brain within.

  Then another came at me, and I targeted a wound I saw on its shell and put a missile right into it.

  After a few more seconds of vicious dogfighting, it was all over. The enemy were all dead, and so were all of us except for Corporal Chen, who had a shattered wing.

  I put the viewer on full magnification and sucked in my breath. The wounds on her ship were closing up before my eyes.

  “Just you and me, Corporal Chen,” I said once I got my voice back.

  “No sweat.”

  She didn’t sound all that confident. That was okay. I was shitting my pants too.

  We dove, racing to catch up with the missiles. They were set to move a bit more slowly than last time so we could keep up in just this sort of circumstance.

  But with all the time wasted fighting the Centaurian formation, and the flying fish swooping up to meet us, it was still going to be tight.

  The viewscreen started to glow red as we caught up to the missiles.

  “Ship is not designed to enter planetary atmosphere,” the computer intoned in that bland voice it had. “Hull integrity will be compromised in thirty seconds.”

  “Better than before,” I muttered. The Dri’kai engineers had put a heat-resistant coating on the noses of all the Shadow Fighters. It reduced the stealth technology somewhat, but it was necessary if we were going to see these missiles safely to their targets.

  I locked onto the formation of ten flying fish that were coming up to meet us.

  “Computer, inform me when targets get into missile range.”

  “Understood.”

  “Corporal Chen, I want you to go a kilometer to the right.”

  “Sir?”

  “I want to see if they’re after us or the missiles.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  She sheared off to the right, trailing behind because we were both going at full thrusters and now she was moving at an angle.

  Just as I suspected, five of those monstrous things moved off to intercept her.

  Corporal Chen opened up with her autocannons. I started a second later. At this range it was hard to hit, but at least we could see relatively clearly. We both got one.

  I sheared off to the left, hoping to draw the remaining four from the missiles, but they didn’t budge.

  “Shit. What’s their game?” I growled as I moved back to rejoin the missiles.

  “Unknown,” the computer replied.

  “Shut up, for fuck’s sake.”

  The viewscreen began to glow brighter. The Shadow Fighter adjusted, partially clearing my vision, but it was getting harder and harder to see.

  I kept firing, giving short bursts and trying to maintain my aim as my Shadow Fighter bucked and shuddered in the thickening atmosphere.

  “Hull integrity will be compromised in twenty seconds,” the computer said. “Targets are now within missile range.”

  I gave another burst from all three autocannons and launched two missiles. The flying fish jerked to the side, one getting raked by autocannon fire and another blowing to shreds from one of my missiles.

  The last two kept coming. I didn’t see how Corporal Chen was faring. I didn’t have the time.

  I focused on one and fired my final two missiles one after the other.

  Or at least tried to.

  “Missile launcher jammed due to heat of atmospheric reentry.”

  “Great timing! Fix it!”

  “Missile launcher is not part of original design and cannot self-heal.”

  Oh crap. The missile launchers probably got fried the last time I pulled this stunt and the repair crews hadn’t fixed them thoroughly, or fixed them just fine and some part finally gave from the stress.

  “Hull integrity will be compromised in
fifteen seconds.”

  “Yeah yeah, I’ve heard it all before.”

  I focused on the one on the left and took it out with a burst of autocannon fire. Just as I targeted the last remaining one, its image hazy in the white heat, Corporal Chen shouted into the comm, “I’ll get him, sir!”

  But she didn’t fire at the flying fish.

  A pulse of green energy came from behind, nearly clipping my right wing.

  All my controls went black and I started to tumble end over end in the atmosphere. As I swung around I saw Corporal Chen finishing off a clam fighter that had followed us down. A second swooped down from a little further up.

  Fuck, I’d been so focused on what was in front of me I had forgotten to check my rear. The support fighters were supposed to have taken these guys out. Why hadn’t they?

  Maybe they were all dead.

  Just like I was going to be.

  As my ship tumbled around I got a vivid look at the last flying fish shooting straight for me, its hungry maw opening wide.

  The ship spun again, and I saw Corporal Chen engaging with the second clam fighter, and far too busy to help me.

  Not that there was anything to do for a man streaking across the skies just like a meteor.

  Except meteors don’t get eaten.

  I shouted at the top of my lungs, trying to wake up the computer, hurting my bad arm and leg as I banged on the control panels and the interior of the cockpit.

  Yeah, I lost it. Sue me.

  I got one last look at Corporal Chen and the clam fighter blasting away at each other, and then my Shadow Fighter spun again and I saw flying fish, appallingly close.

  All of a sudden, my cockpit lit up.

  “Ship has self healed,” the computer said. “All functions have returned to normal.”

  “I’ll never tell you to shut up again!” I shouted as I brought my ship into a steady dive.

  But it was too late. The flying fish was on me.

