by M. D. Cooper
“There’s no way they know that, yet,” Chase replied. “And if they do, we stop firing and hightail it out of there. If they come after us, all the better.”
Ona glanced at Garth and shrugged. “I think it could actually work. We just never speak of this. We’ll be the laughing stocks of the Marauders.”
* * * * *
“Stars!” Rika cried out in frustration. “Another wave of these damn things?”
Around Piper’s node lay the smoking wreckage of the spherical drones that had fallen from the ceiling. Only four of the original group Niki had breached remained, but there were three jammed into the corridor leading to the surface, which was helping to keep the encroaching Niets at bay.
They’d thought it was over, but on the far side of the chamber, another thirty drones were emerging from the walls, lifting into the air and moving around Piper’s node to attack the two women.
Leslie had joined Rika on the catwalk, and took a moment to sag against the railing.
“And we always say the heavies have all the fun.” The scout laughed before checking her remaining loadout. “Starting to run dry, here.”
“Is this new bad news, or ‘we figured this would happen’ bad news?” Rika asked.
the AI said.
“What!” both women cried out at once.
“How?” Rika added, while firing her electron beam into a drone that was easing around Piper’s node. Stars, I wish I’d brought one of Finaeus’s whip-arms along. Those things would make short work of these bots.
Niki made a sound of consternation before replying to Rika’s prior question.
“Great!” Leslie muttered as she fired both her rifles at the onrushing drones, driving several of them back around Piper’s node.
“Sorry,” Leslie replied while continuing to fire on drones that came around the node.
Rika followed suit on her side, while also accessing her taps into Delta Moon’s STC and reviewing the scan data.
“Well I’ll be a comet’s asshole,” she said with a smile. “The Lance and the Republic are out there! They’re absolutely pummeling a Harriet at close range…they just broke the shields! Oh, shit!”
“Stars, Rika share the feed!” Leslie shouted over the sounds of weapons fire, and Rika nodded, swallowing as she shared the datastream.
“They got nuked,” Rika whispered.
“Nuked shmooked,” the scout shot back. “We saw the pounding the I2 took from the Niets at Pyra. Stasis can handle…wow, that was a lot of nukes.”
Rika whistled, unable to find the words. Then she realized that with control of the STC, she could reach out to her fleet. Not even bothering with proper protocol, she leapt across the networks and burst into Chase’s mind.
AN UNUSUAL EVAC
STELLAR DATE: 10.23.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: MSS Fury Lance, near Delta Moon
REGION: Epsilon, Old Genevia, Nietzschean Empire
“Nice metaphor, Potter,” Ona said. “Heather is actually sending pictures of her rampage through Farthing Station. She’s nuts.”
Chase gave a quiet laugh, his gaze fixed on the Nietzschean Harriet Carrier only six hundred meters off the Fury Lance’s bow. Even at dock, ships this large were never so close to one another. He could read the name emblazoned on the enemy vessel, Star Hawk, and make out the eleven spears that noted the number of capital ships it had destroyed.
“I have…wait…no…” Garth said, sounding confused.
“What is it, Chief?” Chase asked.
“I had two Nietzschean ships on a direct course for Delta Moon, a cruiser and an older-style dreadnought. They were three light seconds away…and now they’re gone.”
“There are a lot of ships out there,” Chase gestured at the holotank where thousands of Nietzschean ships were pulling away from various stations, and the impending destruction of the moons surrounding Epsilon. “Could have been a sensor ghost.”
“Maybe,” Garth allowed. “Not a lot are flying closer to the moons, though. Doesn’t matter, they were a long way off.”
“OK,” Chase said, glancing at the holo to see that Travis on the Republic had signaled his readiness. “Let’s do this.”
The two Marauder ships shed their stealth systems, and activated stasis shielding. Both ships were positioned perpendicular to the enemy vessel, beyond the firing angles of the H-Class carrier’s main guns.
Potter and Ona had pre-programmed the opening barrage, as had Dredge and his counterparts on the Republic. The bridge crew didn’t have to lift a finger, as both vessels unleashed every forward-facing beam they possessed, weakening the Star Hawk’s midship shield umbrellas.
