by Autumn Birt
“They are bombers,” Jared said. “Bloody, big freaken bombers.”
“How many can we intercept?” Arinna asked.
“Not all of them. They’ve been flying under radar. Tracking at least ten now,” Jared answered. “Are your vids down?”
“No. I’m trying to fix this thing,” Arinna replied. Despite her frustration with sitting and watching, she wanted to switch the monitors back to radar. Instead, she opened the first file. Not a dactyl. But it was a plane diagram. Telling herself she should take that as a good sign, Arinna began opening others, looking for a method to the naming as much as a diagram of a dactyl.
“I’ll come to your location to provide cover,” Jared said.
Arinna realized he was in the other dactyl. She should have guessed. “Negative. Protect infrastructure and lives first.” Jared fell silent, which was worse than him grumbling. “That is an order, Captain.”
Arinna spoke with authority, enough that he would forget that technically she had no right to order him to do anything. She was supposed to be just a liaison, no matter what role she’d assumed or that the Guard followed. In Jared’s silence, Arinna figured out which of the string of numbers in a file name indicated year. With a quick search, she narrowed down the files to less than fifty spanning the timeframe of the dactyl’s creation. At least the timeframe that made sense from what she and Lewin knew.
Dimly, she heard Jared order other fighters across Europe. Knowing him, he’d give himself central Europe to patrol with a grid right over her head. A diagram opened with the lines of a cargo plane and generator station capable of long range troop movement and instant headquarters creation. She paused with finger over the close key, appreciating the efficient design as much as feeding a yearning to have a dozen of them. Later. She closed the file and tagged the name with “transport.”
A plane flew low over her position, the sound vibrating the hull of the dactyl. Ready to yell at Jared for disobeying, Arinna fell against the side of the seat as the dactyl jumped in time with an explosion. A second knocked the breath from her as she bounced against the console. She expected the next bomb to land on her head.
“Dammit! You could have warned me the FLF was that close,” Arinna snapped as the bombs continued on, intensity diminishing slightly to the west.
“You told me not to worry about you,” Jared answered.
“I wasn’t talking to you. I meant Kehm.”
“We have our hands full here,” Kehm replied, Arinna realizing that not all the explosions she heard were from outside her dactyl.
“What is your status?” Arinna asked at the same time as Jared.
“Nothing has struck Command. I don’t think they know our exact location,” Kehm answered through the static. “They sort of snuck up on us.”
“I’m on my way,” Jared reported.
Arinna cursed, angry at the FLF and her impotence to strike back or protect. Her mind registered a familiar shape as she clicked closed the design that had popped open. She hurried back to it. The streamlined geometric shape of the dactyl filled her screens. Given the time to open fully, pages of diagrams nested behind the first image. She could fix her dactyl. They could build more. If they weren’t out of time now. She sorted down to the schematic showing the stabilizers.
“Kehm, is Command still in one piece?” Arinna asked.
“Affirmative,” Kehm answered, though his response was shaky.
“Tell tech to reassemble dactyl 3. Hopefully they haven’t taken too much off it yet. I want it back together and in the air. Now.”
“They won’t be happy,” he warned.
“Tell them I have the original schematics, including the power cells. That should make up for it.”
“I’m so glad you didn’t get blown to bits,” Jared said, voice distant as if his focus were elsewhere.
“How are you doing with the bombers, Captain?” she asked.
“Like shooting ducks, only there are more ducks than hunters. How long till you can join us?”
“I’m working on it. Right now I can fly, but I can’t shoot anything.”
The stabilizers had been an easy reset and reboot. That left the frizzled wiring to the lasers. The electric system was a nightmare of colored lines running through the 3D schematic on the vids. Desperate for a quick solution, Arinna typed in the warning codes still chiming on the dactyl’s console. Corresponding areas blazed red on the display. Now she was getting somewhere.
“Anything coming to blow me up, Kehm?”
“You have a clear window for the moment. The last dactyl is up with Farrak and Gabriella flying. They really need you too.”
“Roger. Good to hear they hadn’t scraped the third one yet.”
“I think they were afraid of it,” Kehm answered. “It’s barely been eight months.”
“What were they doing, drawing it?” Jared snipped. “Could have been bloody using it.”
Arinna smiled to hear him complain. It meant things were going well enough in the air.
“If you have flight, my Lady, you might want to relocate,” Kehm said, breaking her concentration after a few minutes of silence.
“What do I have coming in?” she asked, not relaxing from her cramped pose as she felt for a bundle of wire beneath the decking of the cargo bay.
“Bomber crossing your path heading northwest,” Kehm answered just as she snagged the wrapped line with her fingers.
Arinna froze. “To the UK? How many of those bloody things are there?” she snapped at Kehm’s affirmative of the intended target.
“At the moment two dozen or so. They’re scattered and flying low with a lot of distance between them,” Jared replied.
Arinna spun the wire around her fingers and yanked, deciding that if the bundle came she would stay and fix the lasers. Otherwise, she’d see what could be done in the air without weapons. The cable slid to the hatch without resistance. When she pulled it out, she could see why. Melted connectors had snapped. Arinna let out a curse that set Jared laughing.
