Home Front: A Science Fiction Adventure Series (Sever Squad Book 4)

by A. R. Knight

  Risky, but Aurora could buy into the aggressive play. Trying to run through those doors with guns blazing would give the agents steps to set up a counter, would mean Gregor and Rovo would be blasted down before Aurora came close enough to make a difference.

  Besides, taking an agent hostage, lie or no, felt pretty good.

  “Drop your rifle, then stand slow,” Aurora said, and Vana complied. “Walk forward.”

  With her rifle keeping a minimum distance from Vana’s back, Aurora followed the agent into clear view. Now the squaddies looked over, unable to hide their curiosity. The agents saw them too, and the one holding Gregor and Rovo up called for everyone to stay calm, stay focused.

  “And keep tapping,” the agent told Rovo. “The easier you make this for us, the quicker we’ll make it for you.”

  Aurora didn’t have to ask what the agents would be speeding up for Rovo. They’d be doing the same thing to every Sever Squad member if they could.

  “You can stop listening to him,” Aurora said, guiding Vana through the doors. She felt a few pistols change their aim her way, weapons no longer aimed at the squaddies. “Lamya, been a while.”

  “It has,” the squad commander replied. “Can’t say it’s a pleasure seeing you again.”

  “Might be we can change that,” Aurora said. “Who’s leading this pack of traitors?”

  “Doesn’t matter who’s in charge,” said an agent to Aurora’s right, a tight-packed woman who didn’t look like she gave two craps about Aurora’s hostage. “You’re going to put down that rifle and do whatever else we tell you, or your squaddie show ends here.”

  Ah, the moment before the first fire. A sweet time, filled with hope and possibility. Aurora had her targets, an optimal set going from her starting position, knew Vana had the same. There’d be a few seconds between the first shot and when the squaddies entered the fight. Survive that long, and Sever might walk away from this alive.

  She’d seen worse odds.

  “Sorry,” Aurora said, and Vana ducked.

  Aurora held the trigger as she took aim, using her weapon’s fast fire rate to stitch lasers across the comm center and, largely, burn some solid holes in the big screen at the center’s back. She sidestepped as Aurora fired, adding the slightest difficulty the agents looking to hit her. Vana drew her pistols quick, adding targeted shots to Aurora’s spray.

  The agents, however much Aurora wanted them to, didn’t sit and take it. They took Aurora’s action to mean an open license to kill, and shot at the squaddies, at Lamya, at everyone. Laser fire and fast-growing smoke from shot things burning filled the space, along with cries for help, for vengeance, for mothers and fathers.

  Aurora pitched forward into the blitz, leaning on the rifle’s trigger until the power pack clicked empty. Hard to tell how many targets she’d hit as Aurora went into the desk maze. She felt heat from the vest where several shots had plunged into its energy-sucking material. Another hit or two and the thing would be compromised, too torched to hold anything more, but it’d kept Aurora alive enough to get out from the open.

  With a click-hiss, the new power pack slipped into the rifle, and Aurora circled right, going for the agent that’d led off the discussions. Aurora found the woman still behind the console the agent had started at, snapping off shots towards the entrance. The damn spies. DefenseCorp didn’t bother to give’em firefight training.

  They’d kill you quick in the first few moments, but get past that and they didn’t know to keep moving, keep firing.

  Aurora did, and the agent went down without ever seeing who pulled the trigger.

  Twenty-Two

  Last Shot

  Kicking around a spaceship in zero gravity wasn’t easy in the best of times, such as during a long, uneventful star-viewing trip from one isolated outpost to another. Sai, trying to get to the Prtisa’s left turret while Eponi dashed around the Nautilus in a twisting, spastic dance, hit his head, his legs, his knees on just about every surface until he found a grip on the handrails lining every hallway, every section.

  Even then, as the Prisa turned, Sai had to modify his grip. Without gravity, Sai didn’t rotate with the ship, just hung there as his world orbited around him. His stomach reacted like his brain, sending nauseating waves quelled only be the adrenaline spikes coming whenever the attackers managed a strike against the Prisa’s shields.

  “You planning on shooting soon?” Eponi’s voice rattled through the intercoms. “I’m not having fun here!”

