Darius pulled himself into the pilot’s seat and pulled off his helmet to put on an oxygen mask. That done, he slipped his helmet back on, dropped the visor, and slapped the open/close button for the canopy. As it dropped down around him, Darius flicked the ignition switch. He was greeted to a rising whine as the Vulture’s reactor spun up. Status lights and buttons glowed to life and holo displays swam into focus.
Darius reached around for his air hose and screwed it into place at the bottom of his mask. His comms lit up with activity, and the familiar voice of Red Leader crackled through his helmet speakers.
“His highness has arrived!”
“Can it, Red One,” Darius said. Blake was one of the pilots who’d consistently scored the highest in the simulators, both in terms of his solo score, and the score of his randomly assigned flight groups. As a result, Darius had made him the leader of Red Squadron. For the same reason, Ikatosh was the leader of White Squadron, and Ra was the leader of Black. “Squadron leaders, report,” Darius ordered.
“White Squadron to launch is ready,” Ike said in his characteristically odd phrasing.
“Black Squadron standing by,” Ra added in his purring voice.
“Red leader?”
“We were born ready, Spaceman.”
“All right. On my mark, White Squadron, you go first, followed by Blue, then Red, and finally Black. Everyone stay close and don’t stray from the Deliverance’s flight path. I’m told the wormhole will rip us apart if we do.”
Several double clicks sounded from the comms as squadron leaders confirmed their orders.
Darius sucked in a deep breath, steeling himself for the battle to come. He tried not to think about how many times he’d died in the simulators. If he bit the dust this time, it wouldn’t just be a useful lesson. It would be goodbye for good, and unlike the last time that he’d fought a real engagement, this time he had a reason to live: Cassandra was alive, and she needed her father.
Darius pushed those thoughts from his mind and mentally activated his comms once more.
“Punch it White Squadron!”
Chapter 54
Darius slammed into the back of his seat as his fighter rocketed down the launch tube and out into space.
Space was warped inside the wormhole, making it look like they were trapped inside a giant glass bottle.
Up ahead, a dozen small pairs of green brackets with white outlines identified White Squadron. Darius engaged his helmet’s 360-degree visibility mode, and the inside of his cockpit disappeared. He glanced behind him to see a dozen green bracket pairs with red outlines come shooting out the bow of the Deliverance. A few moments later, Black Squadron appeared.
Darius keyed the comms. “All squadrons form on me.” As he said that, he pulled up hard and flipped his Vulture over on the spot.
“Roger,” Blake said.
The other leaders clicked their comms to acknowledge, and Darius pushed his throttle up to two Gs. The Deliverance loomed large before him, its hull shining bright with the mysterious radiance Darius had seen Tanik projecting from his hand.
Darius skimmed low over the top of the mighty ship, faster and faster, until it became a bright, silvery blur beneath him. In the distance, fat green laser beams lashed out from the Cygnian Fleet, drawing brief flashes of light from the carrier’s hull. Those beams should have been burning holes in the Deliverance’s armor, and drawing gusts of depressurizing air from the ship, but there was no sign of any damage, and the Deliverance made no effort to return fire.
As the carrier fell away behind him, Darius’s comms crackled with a new, but familiar voice. It was a voice that Darius recognized from the simulators, that of Lieutenant Commander Carter from Flight Ops.
“All fighters, maintain a defensive formation at five thousand klicks. Intercept enemy missiles and fighters. Good hunting.”
“Roger that, Ops,” Darius replied. “You heard the Commander! Fly to five thousand klicks and make a wall.”
Acknowledging clicks echoed back, and Darius set a waypoint on his nav display, exactly five thousand kilometers from the aft end of the Deliverance. That done, he set his Vulture’s autopilot to take him there at a leisurely three Gs.
Long minutes passed as his Vulture accelerated to reach the waypoint, and then decelerated to avoid overshooting it. Halfway there the Cygnian fleet stopped firing, and began launching fighters. The double chimes of enemy contact alerts reverberated in Darius’s ears.
