Survival Strategy

by Anders Raynor

  Relief gave way to anxiety when he learned that Riley had been sent to the surface and that the battlegroup had lost contact with her landing party. Something dramatic happened on Minos Station. One of the dropships took off and disappeared between launch and orbit. A search and rescue mission was underway.

  Jason called his CO. “Captain, I’m reporting for duty. Permission to join the search and rescue.”

  “Negative, commander,” O’Neil replied. “I need you on the Phenix in case the battlegroup is attacked.”

  “As the Air Boss, it’s my job to organize aerial search and rescue.”

  “Commander, the last time I checked, you were reporting to me, not the other way around. FYI, the wing commander is not necessarily in charge of such missions. This decision is at my discretion.”

  “Please, captain.” Jason tried to sound submissive, though such behavior was at odds with his character.

  No doubt O’Neil wasn’t fooled. “You’re too close to this. I know about you and Commander Lance.”

  Jason instinctively raised his hands in a placating gesture, even though O’Neil couldn’t see him. “Captain, honestly, there’s nothing between Lance and me. I mean, we’re colleagues, but… You know we had our differences. I just want to help, that’s all. I’m fully recovered.”

  O’Neil sighed. “Have it your way. But I warn you—I won’t tolerate any personal initiative on this mission. Follow my orders to the letter or face disciplinary action. You managed to get away with acts of disobedience, but it won’t happen this time. This op is too damn important to play cowboy. Got it, commander?”

  “Aye aye, sir. You have my word. Just let me fly, and I won’t let you down.”

  As soon as the captain gave him permission, he rushed to the locker room, yanked on his flight suit, and boarded an autopod that brought him right to his Rapier and dropped him in the cockpit.

  He took a deep breath, clenching the control stick. “Aah, feels good to be back in the saddle!”

  Now Jason felt in his element. Every fiber of his being was telling him he belonged in the cockpit. It felt right.

  His mood darkened again as his thoughts returned to Riley and Adrian. Though they had their differences, he came to think of them as family. He punched a button to start the engine and waited for launch. An electromagnetic catapult ejected his starfighter from the launch tube, and the pale crescent of Nifelheim Bis filled most of his field of view. He set course to the planet’s surface.

  The storm covered half of the planet in a white shroud. The size and violence of this atmospheric phenomenon was mind-blowing. Soon, the entire atmosphere would be held hostage by raging winds. Jason had less than an hour to find the dropship and the survivors of the crash, if there were any.

  “Commander Blaze to all search teams,” he called. “Report.”

  “No trace of the dropship,” one of the squadron leaders said. His location flashed on Jason’s 3D map.

  “No joy,” the second one reported.

  The same answer came from the other squadrons.

  Jason swore inwardly. He hated feeling powerless. “C’mon, guys, a Griffin couldn’t just vanish.”

  “With all due respect, commander, this planet’s a bitch.” That was Red Jack speaking. “We can’t see through the blizzard, and microbes in the air scramble comms and sensors. The ice crust is extremely unstable. If it fell into a crevice, the dropship could be under a mile of ice.”

  “Right,” Jason said. “I’ve got an idea, but I need someone crazy enough to fly with me. Three volunteers.”

  “We’re stretched pretty thin,” Red Jack replied. “You know we can’t leave the battlegroup without fighter escort.”

  “I’ll be your wing.” Jason couldn’t help but smile as he heard Radge, a hothead like him, and one of the most talented pilots with whom he’d ever served.

  “Porto here,” boomed another intimately familiar voice. “I’m with Mitch. We volunteer. Right, Mitch?”

  “Between the four of us, we can take on the Biozi empire itself,” Jason said with a snigger. “Form on me. We’re going in.”

  And down they went, engines roaring, through the veil of blizzard that foreshadowed the storm.

  “Okay, here’s the plan,” Jason explained. “We know the dropship didn’t return to Minos Station, and it isn’t on the planet’s surface, otherwise we would’ve found it by now. My comp extrapolated its trajectory based on the last data received. We’ll have to razor the glacier and look for heat signatures under the surface.”