  “Me either,” Sai said as he found his way to the Prisa’s left prong, the narrowing tooth lined with storage cabinets and ending with a single seat linked up to a twin-cannon turret.

  As Eponi began another rolling maneuver cutting across the Nautilus’s side—which side, Sai had no idea anymore—the demolitionist gave up on the hand rails and pushed himself towards the turret chair with a floating leap. As Sai drifted by the silver-lined, yellow-signed cabinets, he saw space and ship splitting the window outside the turret.

  The Nautilus played its horizon part, slicing against the deep black that space held for anyone making an interstellar jaunt. They’d turned away from Wexer so fast after boarding the cruiser, speeding core-ward. It’d be days before the Nautilus reached any intersection where it could turn towards another inhabited system. Weeks before it arrived in what anyone would consider civilized space.

  That isolated locale hadn’t seemed all that ominous until Sai made his way to the turret, saw the console scanner light up with the four fighters following the Prisa, and nothing else. No nearby traffic, no reinforcements, no escape opportunities.

  If Renard and his agents planned to take over a DefenseCorp ship, this would be about the perfect spot to do it.

  “Sai, please tell me you’re getting there,” Eponi said, electric and focused. “They’re bunching up close, thinking they’re gonna get some focus fire. On my mark, I’m gonna flip-drift and give you a wide open look.”

  “I’m ready to take it.”

  Sai settled into the chair, the Prisa’s systems scanning his height and calibrating the targeting sticks for his reach, the scanner to his eye level. The screen blocked out the real world, showcasing potential threats as small arrows against a basic screen. Enemies as red arrows, allies as blue diamonds—not that Sever had any allies out here—and their expected trajectories spidering out as faint green lines.

  As Eponi started her flip-drift maneuver, Sai felt the engines kick in, punching the Prisa up from its bottom into the aforementioned flip. A dicey move that turned Sai and Eponi facing their followers, Eponi supplemented the maneuver with a hard energy shunt to the frontal shields, killing the engines in the process. Keeping up its velocity, the Prisa went backwards, giving Eponi and Sai a clear shot at their enemies.

  “Line’em up,” Eponi said.

  The four pursuers came cruising around the Nautilus edge, swooping around in a loose formation that bespoke of limited cockpit time. Sai didn’t know how to fly a damn thing, but he’d seen enough tight air combat around or over his head to know the wobbly grouping blasting towards him wasn’t all aces.

  Their scanners would’ve told them the Prisa waited around the Nautilus curve, but not that it’d turned around its lethal side. The foursome curled around thinking they were predators, but their prey had turned a deadly trick.

  Holding down the gooey triggers, Sai sent molten bolts rocketing to the formation’s left side, caressing the Nautilus’s shields while tracing his target. The fighter, a dagger shaped craft with its heavy cannon under its pointed nose, reacted as Sai wanted, jerking away from the oncoming laser surprise towards its wingmen.

  Eponi lit up the Prisa’s central cannon, a gatling thing made to perforate any target dumb enough to sit in the ship’s sights. The middle two daggers, leading their assault, broke left and right to avoid the laser stream. A smart dodge, considering the fighters had to get closer for their big hitting blasts to get within range. A dumb dodge, because Sai’s target veered rig
ht into its middle-juking friend.

  The two fighters, their proximity alarms no doubt screeching their imminent doom, panicked. Eponi’s target swerved up, pulling into a slanting ascent that put the fighter on a hard collision course with the Nautilus. Sai’s reversed its earlier move, getting back outside, right where Sai’s turret, tracking after the fighter, found it.

  Sai’s bolts hit, punctured, and blew the fighter. Vacuum swallowed any fire before it started, creating a popping shrapnel burst as the craft popped all its joints and scattered into the mess. Its disaster buddy tried to swerve away from the Nautilus, a swaying move that didn’t quite kill the fighter’s speed before its aft made contact with the big cruiser’s rocky hull. Panels, debris, and more than a few fighter chunks blew off as the speck hit the wall. Dead in space, the fighter ricochetted away from the battle, spinning into the black.