One-ton slugs launched from the Fury Lance, tearing into the massive carrier, which had begun to rotate to bring its main guns to bear on the Marauder ships.
“Keeping us in position,” Garth announced.
The Republic breached the Star Hawk’s shields on the other side as well, and began slinging kinetics into the enemy vessel.
Chase glanced at another holotank, watching as the Capital and the Undaunted dove between the four Harriets at higher orbits, drawing those carriers further from the moon. The tactic appeared to be working, but then one of the enemy carriers shifted course, dropping toward Delta Moon and the fight surrounding the holed carrier.
At the same time, hundreds of missiles streaked out from the Star Hawk’s aft and fore launchers, the weapons arcing out from the carrier and slamming into the rear of the Fury Lance and the Republic, nuclear blooms surrounding both ships.
Chase held his breath. All sensor data winked out as the stasis shields fully enveloped the Lance to protect it from the blast. Seven long seconds later, scan came back online, though the ionized plasma surrounding the ship limited visibility.
“Bringing us back around,” Garth reported.
Ona laughed as she pushed an image up onto the main display. “They hurt themselves more than us with that!”
Much of the Harriet Carrier’s hull was blackened, and atmosphere was venting in several locations.
“Taking fire from the other Harriet!” Garth called out a second later.
“Dammit,” Chase muttered, knowing he couldn’t get a dropship out of the bays and down to the moon in the midst of this battle. Even with stealth enabled, a shuttle would light up like a beacon, flying through all the plasma from the nukes.
Suddenly he felt a Link connection.
Her laugh filled his mind, and suddenly every worry, all the fear and stress, just disappeared. Rika was alive and well; anything and everything was possible again.
Chase thought of the available shuttles on the Fury Lance and Republic. None of them were large enough to take a core that size—not without ripping out all the seats and cutting a rather large hole in the bulkhead.
Chase laughed aloud.
Chase knew he was grinning like an idiot, but he added a laugh to it, as well.
“What is it?” Ona asked staring at him with hope-filled eyes.
He let out a whoop and thrust a fist in the air. “That, my most excellent bridge crew, was Rika! Passing coordinates to the nav system.”
Ona bit her lip and nodded vigorously, while Garth let out a victorious shout.
Potter added.
Garth tensed, shifting his focus back to his console. “They’re back!” he cried out. “Right on top of us.”
“They?” Chase asked turning to the holotank of the battlespace, still lit up by the beams and rails firing between the two Marauder ships and the Harriets—though less from the Star Hawk as each second passed.
Then he saw them. Just ten kilometers above the Fury Lance were the two Nietzschean ships that Garth had spotted earlier. The cruiser and the dreadnought.
“Put it up,” Chase said. “And get us close to the Star Hawk, again. We need to shoot that bird down. Nuke it if you have to.”
As he spoke, a tall woman appeared on the main display. “Hello, Captain Chase. I’m Colonel Adira; Vargo sent me to help.”
“He what?” Chase asked, then realized that every question he was about to ask had already been answered: the woman was a mech, she was aboard Nietzschean ships—ships that registered as having stasis shields—and she could only have gotten their location from Vargo Klen, just as she’d said. “Nevermind. We need to get that Harriet and its friends off our back so we can send evac down to the planet to get Rika.”
“Rika’s down there?” the mech asked. “Send me the coordinates. I can grab her in a jiff.”
“You’ll need something big,” he cautioned. “She has an SAI core that needs to come up, and it’s five meters cubed.”
A broad smile split Colonel Adira’s lips. “Don’t worry about that. We have dragons.”
* * * * *
“I can’t believe it,” Rika exulted, grinning inside her helmet like an idiot, and wishing Leslie could see it. “They’re coming. They’re fucking coming. Thank stars. Piper, we’re getting you out of here!”
A round pinged off her armor, and she realized that the Nietzschean soldiers had made it past the drones’ blockage, and were spilling into the bowl.