“We’ve got incoming!” Blake said, just as Darius’s autopilot chimed to indicate he’d arrived at his waypoint.
Then came the sharper warning squawks of enemy missile launches, and Darius checked a virtual contacts panel on his HUD to see torpedoes streaming toward them from the Cygnian Fleet. ETA fifteen minutes for the leading wave.
“Target those torpedoes,” Darius ordered.
“Black Squadron targeting,” Ra replied.
Ikatosh clicked his comms.
But as usual, Blake had something to say about it: “We’ve got Blade Fighters targeting us,” he said. “They’re almost in range, and they’re going to pick us off if we just sit here trying to intercept those torpedoes.”
Darius summoned a nav display on his HUD and studied it. Son of a vix... he thought. Those Cygnian fighters were pulling a sustained acceleration of 12 Gs to keep up with their torpedoes. That should have been impossible, but Cygnian pilots were much more tolerant of high Gs than most other species. What that meant for Darius and the other Vulture pilots was that the Cygnians’ lead fighters would reach weapons range with them just five seconds after the enemy torpedoes did. That didn’t give them long to shoot down those torps. He grimaced and shook his head.
“You’ve got time,” Darius insisted. “Target the torpedoes first, and then go evasive and take out those fighters. We can’t let either one of them through.”
The other squadron leaders clicked their comms to confirm. Darius marked his first target, being careful to pick a torpedo that none of the other Vultures were targeting. That done, he armed his Vulture’s twin laser cannons, and waited to reach weapons range.
There were a hundred and ten torpedoes incoming, and just forty-eight Vultures targeting them. That meant they each had to take out more than two torpedoes, and they had only five seconds to do it without interference from enemy fighters.
Time to weapons range ticked down beside Darius’s target.
00:10...
00:05...
00:00
Darius pulled the trigger twice in quick succession and two double golden laser beams snapped out. He watched them converge on his target, but it didn’t explode.
Darius blinked. What?
“Fek it! Those torps are heavily armored!” Blake said.
A prickle of warning raised the hairs on the back of Darius’s neck, and he snapped out his momentary shock just in time.
“Juke!” he yelled, and broke into an evasive flight pattern an instant before a torrent of sky-blue lasers stuttered out from the incoming Cygnian fighters.
Darius effected a randomly bucking barrel roll with a combination of his main thrusters and maneuvering jets. It seemed to be keeping the enemy fighters off him, but not all of the other pilots were as lucky.
Vultures exploded on all sides in bright bursts of molten orange debris. The accompanying death chimes from Darius’s contacts panel were at once forlorn and urgent. Blue Squadron lost two pilots in as many seconds.
“Tighten it up!” Darius said, even as a dazzling sapphire beam stabbed by him with inches to spare. A damage report blinked at the bottom of his HUD, and he mentally checked it to find a fist-sized hole in his starboard wing. Thankfully the damage was only superficial.
“Fekkin’ phantoms!” Blake roared, and returned fire. The rest of the fighter group opened fire, too, trading golden lasers for blue.
More losses chimed in Darius’s ears, but he tried not to focus on them. Instead he targeted the nearest Blade and let loose a burst of three f
ire-linked blasts. The enemy fighter exploded in a fiery burst of light, and then he slipped back into his evasive maneuvers. Blue lasers stabbed furiously all around him as the enemy fighters drew near, and death chimes echoed furiously as Vultures were picked off in rapid succession. Some pilots screamed about their injuries, only to have those frantic cries silenced a few seconds later because they forgot to keep juking.
“We’re outnumbered!” Ra said. “We need to fall back.”
But just as he said that, the Deliverance opened fire. Wave after wave of bright golden lasers and heavy red ones flashed by them, converging on the enemy formation. Bright orange explosions bloomed, peppering the void with fire.
“Yeehaw!” Blake crowed. “Take that, kakkers!”
Half of the enemy fighters evaporated in the first volley.
Darius spared a potshot for a nearby torpedo—again to no effect. He stopped juking for a second to focus fire with two more fire-linked blasts, and was rewarded with a blinding flash of light that tore through his retinae and left him blinking spots.
