Broken Worlds_The Awakening

by Jasper T. Scott

  He blinked. That must be his squadron designation. “I’m here,” he said.

  “Good. Have you activated your ESC yet?”

  “Sorry, I forgot. One second.” Activate ESC, he thought, and a flurry of data streamed before his eyes, too fast to track, like the run code of a program. After that a series of HUD icons appeared at the edges of his field of view, and a line of text appeared at the bottom in a dark blue font:

  Available Networks

  He focused on that and a list of networks appeared. He selected his fighter: SF-76 (Blue Three) from the list of available networks. As soon as he did that, a new HUD appeared, this one relating to the operation of his Vulture. He found the throttle and speed display, the charge levels for the fighter’s lasers and countermeasure systems, as well as HUD icons for landing gear, mag clamps, sensors, and stealth settings.

  “You two ready to go?” Dyara asked.

  “Ready,” Riker said.

  “Ready...” Darius replied.

  “All right, launch your fighters. I’ll see you spaceside.”

  Darius found the launch control panel on his left holo display (LHD) and activated the fighter’s launch sequence. A clu-clunk sounded as locking bolts in the landing pad slid aside, followed by a pneumatic groan as the stairway leading up to the cockpit flattened. Then the landing pad began sinking into the vehicular airlock. The landing pad hit bottom with a thunk, and flashing crimson lights illuminated the airlock as deck sections slid shut overhead, sealing him inside. The airlock shut with a bang, and powerful fans whirred to life, sucking all of the air out of the compartment in a few seconds. Doors opened in front of the fighter, revealing the full length of the launch tube.

  A rising roar came shuddering through the Vulture’s engines, and Darius braced himself. Lights flashed down the length of the launch tube as an automated voice sounded inside Darius’s helmet:

  “Three, two, one—”

  The Vulture screamed down the launch tube, pinning Darius to the back of his flight chair. For a split second the pressure and weight on his chest was so intense that he couldn’t even breathe, but then the weight lifted and his fighter shot out into space.

  Stars gleamed on all sides. The glass cockpit made Darius feel exposed and somewhat agoraphobic, but his helmet helped reign in some of those feelings. Even if the canopy broke, he’d be okay. His air supply was contained. His flight suit was pressurized.

  A double chime sounded from Darius’s sensors, and his eyes dipped to his nav display to find three Vulture-shaped blips racing out from a large, Colossus-class carrier-shaped blip. Up ahead, another green icon appeared with a line rising from an imaginary plane to indicate vertical displacement from his position.

  “Form up Blue Squadron,” Dyara said. “We’re going to do a flyby on that Osprey before we leave. I’ll make comms contact. Standby....”

  “What’s an Osprey doing out there?” Riker asked.

  But when Dyara’s voice returned, she was speaking on a different channel. “This is Blue One to SB-22 Gray Seven, please identify and transmit your flight plan, over.”

  “Who took an Osprey out?” Riker insisted, and Darius realized he wasn’t aware of Gatticus’s hasty departure.

  Darius filled him in over the squadron channel.

  “He’s not replying,” Dyara said over the open comms channel.

  A gruff voice joined hers a moment later. “Blue Squadron, this is the Deliverance. What are you doing?”

  Darius recognized the voice. It was Tanik.

  “Blue leader here, we’re trying to get an explanation from Gatticus,” Dyara explained. “Maybe we can convince him to turn back and wait for us to return. Then you won’t have to jump to the rendezvous.”

  “Don’t waste your time,” Tanik replied. “I tried that earlier, and he’s already charging his Alckam drive.”

  Darius selected the Osprey as a target and saw that Tanik was right. Gamma rays were streaming from the craft, indicating that the Osprey’s Alckam reactor was spinning up.

  “We can disable his ship from here,” Dyara said. “There’s no reason we have to let him go.”

  “You mean besides the fact that I’m telling you to? We’re not in the business of keeping prisoners.”

  “But—”

  “Do you need me to make that an order, Lieutenant?”

  Dyara hesitated. “No, sir.”

  “Good. Now get on your way and hurry back. Deliverance out.”

