by Tim C Taylor
Her cry unlocked his muscles and his hand stretched out for the flight control… but his hesitation proved fatal.
The Mustang shuddered under a hail of fire. He burned away at maximum gees until the engine safety limiter cut in and a sudden weight crushed the breath out of his chest. The momentum dump system had failed. He was a sitting target. While jinking as best he could, he assessed the damage.
Still numb from the loss of Beowulf, he could barely register what the Mustang’s system status was telling him. They’d been hit by corrosive munitions. His X-Boat’s armor was just about eaten away already, and the internal systems were failing one after another.
Hardits! Frakk them!
He had to look away from Janna so she wouldn’t see the terror reaching up from his gut to draw his lips into a tight white line. When pressed to talk about the time his Stork shuttle was eaten away around him in the escape from Tranquility, he’d brush it off like it was a joke, but every night since then he could only sleep if Janna was beside him. Without the protective aura of her love, he couldn’t hold at bay the terror that had never fully released him since that day.
He stole a glance at the main status screen. A warning light flashed, telling him that a fatal pressure breach was imminent.
In the last instant, he flicked a final glance at his lover. He and Janna both turned to touch the other, but too late… the automatic ejector system hurled them into space.
They were clad only in an emergency pressure suit. With five hours of air, a distress beacon and only the most rudimentary of comms, the odds of getting out of a combat zone alive were not good.
Janna, please forgive me!
Without the enhancements of the Mustang’s sensors and AI, the battle for Khallini was eerily quiet and surprisingly far off, almost as if the deadly fight had left him behind. It was someone else’s fight now.
He concentrated on finding Janna. He had no means to change his vector but just the sight of her would give him strength. Although she had a distress beacon same as him, he didn’t have any means of detecting it. His viewpoint span as he tumbled, making finding her even more difficult.
Then the battle came to him in the shape of another Hardit command boat passing only a few klicks away.
It came about in that peculiar manner the Hardit craft had.
And then set off on a new bearing.
Directly for him.
— Chapter 06 —
The Stork shook as it screamed up through the atmosphere. Unlike the three X-Boats it carried, the shuttle had only energy-emitting hull coatings and an old-fashioned heat sink to absorb the massive heat buildup from punching through into space at such speeds.
Within one of the Stork’s carrier pods, the atmosphere in Remus’s Swordfish fighter-bomber was pleasantly cool, but his link to the Stork’s systems told him the shuttle’s hull had heated well into dangerous territory.
“Ease off on the gas, Pilot,” Remus ordered. “We’re no use to anyone if we burn up in transit.”
“Slowing ascent,” acknowledged the shuttle’s pilot who was well used to Remus’s strange Wolfish sayings.
“Deploy in twenty,” warned the pilot.
“Remember your briefing,” Remus told the two Flight-Marines of his scratch flight. “We’re fitted with some kind of experimental EMP bomb. Hit each planet killer and move to the next target. Don’t worry about finishing them off and keep your eyes on the targets. Wing Commander Dock promises to keep the enemy fighters off our backs.”
“Five seconds…”
Remus shook his head. Talk about making things up on the run. The three X-Boat pilots had been briefed while sprinting nearly half a mile from the mess hall to the Stork waiting for them at the shuttle port.
It was only by chance that it was down here to be fitted with the latest prototype churned out by the fertile collaboration between human and mudsucker engineers.
“Good hunting,” said the shuttle’s pilot, and hit the launch control.
The Stork was carrying a total of four modified quick-deployment modules, each one originally designed to throw two squads of armored Marines out into space. Within a second of the pilot hitting the control, the outer door had retracted and all three Swordfish launched into space.
“Let’s bag us some planet killers,” said Remus.
“You got it,” agreed Cragger, flying the Swordfish on his starboard-rear position.
“What’s keeping you?” laughed Avanti, the third member of the scratch flight as he raced ahead, pushing his momentum dump to its limits as he directed his craft to close with the planet killers.