He grinned and broke into a fresh barrel roll just as the Deliverance’s second volley came. Explosions sprinkled the void as Cygnian Blades and torpedoes were vaporized.
“I’m hit,” a quiet voice said over his squadron frequency, and Darius frowned, realizing he recognized it. He checked the comms to see that it was Blue Four. Lisa.
Blue Seven screamed, and then winked off the comms as subsequent fire found him.
“I can’t... I can’t breathe!” Lisa went on in a gasping voice.
Darius switched to a private channel. “Lisa, calm down. Where are you hit?” he asked, while dodging a flurry of blue lasers from the remaining Blades.
“Air hose. Chest.”
“Kak,” Darius muttered. Patch your hose from the utility compartment.”
Lisa gave no reply, and he glanced at his virtual nav display to see that she’d stopped maneuvering. “Don’t fly straight!” he warned, but even as he said that, enemy lasers converged on her fighter. “Eject!”
He turned his head to physically look at her fighter, watching as blue lasers stabbed through it from every side. By some miracle none of them hit her Alckam reactor, but her fighter’s thrusters went dark, and the lights died inside her cockpit.
“Lisa!”
She gave no reply, even though her Vulture’s emergency backup power should have kicked in by now.
Darius felt a familiar ache forming in his chest that had nothing to do with the high Gs he was pulling.
The Deliverance went on pounding the incoming waves of enemy fighters and torpedoes, lighting space on fire with every volley.
Darius targeted the next nearest enemy fighter and broke out of his evasive flight pattern long enough to blast it into a molten orange cloud of shrapnel.
That’s for you, Lisa, he thought as the light of that explosion faded.
Chapter 55
The remainder of the Cygnian fighters went down in a matter of seconds. The torpedoes took longer, however, as they soon broke into spiraling evasive patterns much like the one Darius himself was using.
“Fek it! I can’t get a lock!” Blue Twelve said.
“Can that chatter, and try harder, Twelve,” Darius replied, while struggling to get a lock himself. Each time he pulled the trigger, his lasers zipped through empty space, or else they glanced off to no effect.
After a full minute of trying, Darius finally destroyed one torpedo. There were still twenty left, however, and now they were at point blank range.
Darius snapped off another shot just before the remaining ordnance sailed by him, forcing him to flip around and race after it. The Deliverance’s guns tracked those spiraling missiles, stitching the void together with needles of red and gold. Oddly, the shining light Darius had seen pouring from the carrier’s hull was no longer visible.
“We’re not gonna get them all!” Blake warned.
Darius switched his lasers from linked to single-fire mode and pulsed a steady stream of golden beams after his next target, tracking it as best he could. All around him the remaining Vultures did the same thing, and they managed to intercept all but two torpedoes. The Deliverance caught one of them as it closed to just a few dozen klicks. Darius fired desperately at the final torpedo, but missed. It was going to hit.
“Take it out!” he screamed.
Vultures fired relentlessly, heedless of how many laser beams were going wide and hitting the Deliverance. The Deliverance herself had stopped firing, but her hull was shining brightly again.
Golden lasers converged on the final torpedo at the last possible second, and it exploded just above the carrier.
A bright flash of light swallowed the Deliverance whole, and Darius’s body went cold. But then the ship reappeared through the fading light of the explosion, radiant and gleaming with that mysterious luminescence.
Darius blew out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding, and checked his contacts panel for casualties. There were just thirty Vultures left out of the original forty-eight. He scanned his nav display for any emergency beacons that would indicate ejected pilots, but there weren’t any.
“Where’s Blue Four?” Blake asked.
Lisa. Darius’s chest still ached with grief. He shook his head. “She didn’t make it,” he said quietly.
Blake let out an unintelligible howl, and cursed viciously in a grief-stricken voice, leaving Darius to wonder what had happened between the two of them while he’d been away with Dyara at Hades.