  Before Sai could compliment Eponi on her choice flying, huge blue blasts filled Sai’s view. The lasers themselves weren’t all that wide, but their brightness created halos, as if comets streaked towards the Prisa.

  The ship shuddered as the first shot hit, draining the Prisa’s remaining shields to zero and setting off grainy, squawking alarms that did nothing to calm Sai’s nerves or set his focus to anything useful. The second blast seared the Prisa, a near-hit that left some blast scoring on Sai’s windshield, as though a giant space bug had splattered black guts all over the glass.

  “Keep shooting!” Eponi’s shout carried over the alarms. “We got this!”

  Where Eponi found that confidence, Sai didn’t know, but he did as she asked. Swiveling the turret to the remaining pair, Sai joined in with Eponi’s center cannon and a computer-operated right turret to burn the Prisa’s remaining power on an offensive salvo. The two fighters juked and dodged while their big guns recharged, closing to a range that meant certain death if either survived to another shot.

  Lining up that fatal blow, though, required those damn daggers to stay still for a hot second. Still enough for Sai’s shots to skitter along the outer fighter, already trying to dodge away from the Prisa’s right turret. Just like Eponi had done with the first pair, Sai caught the fighter forgetting the Prisa’s many guns, and his shots burned off an engine, freewheeling the dagger to join its buddy in a forever journey to infinity.

  Eponi had her sights set on the last fighter, but the weaving pilot, with more space now that his wingmen had been obliterated, avoided her streaming fire. The flyer wheeled right, putting the craft away from Eponi’s danger, out of reach for Sai’s turret. The Prisa’s right side peppered shots, but the AI couldn’t keep up with the dancing, always shooting where the fighter had been rather than where it was going to be.

  “Bring him left,” Sai said. “I can’t hit him over there.”

  “Working on it,” Eponi replied. “Engines aren’t too happy right now.”

  Maybe because she’d bet it all on the flip’n’shoot. Sai couldn’t argue with the results, but it’d been an all or nothing play. They hadn’t hit the last fighter, and now they were coasting in a line, easy pickings for a calm attacker.

  The Prisa shuddered as Eponi tried to salvage her move, and Sai saw the power for his own shots drain away as Eponi gave everything she could to the engines. They’d poured everything into offense, and now they had to go the other way. Their velocity slowed and the dagger fighter rocketed towards them.

  Sai blinked, realized Eponi had gone from one move into another. Get the dagger fighter to overshoot and pull another flip, giving the Prisa’s triple threat a perfect engine pair to light up.

  “I see—” Sai started as the dagger fighter closed, its point aiming right for them.

  As the dagger shot.

  Eponi swung the Prisa as the blue bolt flashed, the shot crashing towards the Prisa. From Sai’s view, the big blue bolt went right, and he would’ve believed too far right, except the Prisa jolted, a shaking rush accompanied by more pops, bangs, and concussions than Sai had ever heard.

  Behind him, an emergency seal slammed into place, trapping Sai into his turret prong. Keeping out any potential leaks to vacuum, giving Sai the oxygen currently stuck in there as his time to live. Outside, the Nautilus came and went into view, the Prisa spinning as its engines struggled to compensate for the damage.

  “Eponi, please tell me something,” Sai said into the console.

  Static came back. A sharp burst, then nothing. Not good.

  Sai tapped away at the console, trying to bring up a system status list, trying to get some information on what’d happened. As he swiped, Sai found one red assessment after another. The Prisa’s power frittered all over the place, its engines barely sparking along. Like water rushing through a pipe with a thousand valves springing open, too little energy flowed everywhere.

  As for the vacuum leak, the console put it between the Prisa’s right wing and the center core. A sheared hole that’d broken open.

  “Sai,” Eponi’s words sounded different, fuzzier and harried. “Had to switch consoles. Mine blew out with the hit. Far as I can tell, we’re dead in space.”

  “By my count, we’re still alive.”

  “That fighter’s out there. He’s going to come back and finish us off.”

  Sai swiped the console back to the scanner, saw the fighter’s red arrow swooping back around. Lining up that fatal shot.

  “You have any tricks left?” Sai said.

