She took a deep breath. Forget that old man. Keep your mind on your work.
“Ready?” Geiger said.
“Affirmative.”
“Fire.”
Her finger jerked back on the trigger. The missiles launched. She slammed her controls to the side. Throttle on maximum. The G meter spiked. Her G-suit inflated again, squeezing hard. Vision turned gray, then a wave of dizziness swallowed her whole, and spit her out on the other side of nausea. She gasped for breath.
Please let there be a big explosion. Please.
“Damn it,” Geiger said. “No fucking damage.”
Numbness crashed over her awareness. She knew what would happen next. They still had ammunition.
“Rejoin?” Her voice squeaked.
“Rejoin.”
God, where was the other flight, the planes with all the high-tech gadgets?
Some dark part of her mind screamed at her to keep flying straight. Don’t rejoin.
Courage. You have to go through with this.
She tried to bring her craft around. Her reflexes didn’t seem to be working anymore. Her hand shook, and she loosened her grip around the stick so that her plane wouldn’t wobble in the air.
Finally, they were flying side-by-side again.
“We’ve only got a few hundred miles ’til those bastards reach their target,” Geiger said, his voice flat. “You ever see that old movie, Ben Hur?”
“No, sir.”
He paused. Then, his voice came through softly. “Ramming speed.”
She didn’t need to have seen the movie to know what that meant. Now, they were going to be Kamikazes. What would her family think about that? Would her father finally decide she had done something to bring them honor?
It didn’t matter. And she would never know.
Don’t think about that. Just do your job. Be a robot. No feelings.
“Roger,” she said. “Same spot?”
She saw him nod. “On my mark.”
She glanced around the cockpit, thought to apologize to her aircraft for what she was going to do to it, but then decided against it. It’s an inanimate object. It won’t feel anything.
Just like her father.
And she would die so fast, she might not even register any pain, either. Let’s hope so.
On the other hand, she could eject before impact. But no, that wasn’t an option. The alien craft wasn’t barreling straight ahead anymore, it was changing directions erratically, and while missiles could track and home in on a moving ship, autopilot was not configured to do that. And once they got close enough to ensure a hit, bailing out would be pointless. They would be enveloped in the explosion’s fireball.
“Now,” Geiger said. His afterburner flared, and his aircraft leapt forward.
“Sayonara, okaasama,” she whispered, then pressed her own throttle all the way.
CHAPTER THREE
Mehta tried to lean forward, but the safety restraints held her against the chair. “Ramming speed?” The enemy ship, at least 175 miles away according to Captain Lawry, looked like an indistinct black blob, a cancerous mole.
To the far left, three Boeing 777s hung in the air, each at a different altitude, each going in the same direction. Beyond them, Barker’s C-17, looked like a speck in the distance. To the right, a C-5 floated eerily above the clouds.
A beam of light from the alien ship slashed the air, and at the other end a tiny puff of smoke bloomed.
“What the hell?” Davis said.
“Cobra six-one is gone,” a woman said on the radio, her voice breaking.
“Evade, evade,” Bandsaw, the AWACS controller, said.
Another flash of light shot out from the alien ship, followed by a puff of smoke.
“I’ve lost my engine,” the woman said. “Ejecting.”
All Mehta’s internal organs seemed to jerk upward, blocking her throat and making it hard to breathe. She strained to see anything—a parachute, a pilot floating to safety. But they were too far away.
“Demon five-one,” another voice said on the radio, “a flight of seven aircraft.”
“Seven!” Lawry said. He looked like he wanted to give Captain Angelo a high-five, as if this was a time to celebrate. “They’ll get ’em for sure this time!”
The alien ship no longer looked undefined, but like a blackened sponge, edges scalloped and furrowed, cratered, pock-marked.
A swarm of gnats approached from the west, then sparkled briefly.
“Fox one, seven missiles.”
Seconds later, smoke billowed against the black alien ship, but it looked like mere puffs compared to the enormous hulk.