  “Well that was odd,” Darius said over the squadron channel. What he really meant to say was suspicious, but he didn’t know if Tanik was monitoring their comms.

  Gatticus’s Osprey went on streaming gamma rays in ever-increasing intensity, and then it suddenly streaked off the nav display.

  Darius frowned, unsettled by the android’s departure. It did seem out of character for him to leave without even a word of explanation. Darius blinked and shook his head. He had more important things to worry about.

  “Set course for Hades,” Dyara said. I’m sending you both the coordinates for our rendezvous with the Deliverance.”

  Another chime sounded, and a prompt appeared at the bottom of Darius’s nav display, asking him to accept the incoming coordinates. He did so while setting course for Hades and spinning up the fighter’s Alckam drive. A blue arrow appeared in the center of his HUD, along with a text prompt telling him to line up his fighter’s nose with the jump trajectory and to accelerate to his desired exit velocity. Darius pulled up on the flight stick and nosed over to starboard until the blue circle of the jump trajectory was dead center of his HUD.

  As soon as he did that, a five-minute countdown appeared, along with an option to synchronize his exit velocity and jump timer with nearby ships. Darius was just about to ask Dyara about it when she sent him a request to do exactly that. He accepted and his fighter’s thrusters automatically fired with a throaty roar that pinned him to the back of his flight chair. He glanced at the accelerometer on his HUD and saw that his acceleration was currently set to 2.5 Gs, with a target velocity of 10 km/s.

  The jump timer froze for a few seconds to give his fighter time to speed up, and then it began counting down again.

  “When we drop out of FTL, we’re going to light up the system like Times Square on New Year’s Eve,” Dyara said.

  Darius blinked, shocked by that reference. “Times Square still exists?”

  “Yes, now focus. I’m sending you both exit coordinates that will land us within spitting distance of Hades. Unfortunately, the burst of radiation released when our warp bubbles disperse will be impossible to disguise, as will our subsequent atmospheric entry, but—”

  “Then why did we bother taking Stealth Fighters?” Darius demanded.

  “Because as soon as we’re in the atmosphere we can effectively disappear. The Cygnians won’t be able to track us without sending fighters of their own down to look for us, and even then, we’ll be very hard to spot on sensors unless we do something to reveal ourselves.”

  “Coordinates received and locked in,” Riker said.

  “Darius?”

  He accepted the second nav data transfer and fed the exit coordinates into his Vulture’s FTL calculations. “Done,” he said.

  The jump timer hit three minutes.

  “Remember to engage stealth mode and switch to passive sensors as soon as we get into the atmosphere. Also, from here on out we’re going to play follow the leader and observe a strict comms silence.”

  “You can spare me the idiot’s guide,” Riker said. “I used to fly SF-76’s with the Fifth USON Fleet.”

  “You did?” Dyara asked.

  “For more than six years before I was promoted to Captain and given a Dreadnought to command.”

  “Then maybe you should take command, sir.”

  “Agreed. Thank you, Lieutenant. Darius?”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes, sir—you understood everything that the Lieutenant said?”

  Darius blinked. “Ah...
yes, sir.”

  “Good, then we’ll see you on the other side.”

  “Roger that...” Darius replied. He watched the jump timer ticking down. The countdown became audible for the last few seconds.

  “Three, two, one—”

  As soon as it reached zero, the stars vanished in a bright flash of light, leaving him adrift in a perfectly black void with a bright circle of light at the end—the warp disc.

  A new timer appeared on his HUD.

  ETA: 12h 5m 29s

  Darius felt his skin begin to itch at the thought of being cooped up in this cockpit for more than twelve hours. What was he supposed to do in all that time? The answer came to him even as he asked the question. A compartment beside his left thigh slid open as an additional reminder. Inside were three silver injector pens, each of them color-coded for different purposes. The blue one was a sedative; the red one was a nanite booster shot, in case of physical injury; and the yellow one was a stimulant. Below that were two patch kits, one for his flight suit and another for the cockpit canopy. Darius removed the blue sedative pen, and another one sprang into place from behind.