“Remind me to suggest a few improvements to the tech team when I get back,” Arinna hissed.
“You won’t be getting back if that bomber sees you,” Kehm replied.
“Two more minutes. I need to hard-wire the laser power directly to the circuit panel.”
Kehm railed that the idea wasn’t a good one and that she should move, but Arinna ignored him. The minute the dactyl took to the air, she’d be even more a target than she was on the ground. With the final wire soldered securely thanks to the aid of the small onboard maintenance kit the schematics had clued her onto, the last warning chime died. Arinna scrambled to her feet. The small cargo bay was a nest of poorly strapped and sorted servers zigzagged by snaking wires, but her dactyl would fly. And shoot. Which was good. There was a bomber coming directly for her.
Arinna jerked the dactyl a few feet vertical, shooting sideways across the landscape before the engines came off idle. Bombs chased her quickening escape. The cockpit lights brightened as the power surged. The dactyl shot ahead of the bomber, giving her the room to swing it around to finally see what had been causing havoc the last few hours.
A B-52 Stratobomber lumbered toward her. She recognized it from times spent with Michael on US Air Force runways. Old US equipment, exactly like the FLF to put to use equipment thought obsolete. Feeling like a futuristic hornet compared to the old monster in front of her, Arinna flashed beneath the B-52’s wing. The dactyl’s lasers hadn’t warmed up yet.
Flipping around again, Arinna chased down the bomber, watching the last of the bombs meant for her fall toward earth. What she saw made her jerk the dactyl sideways. The bomb never touched the ground. It detonated in the air, lines of crackling energy spreading out in a curved sheet to reach downward along either side of a transfer station. The next bomb did the same, though the third fell to earth, blasting a crater of debris outwards.
There wasn’t time to sort out what she’d seen. Instead, she dropped a GPS marker and correc
ted her flight to hunt down the bomber. It was time to help out the Guard and remove a few planes.
—
The air battle was one-sided. The B-52s had no fighter escorts to protect them. Their only advantage was flying low until rising to prepare for bomb drop, and the spacing between them. The FLF had planned the attack well, wanting to destroy the cities and crop fields remaining in Europe. It might have guessed that a few of the Guard air fighters were operational but hazarded that the EU fuel supply was too low to keep them in the air long. It hadn’t known about the dactyls, or at least what they were capable of, even if it had tried to claim them first.
With all three in the air and targets spread out over the continent, the FLF bombing run became a testing field for the dactyl’s capabilities. Speed, agility, and weapons were pushed. Arinna loved her plane. Though she cringed whenever a sharp maneuver slid server pieces across the cargo hold. Tech would be yelling at her that they needed to fix the servers to access the plans. But it couldn’t be helped.
The sun was setting when Arinna watched her last bomber fall into the North Sea. Terri read reports on damage over the comm. Bad, but not horrible.
“Sounds like most damage is infrastructure,” Jared said, voice weary but satisfied. “And the war pretty much put holes in most of those. The FLF just took them down to make way for rebuilding.”
“Now that’s a thought,” Arinna mused.
Rebuilding when the war ended. Hope stung her eyes with lost dreams. She wasn’t ready for that part yet. Blinking her vision clear, her gaze fell on the soft glow of the GPS tracker. Memories of the strange phenomena Arinna had witnessed earlier resurfaced. The location was on the way to Command. Well, it was close enough for a detour. And she could check out the air base to see if anything remained in case they wanted to salvage more.
The brick building with its glass entryway lay shattered. A corner dissolved into a crater, bits of the remaining building cascading downward in a small landslide as she flew over. Even if there were anything left to salvage resting in the below-ground hallways, it would take a lot of equipment to dig it out. And looking at the size of the crater swallowing the building, Arinna doubted there was much remaining anyway. Especially when one rainstorm would destroy the electronic equipment.
Ahead, the damaged power grid continued to arc, although she doubted it would last much longer. Towers leaned close, wires nearly crossing. If it didn’t ground itself out, the power station was sure to deliver the last of its output. The day of fighting spawned a maverick urge. Arinna fired at the mishmash of lines. The lasers never touched them.
The beams dissolved. No, they were absorbed into a halo of energy. The pulse of extra power flared around the small transfer station in a bubble, transmitting along the damaged lines with an angry buzz. Arinna hovered the dactyl a distance away, giving her a wide view. She fired again. The effect was the same. A shield of power flared to visible around the lines, saving them and the building. Arinna released a puff of breath. It didn’t seem possible, but she’d just witnessed it.
Cautiously, she set the dactyl down outside the invisible halo. The day had faded to dusk. Around the crossed lines, a light aura glowed in the night. She was tired and hungry. Server pieces were scattered across the cargo bay of the dactyl and held plans that could gain them a chance of victory. But the mystery before her captivated. Just to be sure, she shot it again.
The dying glow flared to life once more, power hissing around the shield from the point of impact. Oh, she had to figure out what was happening.