The swarm scattered, flying away from the enemy in all directions. “Demon five-five,” another voice said, “I thought I saw a dent.”
“Hot damn! Rejoin, and we’ll hit ’em again!”
The swarm reunited, and sparks shimmered underneath the fighter aircraft. But this time, the alien vessel spat out multiple beams of light, and the oncoming missiles disintegrated in puny dots. A second later, another volley of blasts shattered the sky. Three tiny spots exploded.
“Evasive!” someone shouted on the radio.
“We need to get out of here,” Mehta said as the remaining fighter aircraft turned away.
More spears of light flashed from the surface of the space craft, reaching out to the scattered fighters, zapping them like a morbid fireworks display. One puff of smoke pin wheeled, leaving a spiral headed downward, out of control.
“Thug two four, Bandsaw one three, change course…”
The AWACS began re-directing the cargo jets. Lumbering passenger planes were not made to fly into a dog fight. They had no armor, no weapons, and very little maneuverability, not to mention they had no fighter escorts—not that escorts would have done them any good.
Mehta’s hand relaxed and she breathed a sigh of relief. If she read the instruments right, they were now heading southwest, moving away from the enemy.
Then, Bandsaw came back on the radio, his pitch higher than it had been. “All passenger aircraft, the bogey is heading straight for you. Take all possible evasive maneuvers!”
They’re chasing us? Why? These passenger aircraft had done nothing to indicate they were hostile, and yet now the alien craft was pursuing them. Damn it. If they were going to get into a battle with aliens, why couldn’t it be on the ground, where she had some authority, where she could direct her troops and have some influence on the battle? She didn’t want to die just a target, some nameless blob the enemy fired on just to see if it could hit them.
“I gotta go to the baffroom,” Davis said.
“This is not a good time,” Lawry snapped. He pressed on the controls and the plane banked sharply.
Mehta threw her head against the back of her seat, hands gripping the arm rests, muscles stiff and trembling from the exertion. From the cargo bay, shouts of dismay floated up, punctuated by terrified screams and the occasional curse. Clouds spun in the pilot’s window.
The most galling thing was not that they were going to die, but that she couldn’t do anything to help. It was up to the pilots, these young kids who looked like they were barely out of diapers.
They had to know what they were doing.
They had to get her unit out of this.
Damn, she hated being so helpless.
The pilots seemed calm. “This is the kind of maneuver we used when we’d fly into Baghdad during the war,” Angelo said over his shoulder. Maybe they would be okay. Or maybe he was just trying to make her feel better.
How many degrees had they turned? Where were they pointing? Dizzy and about to lose her lunch, Mehta could no longer look at the spinning puffs.
Lawry pulled his controls in another direction, and the craft seemed to level out, although it still circled, from the way the clouds were acting. Then, a huge gray cloud panned across the windshield, spewing streaks of red.
“That’s not a cloud, is it?” she said.
Lawry nosed t
he aircraft down. “That was one of the 777s.”
Oh, god. That might have been one of her battalions.
“Which one? Do you know which one?”
“No, ma’am.”
She saw another billowing explosion in the distance, and then after some more spinning, a third.
“How many?” She’d lost track. Was that last one the same as the first explosion? Or had the aliens blown up three aircraft?
“The rest of the planes have split up,” Angelo said over his shoulder. “Now, the aliens gotta choose who they go after.”
Mehta held her breath.
“Thug two-four,” the control voice said, “he’s coming after you. And there’s another spaceship coming at you from the west.”
Angelo crossed himself.
“Your airspace is clear,” Bandsaw said.
“You want us to evade?” Lawry shouted. He slammed the controls to the side and the ship spun. “This is all we can do! He’s faster than us, he’s more maneuverable than us. And we’re unarmed. Tell him we’re unarmed!”
“Thug two-four, we don’t have comms with the bogey.”