  Darius found the injector port in the left thigh of his flight suit and screwed the tip of the pen into the threaded metal opening; then he depressed the injector button on top of the pen. He felt a slight prick, and heard the pen issue a soft tsss of escaping air. That done, he fed the empty pen into a slot below the other injectors, and shut the compartment.

  Darius spent a long moment staring into the depthless white light at the end of the warp tunnel. Before long, a wave of sleepiness washed over him, and his eyelids grew heavy. His last thought before they slammed shut and he lost consciousness was a terrified whisper of doubt—

  What if Cassandra really is dead?

  Chapter 41

  Darius woke up to the sound of an automated countdown—

  “Ten, nine, eight—” It was interrupted by a second voice: “Please administer your stimulant now....”

  Darius shook his head in an effort to clear away a thick fog of sleep, and grabbed the yellow-colored injector pen from the open compartment beside his left thigh. He screwed the tip into the injector port in his flight suit just as the warp disc in front of him dissolved and the planet Hades appeared in its place—

  But this wasn’t the mottled red, green, and blue planet he remembered. This planet was a polished gray and white pearl, that looked as if it were entirely covered in snow. Here and there the surface peeked out in hazy gray-blue scraps of water and dead black trees.

  Darius double-checked their location on his nav panel, hoping to find that they’d somehow jumped to the wrong planet by mistake—

  They hadn’t. This was the Hades System. Darius pushed back a wave of despair and depressed the button in the top of his injector pen. His thoughts immediately snapped into focus: it didn’t matter what the surface looked like. The Grotto was a natural bomb shelter. Cassandra and all the others down there with her would have survived.

  But right on the heels of that thought was a darker one: the stairwell leading down into the caves had been made of wood. The whole thing would have incinerated in the blast and provided an open conduit for super-heated air to flood down into the Grotto.

  Darius shook his head, refusing to give that thought any credence. He dropped the empty injector pen in the collection slot below the others and slid the compartment shut. He was just about to activate his comms to ask where Karkarus was—or had been—when he remembered what Dyara had said about maintaining comms silence.

  Instead, he found and targeted Blue Two, Captain Riker’s fighter, and then nudged the flight stick over until the black speck of that fighter appeared dead center of his targeting reticle. Riker’s fighter was surrounded by a pair of green target brackets, and a second black speck appeared alongside his, which was Dyara’s fighter—Blue One.

  All three of them were cruising down to the planet with their pre-jump velocity of ten kilometers per second, but Darius was lagging behind them by about half a klick—probably because he’d launched a split second later than they had. He considered firing his thrusters to catch up, but then thought better of it: if they didn’t fire their thrusters they’d look just like ejected debris falling back down and breaking up on re-entry.

  After a few seconds, they hit the upper atmosphere of Hades, and Darius’s fighter began shuddering with turbulence. Heat came radiating through the cockpit in shimmering waves, but between the thick armored glass of the canopy, and his insulated flight suit, it wasn’t an uncomfortable heat—more like lying in the sun on a hot summer’s day.

  The metal frame of the cockpit began glowing with the heat of atmospheric entry, and the fighter shook like a leaf. The planet’s atmosphere roared loudly in Darius’s ears, and he glanced at the fighter’s speed indicator, worried that the Vulture would rip itself apart on entry.

  But his fighter was already down to six kilometers per second—well below the red overspeed bar now marked at the top of the indicator. It helped that they were diving down at a relatively shallow angle, giving them time to decelerate before they dropped into thicker atmosphere.

  Darius checked his contacts panel for enemy ships. He didn’t find any. It looked like they were in luck: either the Cygnians who’d laid waste to the planet had already left, or else they were on the other side of Hades, and effectively blocked from view. Either way, there was a good chance they’d be able to get in and out undetected.

  Long minutes passed and the black of space gradually brightened to a pale white, then to a light blue, and finally, to a deep shade of cobalt. The tops of the thick white and gray clouds soared up around them like mountains. They plunged into a shadowy valley and gloomy gray-black sheets of moisture and smoke swirled in on all sides. Rain and ash speckled Darius’s canopy, running in dirty, shivering lines.