  “I’m a pilot and my ship’s not working right now.” Eponi coughed. “Our power relay is busted. Even if that fighter doesn’t hit us, we’re gonna blow up on our own.”

  Like a bomb. Sai hooked into the reference, a puzzle he knew how to solve. Disarming an explosive often meant keeping two things from reacting, meant routing them away from each other or killing the connection. The Prisa kept trying to send power to the engines, to the right turret, and neither one worked. Eventually, all that energy might burn through something important, blowing the ship to atoms in what would be, with all the vacuum, a profoundly disappointing explosion.

  “Route everything to my wing,” Sai said. “Everything you can, push it to my side.”

  Eponi coughed again, but Sai could almost see the smile when she spoke, “You’re a moron, Sai. You’ll explode when you fire.”

  “At least I’ll get him.”

  Eponi didn’t answer, but Sai saw his console flash. With a swipe, Sai jumped back to the scanner, the turret reporting all the power it needed was waiting. The fighter had its arrow going right back towards the Prisa now, a slow walk-up as it lined up for the fatal shot up the Prisa’s aft engines.

  “Got one last thing to tell you,” Eponi said. “Don’t miss.”

  “Been a pleasure flying with you, Eponi.”

  Wheeling the turret around, Sai centered the cannons on the fighter. He whispered a quick prayer to his children, to his wife, and pulled the trigger.

  Twenty-Three

  Smokescreen

  Gregor refused to let any surprise touch his nerves when he saw Aurora waltz into the room with an agent at pistol point. He hadn’t seen his commander since she’d vanished with Deepak minutes after boarding the Nautilus and Gregor would be lying to himself if a big ol’ part of him hadn’t figured an agent had Aurora kissing vacuum by now.

  Instead, in she came, bringing the thick pre-fight tension with her. Gregor decoupled his focus from Aurora as she spoke, locking instead on the distance between himself and the jackass behind him, the scum who’d played Rovo into dropping Kaia’s location.

  When Aurora’s hostage dropped and his commander started laying waste with that intriguing rifle she had, Gregor’s pre-loaded plan went into action. The agent behind him had both pistols drawn, aimed, and ready to shoot. Turning would take too much time, but Gregor had slid his feet ever so slightly so he could kick himself back at the first sign.

  Like an angry trust fall.

  The charge back knocked the agent off balance, sent the first pistol shots burning over Gregor’s shoulders and into
the ceiling. Gregor kept his feet pumping, working the ground to keep his back slamming into the agent’s chest while Gregor’s left hand fought to keep the agent’s pistol arms from finding any aim.

  If he could get the agent against the wall, Gregor’s size ought to be able to mash the agent to dust.

  If.

  Gregor’s ankle struck something hard as the agent swiveled, the smaller man using his size to get out from under Gregor and trip his opponent. Gregor fell hard, hit the comm center’s smooth floor, and looked up into a double-barreled salute. Smoke blew up around the agent’s twisted face, a seared look that said vengeance was very much wanted in that moment. Smoke couldn’t hide that rage.

  Didn’t do much to hide the chair crashing in from behind, either.

  Rovo swung the seat hard into the agent’s head, a blow that sent the rookie tumbling after the agent. Both hit the ground, the agent glassy-eyed as Gregor tore away the pistols, and Rovo groaning that he’d torn something in his chest.

  “Thanks, rookie,” Gregor said, delivering a solid knock-out blow to the downed agent. “You going to make it?”

  “Don’t know,” Rovo said, one hand on the chair, as if the furniture were his anchor in the madness.

  “Then hold on till I get back.”

  Gregor would’ve helped Rovo right then and there, but with all the laser fire burning through the comm center, getting the fight finished would bring better odds for the rookie’s recovery than a daring drag-out.

  With Aurora and the squaddies occupying the comm center’s front, Gregor used the smoke and desks to cover a stalking slide back towards the outer wall. Non-agent staffers followed DefenseCorp’s protocol, huddling beneath their desks and praying to whatever gods they believed in. The agents themselves, and Gregor killed a noisy curse at their apparent numbers—the sheer laser volume gave a clue that the damned spies were everywhere—clustered towards the back, forming up an actual defense.