Lawry straightened out the craft and turned the nose down. “Let’s see if we can get some more speed.”
Angelo pointed out the right window. “There’s the other ship.”
A huge aluminum saucer lined with windows, bottom dotted with pearls and sequins, chains and pipes, the new ship swept the clouds away as it moved through the sky like a snow plow.
“It’s enormous!” Lawry said.
“I don’t need to go to the baffroom anymore,” Davis mumbled.
“There’s no way we can get away from that thing.” Lawry said. “It’s coming at us too fast.”
A light glowed in one of the cup-like divots on the new ship’s surface.
“They’re getting ready to fire,” Mehta shouted. “Do something!”
“This is it,” Angelo said, his face grim.
The light on the space ship flared, and the world turned white.
CHAPTER FOUR
Mehta grabbed her seat’s arms, fingers pressing into the hard plastic, her restraint system pulling her tight against the seat back. The cockpit rattled, the fuselage groaned, and her vision blurred.
Then her stomach rose into her chest, and blood exploded into her head. Her pen lifted off her lap, weightless. They were falling, the aircraft out of control and plummeting.
“Jesus, God!” Angelo shouted.
“Hold on!” Lawry groaned, wrestling with the controls as the cloud deck below raced toward them.
Bam!
They smacked into something, crushing Mehta’s torso and forcing her head forward. The world went gray. She sucked in a desperate breath, while the pilots checked each other—“You okay? Yeah. You?”—and her vision slowly returned.
Clouds pillowed below them, and the aircraft now flew level.
And they were still alive! She took a gratifyingly deep breath of the odorless, processed air.
“What the hell just happened?” Davis said with a groan.
“The blast from that ship heated the air,” Lawry said. “That’s why we lost altitude so fast.”
She looked out her window, where the distant, dark blob of the Nabber ship shrunk to a pin-point as it blew past the wispy cirrus clouds and out into space. Several thousand feet above them, the new, bright metallic ship flew in a leisurely circle.
“Fox one,” someone said in the radio, and a streak of smoke marked the path of a missile screaming toward the new aliens.
“What in the hell are they doing?” Mehta said, leaning forward while her restraints bit into her shoulders.
“Fox two.”
“Crap! Put me on the radio,” Mehta said.
Angelo looked at her over his shoulder like she’d just committed the most serious breach of protocol. The first missile bumped impotently against the side of the alien ship.
“Fox three.”
“Damn it, put me on, or I’ll rip that headset off your skull!”
With his face immobile, he flicked a switch. “You’re on.”
“Cease fire! Cease fire!” she shouted.
“Who’s on this freq?” the Bandsaw voice said.
“That ship ran off the bad guys. Tell everyone to stop shooting at them.”
“Cease fire,” Bandsaw said. “Now, who is this?”
“Colonel Mehta,” she said, “on Thug two-four. Is there anyone left up here who’s senior to me?”
Silence.
Well, if no one else claimed the position of senior combat officer, she would take the job. “Bandsaw, see if you can contact that new ship.” If these aliens were friendly, as Mehta suspected, the government could make an agreement with them to keep the Nabbers at bay.
“We’ve been trying, ma’am,” he said.
She leaned back in her hard seat and let out a long breath. “Very well, then. Carry on.”
“Roger.”
“Are you sure they’re friendly?” Angelo turned back to his instruments, while Lawry requested a new course and altitude, specifying that he wanted one that would take them back to base.
“Thug two-four, Bandsaw one-three, new course 43 degrees, flight level 28.”
“Hell,” Lawry whispered, but then keyed the mic and gave a crisp “Roger.” He input the numbers and the plane turned until it flew behind the alien ship.
“Why are they headed this way?” Lawry said. “You suppose they know where D.C. is?” Their aircraft slowly gained altitude, and in a few thousand more feet, they would be on the same level as the aliens.
“If you were going to make first contact, wouldn’t you do some research?” Mehta said.