A crushing weight fell on Darius’s shoulders. He had eighteen dead pilots, most of whom he hadn’t even gotten a chance to get to know.
Their victory felt hollow at best. Darius made contact with the Deliverance. “CAG to Flight Ops,” he croaked in a hoarse whisper. His mouth was suddenly dry, and he had to work some moisture into it before going on. “Requesting further orders.”
“Form up at one click off the bow and prepare to engage hostiles at the Crucible,” Flight Ops replied.
Darius blinked in shock. “We’re through the Eye already?”
“Almost. Get your pilots in position, Commander.”
“Understood.” Darius relayed those orders to the other squadrons and then set a waypoint and set his autopilot to take him there at three Gs. His fighter rocketed forward, and soon he was racing back over the bright, shining hull of the carrier. Seconds later he flew out over the bow and into open space once more. Darius stared into the vibrant blue nebula on the other end of the wormhole. Now that they were closer to it, he could see it was rimmed in a bright orange band, making it look just like... an Eye. The Eye of Thanatos, Darius thought, nodding to himself. He wondered where in the galaxy that nebula was and just how far they’d traveled from the Orion Spur in this tunnel through the fabric of space-time.
He didn’t have long to wonder. The warped, glassy-smooth sides of the wormhole seemed to peel away in a vibrant swirl of color, and they popped out of the wormhole in the midst of that blue, eye-shaped nebula. A silvery gray speck lay dead ahead. Darius zoomed in and saw the ring shape of it.
The Crucible.
The voice of Lieutenant Carter from Flight Ops crackled in Darius’s ears: “All fighters, reverse thrust at two and a half Gs and prepare to engage enemy forces.”
“Roger that,” Darius said, and hauled back on the throttle. The reverse thrust pinned him against the padded bars of his acceleration harness. He felt his eyeballs bulge, and everything took on a vague red hue as the blood rushed to his eyes.
In the next instant, Darius’s contacts panel began chiming endlessly, and his nav display came alive with enemy fighters. But these weren’t Cygnian Blades. They were something else. His contacts panel marked them as unidentified types.
Just to be sure, Darius magnified one of them until he had a visual. Cygnian Blades looked just like their namesake: long, dagger-shaped fighters with refractive silver armor and folding wings that they didn’t bother to deploy unless they were actually in a
tmosphere. But this fighter looked nothing like that—it was a perfect sphere, dull black, with a thruster pod glowing blue at the back, and laser cannons poking out at the front.
In all of the simulations they’d run, they’d been up against Blades, not... whatever these things were. The question was, were these fighters going to be easier or harder to fight?
Flight Ops provided the answer a moment later. “Vultures, be advised we have incoming enemy drones, bearing zero zero nine by mark fifteen. They should be easy pickings without a fighter escort, but don’t let them get too close. They’re packed with antimatter.”
Darius grimaced. Great. Kamikazes.
Chapter 56
“That’s it?” Blue Six asked. “All they’ve got to defend them are a few dozen drones? Where are their fleets? We’ve got this in the bag!”
“Their fleet is behind us,” Darius replied. “And they’re racing through the wormhole as we speak. Don’t get cocky.”
Darius activated his comms and said, “All fighters, target those drones!” Then he set his own target and watched as the time to reach weapons range ticked down steadily, all the while his Vulture’s thrusters fired in reverse, pinning him against his acceleration harness.
While he waited, Darius couldn’t help but wonder: if this was where the Revenants were born, then where were they? Would the boarding teams have to face them inside the station? Or were they all off fighting their war, content to leave the Crucible undefended?
The countdown to reach weapons range hit five seconds, and Darius opened fire early, popping off three fire-linked blasts. His lasers hit their target, but did only minor damage due to the extreme range. Then he reached weapons range and he pulled the trigger once more.
The drone in his sights exploded with a brilliant flash of light. Golden streams of laser fire flickered out from the other Vultures. The drones fired back, their lasers coded blue to differentiate them, and Vultures exploded left and right, winking off the contacts panel.
Broken Worlds- The Complete Series Page 30