Wing Commander Dock was en route from the dockyard, as were X-Boats detached from flying Combat Space Patrol around the Beowulf. Romulus should be flying in that group. Friendly drones were zipping back from patrolling the region outside of the minefield.
The cavalry was coming, but for now it was down to Remus, Cragger, and Avanti with their untested new weapon.
A sudden thought occurred to Remus. “Do not fire your railguns,” he ordered the other two members of his flight.
“Why?” asked Avanti.
“If I’ve understood right,” replied Remus, working this out as he spoke, “our new weapons are like cyber grappling hooks. Snag them onto the enemy ships and our muddy friends will cyber-board.”
“So?” Avanti’s philosophy centered on his firing stud.
Cragger tended to think a fraction of a second longer than Avanti before firing. She answered his question. “Because there’s no point hooking your grapple onto something you’ve already blasted to drent.”
“Got it in one,” said Remus. “Here we go. Avanti, you take Papa-Kilo Seven. Cragger take Six, and I will take Niner. We deploy payload and then come back for Eight using Attack Pattern Delta.”
Remus flew his Swordfish in a corkscrew pattern at his target. Papa-Kilo Niner steered away, but it was such a lumbering behemoth that its maneuver made little difference to the nimble X-Boat. He screamed into the target before halting just 20 meters from the planet killer’s outer layer – Remus couldn’t think of the roughly finished mass as a hull – and let loose his new weapon. Something spun out of his X-Boat’s crescent wings. He didn’t even know what his new ordnance looked like, but it registered a hit.
Without obvious weapons, the planet killer had nothing to fire back at him. He flew away at maximum gees anyway, before turning back for Papa-Kilo Eight.
Remus wasn’t sure what to expect from his first target. There was no explosion, no change in bearing other than to continue its slow turn. In perfect tactical coordination the three Swordfish crisscrossed over Papa-Kilo Eight and loosed another salvo of their new ordnance.
He led his flight away to a safe distance and observed the result. The outer layers of the targets began to strip away. Was this the effect of the new weapon, to make the target tear itself to pieces?
“Reckon we were too late, Reamer.”
There was a catch in Cragger’s voice and it took a moment for Remus to understand why. The fragmenting outer surface of the targets was breaking into needles. Giant darts the length of his X-boat.
The targets, the strange-looking hulls… they were each a swarm of kinetic torpedoes.
“Do we go after them?” demanded Avanti.
“Negative,” Remus replied grimly. “We’re too late. Against beasts that size, all our railguns would do is detach the kinetic torpedoes for them. Am assigning fresh targets.” As he began painting into the tactical net a new trio of planet killers farther out from the planet – their next targets – he couldn’t help but look on with horror at the planet killers. The torpedoes had miniature thruster engines, just enough to spread them out into a deadly rain. Already the dart tips glowed with the heat of atmospheric braking. By the time they hit the ground at terminal velocity their momentum would be ferocious.
“Our weapons made no difference at all,” Remus said softly.
A new voice came through the speaker. “I never knew you suck
ed alluvial mud through your teeth, boy.”
Remus stiffened in his seat. The comm signal was coming from Wing Commander Dock.
Remus’s flight was already coming into range of their new targets. He signaled to hold back while he had time to interpret Dock’s riddles.
“Pardon, sir?”
“Wake up, boy! You’re not a damned mudsucker. Not ugly enough for a start and not half as smart.”
“But, sir. If we hit the outer layer of the Papa-Kilos with our new ordnance, the target just sheds its skin, and our cyber bombs with it.”
“We don’t know that means they’re ineffective, Flight-Sergeant. Anyway, I’d already considered that. I’m passing fresh targets. Time your attack well. Dock out.”
Remus’s Swordfish received fresh target data: a four-ship formation of planet killers farther out, just inside the minefield. His flight changed course to intercept the new targets.