“Maybe they’re not making first contact,” Lawry said, then keyed his mic. “Bandsaw one-three, Thug two-four, the new ship’s starting to gain altitude.”
“I see that. Wait one.”
Now, Mehta had to scrunch down in her seat and lean as close as she could to the cold window to be able to see it. Soon, it would be so high that no amount of contortions would work. And if the aliens continued on that trajectory without any contact, all hope for some sort of alliance would be gone.
A second later, a smaller ship popped out of the main vessel, then headed east and dropped to the same altitude as her aircraft.
“Bandsaw, they just launched a shuttle.”
“I see it. Stay with it.”
“Hey, we’re not an escort aircraft.”
“We’ll have some fighters up there to do the escort soon. Until then, just follow it.”
“Roger.”
Mehta sat back and watched the shuttle skim over the clouds, and her stomach felt like a giant, hollow gourd. Angelo was right. Nobody knew what these new aliens wanted, or whether they were friendly. She wanted them to be friendly. But the aliens could have another agenda. They could have saved the humans just to be the ones to impose an even more draconian regime on them.
The tiny shuttle—it looked about the size of an RV—was probably a means of getting humans to drop their guard. It looked harmless. And they had saved us, after all.
“You think they’re the good guys?” Davis asked.
“I think I have a lot of letters to write,” Mehta said. “If they’re the good guys, they didn’t get here soon enough.” The air seemed to grow stale, and her restraints felt oppressive. The next couple of weeks were going to be hell.
“We got escorts coming in,” Lawry said. He pointed through the windshield toward two tiny black dots.
“Good. Now maybe we can go home,” Angelo said.
“Thug two-four, Bandsaw one-three,” the controller said. “Continue on course, increase to flight level 29.”
“We’re not going home?” Mehta said.
“Doesn’t look like it.”
“Any instructions? Do we know where we’re going?”
He shook his head.
Her fists tightened. That was the worst way to go into an operation. No plan, no conce
pt, no clue.
CHAPTER FIVE
As the plane descended into the capitol area, Mehta strained to see the Washington Mall, but it was either out of view or blocked by clouds. That was where the new alien shuttle now rested, according to Bandsaw. That was where they were going next.
The runway came up to meet them and they landed with a thump and a soft sideways jerk. The engines roared as the plane slowed. It was almost time to take control again.
“Look at that,” Angelo said, pointing out the right window. The taxiways were filled with aircraft, lined up nose to tail, waiting until they could get back in the air.
At the end of the runway, they stopped. Mehta climbed down from the cockpit, into the cargo area, where the pungent odor of urine and feces assaulted her. That was what real fear smelled like. She quickly stepped through the open door, only to be slammed by the humid air and the heat of the afternoon sun.
A sound alerted her to another incoming aircraft, this one a commercial aircraft filled with infantry. It touched down on the other runway, followed by the blast of deceleration.
Behind that would come one more plane, these three all that was left of the ten aircraft that had taken off only a few hours ago.
An invisible hand wrapped itself around her chest, so tight she could hardly breathe. All those soldiers… shot into oblivion, their body parts scattered over hundreds of square miles, most charred until they were unrecognizable, bits of blackened bone.
You can’t think about that.
Behind her was a whole plane full of soldiers, still alive and with a mission. She had to keep herself functioning. For them. To keep more soldiers from dying.
Her unit was going to set up security around the alien shuttle, a task fraught with potential danger, filled with unknowns and possibilities.
She thumped down the steps to the hard, concrete landing surface, where a man in an Air Force uniform waited for her near the edge of the runway, a manila envelope tucked under his arm. She walked over to meet him, then recognized him from one of the video teleconferences she’d attended earlier, a tall, even-featured man whose dark hair sported wisps of gray at the temples. This was Air Force Colonel John Freeman, who worked in intelligence.
No Plan Survives (Tales from the Protectorate Book 1) Page 3