“Aw, shit,” she muttered “These guys aren’t smart enough not to shoot at Piper.”
Without another word, both Leslie and Rika leapt from the catwalk, sailing over the long drop leading to the black hole lurking far below Piper’s node, before running across the wide bowl in opposite directions, drawing the enemy fire away from the SAI.
Trapped between the bots and the Niets, Rika worried they may not be able to hold out until evac arrived. Chase hadn’t exactly said it, but she knew that he didn’t have a shuttle handy that was large enough for Piper’s node. She realized that asking for some backup while they waited would have been wise, and was about to reach out again, when she spotted movement in the shaft above.
Something had blotted out the dim light of the stars.
Rika could only give it a cursory look as she fired on a pair of drones and the brave, but foolish Niet that had charged her, but whatever was in the shaft was falling…and fast.
Seconds later, it burst into the chamber, veering away from Piper’s node and instantly diving toward the Nietzschean soldiers. The blue-white flash of an electron beam shot out of its mouth, and tore into the enemy soldiers.
From its mouth?
Rika’s mind finally registered what she was seeing. It was a dragon…a mech dragon. Now that she understood what had flown into the chamber, the rough shape of a Skyscream became apparent, but it had been modified to look like the mythological creature of old.
It had a tail, wings, even clawed feet. A long neck protruded from the body, and—as Rika had already witnessed—beamfire poured from its mouth.
What was even more amazing was that a mech sat astride the metal beast, holding a massive war hammer aloft as the creature swept across the space.
The dragon-riding mech swung her hammer at a drone, energy surging around the weapon as it smashed the drone’s casing, as her mount wheeled about, laying waste to the drones with its beams and claws followed by a barrage of missiles that launched from under its wings.
Two more of the mechanical beasts dropped out of the shaft and joined the fray, as the first dragon with the mech atop it swung toward Rika and settled on the ground.
“Rika, I presume?” the woman asked as she leapt off the dragon and landed before her.
Rika hadn’t realized it at first, but the rider’s armor was stylized to make her look rather demonic—even her helmet had long, curved horns.
“That’s me,” Rika said, glad her helmet hid her slack-jawed expression. “You are?”
“Colonel Adira, at your service! This here is Prentis. Captain Chase said you needed a pickup, and I have just the mechs for the job.”
“Dragons?” Rika asked, still adjusting to what she was seeing.
“Nice to meet you, Colonel Rika,” Prentis-the-mech-dragon said with a low rumble.
“Well, they don’t call my company Adira’s Demons for nothing. We get a lot of pleasure in scaring the shit out of Niets. Plus, the K1Rs really wanted to fly, so we worked these up.”
“Effective,” Leslie praised as she approached, firing at a single drone that tried to rise from the surrounding carnage. “So, we ask for shuttles, and Chase sends you?”
“Why take a shuttle when you can ride a dragon?” Adira asked with a shrug and a laugh.
Leslie offered her hand. “Captain Leslie, glad to meet you. I can’t think of any reason to take a shuttle when dragons are an option.”
“As much as I’d love to sit around and chat all day, we should probably get the hell out of here,” Rika said, eyeing another wave of drones that were emerging from the walls, much to the joy of the dragons, who roared with delight as they charged the machines.
A sigh came from the AI.
Realization dawned on Rika.
* * * * *
Four minutes later, they were airborne. The dragon Rika was astride carefully cradled Piper’s node in his clawed talons as they rose through the kilometer-long shaft below Adira and Leslie. They broke the surface in seconds, and Leslie’s dragon nearly collided with a Nietzschean fighter.
The K1R-turned-fantastical-beast took off after the Nietzschean craft, firing its beams and launching missiles, while Leslie shot at the enemy from its back.
Rika looked up to see the point of light that was the Fury Lance approaching Delta Moon, its beams lighting up the sky as they tore into a Harrier that was dropping down toward the dreadnought. Another dreadnought and cruiser were nearby, and the Republic was moving around the enemy ship, hitting it in the engines.
Rika snorted.