As they moved to intercept, he watched the pane on his tac-display that showed the scene behind as the planet killers they’d abandoned carried out their deadly function. The layers of torpedoes had fallen away to reveal the central core of the planet killers: two cones stuck together at their bases. Unlike the kinetic torpedoes, which tipped into the lethal equations of orbital mechanics that Remus understood all too well, the central core turned about in a long, lazy arc that defied the laws of physics, until its nose pointed straight at the planet’s surface. He had the sense that an invisible force other than gravity reached up and pulled the 700-meter-long ships downward. A sharp tug and they disappeared out of view, leaving shockwaves in their wake that raced out through the atmosphere until the entire hemisphere churned with angry clouds.
Bright lights lit the sky, the clouds softening the searing blasts of energy so they looked pretty, even delicate. Whether they were the planet killers hitting home, or the defense from the zero-point air defenses, he couldn’t tell.
The wing commander was wrong. Their weapons had done nothing to prevent the ship striking Khallini. Dock was a strange old geezer, and Remus wasn’t sure that he respected the man even though he did respect his rank. For an old guy, he could outfly most of his command and scuttlebutt had it that he’d been made an officer by the Jotuns in the days before Momma had joined General McEwan in his revolution. The rumor mill spun other dark tales about Dock too, and all of it was probably drent.
All Remus could say of the commander was that he always had his reasons for doing anything.
And now, with mounting excitement, Remus could see why Dock had reassigned their targets. A dark cloud flew in from space and surrounded the four planet killers.
Avanti whooped. “It’s the frakking cavalry!”
Remus thought the incoming wave of friendly AI-drones looked more like a swarm of bees than mounted soldiers. He quickly revised his comparison to a plague of locusts. Dock must have given his little AI-controlled gun platforms highly unusual instructions because when Remus was ready for his attack run, the drones peeled away from the enemy ships to reveal they had been picked clean. The thick layers of detachable kinetic torpedoes had been shot off to reveal the vulnerable hull beneath.
The three Swordfish made two efficient passes that flung the mudsucker weapon out of their crescent wings, hitting all four enemy vessels.
Remus waited for some effect. But there was nothing. The planet killers picked up speed, still on course to penetrate Khallini’s atmosphere.
The weapons were ineffective, and when another wave of planet killers appeared just inside the minefield, Remus realized so too would be their defense.
But they had to do their best. “Let’s hit them again,” Remus ordered. “Use railguns this time.”
Before he could change course to come in for another attack a whistle came over the comm channel. Was that Dock or the side effect of a cyber-attack?
Then a piercing shriek drilled into his head. Instinctively he tried to clamp his hands over his ears to block out the aural attack, despite the fact his helmet was in the way.
But the noise cut out and Remus watched open mouthed as every planet killer simultaneously made a quarter turn anti-clockwise along its central axis, righted itself, and then made a quarter turn clockwise.
“What the hell are those things doing?” he asked.
“Victory roll,” answered Avanti. “The beautiful mudsuckers have only gone and done it. They’ve cyber-boarded and taken control.”
While the comm channel filled with Avanti and Cragger’s whoops and cheers, Remus needed to reassess the situation before he could join their celebrations. The planet killers were all turning back from the planet. The Wing Commander’s X-Boat squadrons, supported by swarms of AI-drones, were tearing through the fleeing Hardit survivors of their other attacks, and he was still receiving tactical updates from the ground, which meant at least someone down there was still alive. But Beowulf…
Ice gripped his heart. He re-checked the tactical grid, but it made no difference. Beowulf had been lost. He froze, his mind unable to grasp the enormity of that simple fact. He was trying to locate Romulus when he received an incoming transmission from Khallini-Control.
“Reamer this is K-CON. We need you planetside to pilot Storks. Leave your X-Boats at the OP2 platform and get your asses down the elevator pronto. There’s work to be done. This isn’t over by a long shot.”
“Say again, K-CON. This isn’t over?”
The operator working the Khallini Control call sign sighed. “Oh, what the hell, Reamer? The Chief Strategic Analyst has confirmed what I had thought were panicked rumors. And that freak’s suspicions are firmer than most normal folks’ facts.”