One more pulse with the lasers and Arinna mentally noted the edge of the shield on the ground. It’d stopped bombs and lasers. She wasn’t too keen on discovering what it did to organic compounds accidentally. Dropping the back hatch, she stepped foot onto soil for the first time in half a day. The aroma of plants and ash struck her. Flying disconnected her from the world while making her realize how interconnected it all was when she landed.
Near the invisible shield, the air crackled and stood the hair on her arms on end. A stick tossed toward it bounced backwards with a snap that smelled of ozone. That impressed her. She’d stay up till dawn if that were what it took to unravel what made the effect. Images of the destroyed buildings she’d seen overlaid the small and unharmed station setting at the center of the shield and fueled her with a burst of energy
“How are things at Command,” Arinna asked into her comm.
“Hectic,” Kehm replied. “Repairs are underway for damaged critical systems. MOTHER and Parliament have both requested reports.”
“Jared or Farrak back yet?”
“Negative. Both are enroute and should arrive within the hour.” Kehm paused. “Why aren’t you moving?”
“Send a very brief report to both MOTHER and Parliament outlining the attack, that the threat was dealt with, and that we will know more tomorrow. There is no more FLF movement, right?” Arinna dreaded the answer.
“Correct. No movement. I think we are in the clear for tonight.”
“Hopefully for longer than that. It must have taken the FLF a significant amount of time and resources to pull this off.”
“Agreed. You think that it might have been a desperate gamble?” Kehm asked.
“We can hope.”
“So why aren’t you enroute, my Lady?”
Arinna huffed a laugh at the tentative tone in Kehm’s voice. And that he’d continued to use her unofficial title. She might have to get used to it. Maybe.
“Tell Captain Vries I found something I need to check out. I’ll be late coming in.”
Arinna cut off Kehm’s reluctant affirmative.
No Quarter
August 2064
Derrick pressed his back into the demolished building. Instincts from fighting with the Guard kept him from rushing forward. Instead, he looked for escape routes and scouts hidden in the jumbled shadows. There was no backup here. He was not a soldier. Not anymore.
But he should notify them. And he knew it. If the five men he’d seen slipping through Libourne’s streets were FLF, they most likely weren’t alone. He should call the Grey Guard to alert them. And then he would go back to his politician’s quarters embedded within a small Guard base. The thought was worse than the five unknown men. He could not take another night of sitting and waiting for the war to end. He watched the soldiers train and leave on missions daily until the sight drove him mad.
Running into five strangers dressed in black while out riding seemed a godsend.
“Did you get it?” one of the men hissed.
Derrick had just been thinking that his need for action was overstimulating his mind. The men he’d tailed couldn’t be FLF. Not this close to a Guard base. But with the sound of a heavy backpack settling on dusty concrete followed by the chink of metal, Derrick froze. There was only one reason for the FLF to be here. They wanted to take the base out.
Dammit, he should have told someone where he was going.
Derrick didn’t carry one of the comms he’d pestered Parliament so hard to be given to the troops. Nor did he have a gun. Those were in too short of a supply, just like electricity. But he did have the sword he’d claimed the time he’d fought with Jared in Voltzcrag. In that fight, he would have risked attacking these six men, hoping for an advantage in terrain and timing, and that there were only six. And that they weren’t carrying guns. Even the FLF was a little low on ammo these days.
But that was nearly three years ago and before the injury that had led to his withdrawal from the Guard. Only the weakness of his wounds had allowed the combined forces of his father, Renault le Marc, and Renault’s daughter, Danielle, to convince him to join Parliament. He’d tried to make the choice count. But what he did wasn’t good enough. This moment proved it.
“Only four?”
The whispered words blended into the rustling of leaves.
“That is all we got through. How close can you plant them to the base?”
A snort accented the answer. “Right
where they need to be. I have a way in.”
Derrick had to do something.
He slipped back to where he’d tied his horse in deeper shadows and on soft grass. Petting her muzzle, Derrick felt a twinge. He was fond of the mare. Hopefully, she’d find her way back to the stables on base. Preferably with a few FLF chasing her down right into a night patrol.
Derrick led her through the grass to the far side of the building where the FLF hid. The wide front windows held broken panes. The mare’s shoes would reverberate in the canyon choked with rubble. It would help. He smacked her rump with a branch.
She whinnied and kicked before taking off in a bucking trot. Her startled cry brought moving silence as the men whisked forward to peer at the galloping horse. She was already too much in shadow, hiding that no rider guided her race toward the Guard base.
“Shit.”
“I thought you weren’t followed.”
“Just go and take care of whoever that was!”
The order sliced through the babble. Three men peeled off on horses that hit a full stride before reaching the road. Three gone, which left at least three remaining. And the bombs. They wouldn’t have risked those in a mad dash toward base. Derrick drew his sword and edged into the building’s shadow.
“Where are you going?”
“We were seen. I can’t risk being caught here. You have the package and your orders.”
A figure hesitated in the darkness along a rent in the building’s side. With swift movements, it detached and hurried in a limping gait along the rubble strewn alley. Stocky and shorter than Derrick’s height by a head, he recognized the figure without needing to see his face. Which made the choice of tracking down the man with connections to the FLF or staying with the explosives that much easier. And better. Now he wouldn’t have to kill someone who held information the Guard would find valuable.