  My hands flew over the controls. The top autocannon turret fired a long burst clockwise. The bottom turret fired counterclockwise. The nose autocannon focused forward.

  I kept all three firing as I plunged into the creature’s vast throat.

  Darkness, just for a second.

  Then blinding light.

  I’d cut through! I pulled up hard, the controls nearly being torn from my grip.

  “Ascend immediately,” the computer said.

  “That’s what I’m trying to do!”

  As the tattered remains of the last flying fish fell, I struggled to pull out of that suicidal dive. The entire ship shook, the white-hot viewscreen wavering in front of my half-blinded eyes.

  “Ascend immediately.”

  “Is hull integrity breached?”

  “No. A thousand megaton nuclear strike is due in five seconds.”

  “Oh right, that.”

  “Three seconds.”

  I got control of the ship. Corporal Chen had defeated the last clam fighter and was already ascending.

  “Sir, are you all—”

  A blinding flash on the surface. The screens went black. If I had been looking toward the planet and not my sole surviving wingman, I would have lost my sight. I hit the thrusters on maximum. I saw Corporal Chen do the same.

  “Will the shockwave reach us?” I asked the computer.

  “Shockwave due in five seconds. Four. Three. Two. One.”

  The Shadow Fighter shook, but not as much as I thought it would. The ship bucked, and for a sick second I thought I was going to lose control, but then I got back on a steep ascent. We were already high in the stratosphere. The shockwave had partially dissipated, and there wasn’t enough air pressure to hit us hard.

  “God forgive us,” Corporal Chen whispered.

  I looked through the rear viewscreens as they came back online.

  All across the surface of the planet, huge mushroom clouds bloomed up from the ocean.

  The World Ocean. Home to one of the Orion Arm’s intelligent races. Now a boiling waste of irradiated toxins.

  The butcher’s bill made for grim reading.

  While I and my squadron had been escorting our own form of Armageddon to the planet’s surface, the fleet had managed to fend off the rest of the Centaurian formations and move to the other side of the planet to finish the job.

  But at a horrible cost. We had lost nine ships completely destroyed, including a Dri’kai battleship, plus more than fifty fighters. Thousands of individuals had perished.

  The Centaurians had been smart. They had refueled and taken off, leaving behind that strange algae to experiment on the ocean species. They knew that we would return, and calculated that they probably couldn’t defend their resource base without risking their entire fleet. So they had abandoned their algae and whatever developments it had made. That meant they were afraid of us.

  Maybe less so now that they had taken out several of our main ships. I had no doubt that they had some scout ship that slunk away after the battle was finished, hurrying to report to their fleet just how much damage they had caused us.

  It would also report that we had won. The enemy would not return to the Chordatid home world, that was for sure.

  Valeria and I stood on the observation deck of the Nansen, looking out at the stars, wondering where the Centaurian fleet could be hiding and where it was headed next. Wherever they went, we would have to follow them. We couldn’t rest until this threat to the Orion Arm was eliminated. There would be some hard fights ahead, but all the races were united and we had learned how the Centaurians fought. We wouldn’t be caught by surprise anymore.

  I glanced at the woman beside me, the woman who had tied up her life in mine. She admired me, maybe even loved me, even though neither of us had yet said the words. I wondered what she’d think when I told her the truth about myself. I had to tell Qiang too. The two people I cared most about on the Nansen might soon turn against me.

  Foyle had survived the battle, fighting like a demon and taking out several enemy ships. It would be hard to deny him a promotion now. I had no idea how I was going to take it up with R’kk’kar.

  Yet another insurmountable problem to add to the pile.

  Taking a deep breath, I looked back out to the stars. I realized that even if Commander Loftsdóttir hadn’t ordered me to tell them, even without Foyle’s threats, that I would tell them anyway. I couldn’t have their friendship on false pretenses. They had to either love me or hate me for what I was, and what I had been. I had to come clean.

  Yes, there were a lot of big battles ahead.

  For me, for the human race, and for the entire Orion Arm.

  About the Author

  Sean McLachlan is an archaeologist who has excavated in the Middle East, Europe, and the United States. Now a full-time writer, he specializes in history, travel, and fiction. He won the 2013 Society of American Travel Writers Award for his Iraq reportage. He’s traveled to more than 30 countries, interviewing nomads in Somaliland, climbing to clifftop monasteries in Ethiopia, studying Crusader castles in Syria, and exploring caves in his favorite state of Missouri.

  Sean is the author of numerous works of fiction and history. Fans of David Ryker might be interested in his Toxic World post-apocalyptic series and his Trench Raiders World War One action novels. For a complete list, check out his Amazon author’s page. You can also follow him on Facebook and his quarterly newsletter Sean’s Travel and Tales. Every issue includes a travel article, short story, and a coupon for a free or discounted ebook. Your information will never be shared.

 

 

 
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