Remus’s mind brought up an image of the Chief Strategic Analyst, a strange little man inside a deep-sea bubble. He’d tried to murder General McEwan and Colonel Lee’s children. Rom always said he’d gotten off too lightly.
“This attack was not an isolated incident. Every fleet, every Legion-controlled system has been attacked simultaneously. No invasions. This was a coordinated pre-emptive strike designed to inflict maximum damage. I’ve lost contact with four planetary systems altogether, meaning their Hummers acting as comm nodes are dead. ‘K’ Fleet was hit hardest. I’m hearing 25% casualties.”
“Chodding hell.”
“Damned right. Whoever they are got the drop on us all right. They wanted to punish the Legion and the bastards got what they wanted.”
“I’ve got a good idea who they are.”
“Yes, Flight-Sergeant Remus,” came a new voice – a computer translation. “We all do. This is K-CON Actual. Now cut your small talk and get your flight’s buttocks down here like you’ve been told. I need you flying Storks up to those dead planet killers to make sure they stay safe, and to start getting some hard intelligence.”
K-CON Actual… that was Major-General Siniseen, the senior officer in the system and the most ferocious Littorane he’d ever seen. “Wilco, K-CON Actual. We’re on our way.”
Remus edged his Swordfish into the edge of the danger zone of his momentum dump system. It would only shave a few seconds off his journey time, but fear and duty urged him onward. Hardits or not, a new force operating alone or in alliance with an Imperial faction, whoever this new enemy was their aim had been to degrade the Legion’s fighting strength.
Which could only mean one thing.
They were coming back.
Most importantly to Remus, moving forward kept him looking backward; back to the debris field that had been the Beowulf and the combat space patrol that had protected her.
Romulus was supposed to be assigned to that patrol unit, but the data on his brother was confusing. One thing was clear.
Romulus was missing.
— Chapter 07 —
Such was the chaos and destruction in the wake of the Hardit sneak attack that it took nearly two days before Remus picked up any clue as to the fate of his brother. The trail led to a hospital ward overflowing with wounded, and a sleeping Wolf-woman diagnosed with su
ffering the effects of prolonged oxygen starvation.
Brain damage. The thought sickened him.
He sat by Janna’s bed for hours until the light of consciousness returned to Janna’s eyes and strengthened this time, rather than flickering out as it had so many times before. Remus bent over and kissed her scaly forehead. The green hexagonal plates of the ginquin parasite felt like warm polished leather.
The kiss ended, but he was unwilling to relinquish the touch of his lips and kept his lips pressed against her. Janna was all he had left. If he let go, she might leave him too.
Remus was cut off from his mother. Worse. He had received occasional word over the years, but she was stranded on Tranquility with only intermittent and often corrupted lightspeed comms. It took thirty years to pass a message there and back. It was like receiving word from a ghost. And although he had no memory of her, the death of his birth mother when he was a baby still left a gaping wound in his heart. If Romulus was truly gone then his girlfriend, Janna, would be the only family he had left. She was so desperately precious to him.
He sat back upright and turned his head away, unable to look Janna in the eye and see there that his brother was dead.
Janna reached out and squeezed his hand. “He was still alive when we ejected,” she said. “Don’t give up hope yet.”
“What happened?” Remus turned back and peered into Janna’s face, as if hoping to find answers in that scaly face. “It’s a blessing you survived, Janna. But I don’t understand. You were cut off and surrounded. How is it that I see you here alive?”
She glanced away, searching her memories for an answer. When she looked back at him, her eyes were filled with sadness. “It’s no use. I can’t remember anything between ejecting and waking up in hospital.” She added halfheartedly, “They say my memories might return.”
Her words propped up Remus, but only for a few seconds. Then the hope drained out of him and he knew in his heart that his brother had left him forever. He drew the wounded Wolf to him in as tight an embrace as he dared. Only the thought that it would embarrass her kept him from sobbing. His eyes streamed with silent tears.