  After just a few seconds, jagged black trees came swirling out of the haze—charred, leafless skeletons. Up ahead, Both Dyara and Captain Riker leveled out to cruise over the tree tops. Darius pulled up and matched speed with them at Mach one point two. He gaped in shock at the blackened forest scrolling by below. He couldn’t see the ground, but a flickering orange light and rising walls of dirty black smoke gave him some idea of what was down there. Now Darius realized why Hades had been shrouded in clouds from orbit: a large part of that shroud was made up of smoke and debris.

  A flicker of movement caught Darius’s eyes, and he looked up to see Captain Riker waggling his fighter’s wings. Dyara did the same. Darius wondered what that was about, but then remembered that he was supposed to engage stealth mode and switch to passive sensors. He quickly did so, and both fighters stopped waggling their wings at him. They slowly banked to the left, and Darius followed them through that maneuver.

  Long minutes passed, and the parade of dead tree tops dragged on and on, endlessly to all sides.

  A nav prompt appeared:

  Incoming waypoint data from SF-76 “Blue Two.”

  Darius accepted the transfer and a green waypoint titled Karkarus appeared dead ahead on his HUD and nav display. Darius felt a sweaty surge of anxiety that left his hands shaking. That waypoint was just ten kilometers away, and the trees below were burned to a crisp.

  By the time they closed to just five kilometers from Karkarus, the skeletal black treetops vanished completely. At that point both Dyara and Captain Riker slowed and swooped down lower for a better look. Darius matched speed and followed them down. At an altitude of just two hundred meters, the ground appeared. It was still cloaked in a thick veil of smoke, but there weren’t any trees—collapsed or otherwise—just the smooth, sloping black sides of a blast crater, filled with a fine coating of ash and flaming orange chunks of debris. Ash rained down steadily in fat, fluttering flakes. They followed the crater down, slowing still further and dropping altitude as they went, until Darius had to engage his fighter’s thrusters to avoid stalling out.

  They reached the lowest point of the crater—a dirty, w
ater-filled pool with the glowing green diamond of their waypoint beside it—Karkarus. The name of the settlement blurred until Darius couldn’t read it anymore. He shook his head and gasped, his chest rising and falling quickly as hot tears fell inside his helmet. Karkarus was gone, even the peninsula it had been built upon was gone—carved out of the planet as if by a giant ice cream scoop.

  Heedless of his orders, Darius activated the comms. “Are you sure this is the right place?”

  Someone opened the comms, but hesitated before speaking, their breath a crackling roar of static. “Positive,” Dyara said.

  They circled the waypoint and Darius cruised dangerously low to the ground. A red stall warning appeared on his HUD, but he ignored it. There had to be something left—some hint of the Grotto, at least.

  Darius spotted Captain Riker jetting off to one side and banked sharply to follow. He’d lived in Karkarus. He would know what to look for.

  After just a few seconds, blackened rock turned to churning gray water. Fat black ashes went on falling like snow. Captain Riker flew around the devastated peninsula, skirting formerly sheer black cliffs, now blasted flat, to the jutting tip of the peninsula. Here the cliffs were still more or less intact, and the yawning mouth of a cave appeared just above the level of the raging sea.

  Captain Riker flew straight toward that cave, and Darius followed him with his heart thundering in his chest. This cave had to connect to the Grotto, and if it was still intact, then maybe other parts of the Grotto had survived too—along with the children hiding down there.

  Darius fired his braking thrusters to slow down as he reached the mouth of the cave. He dropped his landing gear and cruised in for a landing beside Captain Riker on the slick black rocks of the cave floor. Darius released his harness and pushed it aside.

  Seeing that the cave was choked with smoke like everything else, he removed a portable oxygen tank from below his chair and leaned forward to clip it to the mag-plates along the back of his flight suit. That done, he exchanged the air hose from the fighter’s integrated air supply for the one from the tank. Finally, he punched the open/close button for the cockpit, and the canopy swung up on pneumatic struts with a hissing groan. Darius sprang over the side to the ground. His legs collapsed, unused to the feeling of gravity, but he sprang back up in a fraction of a second and whirled around, looking for Captain Riker.