  “What?” Mitch exclaimed. He was the youngest and the least experienced pilot among the four. “Sorry, commander, I didn’t mean to be disrespectful. It’s just that…when you said you wanted to razor the glacier…”

  “You heard right,” Jason confirmed. “We’ll fly a few meters above the surface, as close as possible.”

  “Through the goo?” Porto asked doubtfully. “With our sensors scrambled? That’s daredevil flying even for you. Even for Radge.”

  Radge sniggered. “He he. I love you, commander.”

  “Radge, you’re my wing,” Jason said. “Porto and Mitch, cover us from above. Formation omega-four.”

  “Roger, boss,” Porto acknowledged. “What happens if we find the bucket?”

  “When we find the dropship, we take our birds out of the goo and call the angels.”

  The starfighters raced above the glacier. The night was totally dark, and even with the search lights at full power the blizzard reduced visibility to about a hundred meters. They had to rely on echolocation to avoid obstacles.

  Jason’s bird trembled, its engine struggling against a ferocious squall.

  He raised his voice to cover the growl of the wind. “Darus taught me deductive reasoning skills, so let’s see if I’m a good pupil. We don’t know why the dropship went down, but I bet it’s not due to atmospheric conditions or mechanical failure. Griffins are tough buckets. Piloting error is also unlikely. Sensors didn’t register any explosions or energy signatures from blaster fire or heavy ordnance, so we can rule out hostile fire. One possibility remains—sabotage.”

  “Wow, that’s not reassuring,” Porto boomed. “If you’re right, how does that help us?”

  “Throttle back to a hundred m.p.s.,” Jason called. “Set scanners to infrared and boost to the max. To answer your question, Porto, if I’m right, sabotage probably happened on the planet. The saboteur could be nearby. Stay sharp.”

  “I’ve got something!” Radge shouted. “I’m going back to check.”

  His Rapier made a U-turn and sped toward a crevice in the ice. Jason followed.

  “Porto and Mitch, set scanners on hyperspectral sweep,” Jason ordered. “Also, boost your motion trackers.”

  “Contact!” Mitch yelled.

  Jason’s map lit up with eight red dots. He thrust the stick to the side and stepped on the accelerator. “Evade!”

  Plasma bolts exploded around him. The starfighter jolted as one of them punched through the hull. One of the main thrusters died with a rasp. Warning icons flashed on the HUD.

  “I’m hit!” Mitch cried. “Losing power! Oh, stars, no, no, no!”

  His bird slashed through the snow, leaving a dark gash on the immaculate surface of the glacier.

  “Porto, Radge, scram out of here,” Jason ordered. “I’ll draw fire.”

  “We can’t leave you, commander,” Radge yelled back.

  “Obey my fragging order, or I swear I’ll shoot you,” Jason snapped. “Climb!”

  Wrestling with the controls, Jason aimed at the red dots on the surface. No doubt they were Biozi troopers with anti-materiel plasma rifles. He squeezed the trigger, and his four 12-mm rapid-fire blasters rained hell on the hostiles.

  Three of them fell into the crevice, hit by blaster bolts. The others took cover behind ice outcrops.

  Jason glanced at the damage report. He’d lost one of the main thrusters, stabilizers were unresponsive, and his bird was leaking power. Clearing the
atmosphere through the blizzard, with a massive storm approaching, would be a challenge even for him.

  How the hell did we manage to miss Biozi presence on the planet?

  The answer struck him—signal scrambling wasn’t due to the planet’s native microorganisms. The Biozi introduced artificial ones to jam the signals.

  Devilishly clever! They played us like a goddamn fiddle!

  “…respond…only survivor…trapped…” He picked up a faint transmission coming from beneath the ice. Although it was distorted, he recognized the voice.

  “Lance!” he yelled. “It’s Blaze, can you hear me?”

  The signal became so weak he couldn’t make out a single word.

  “Ah, the hell with it! Lance, hold on tight, I’m coming for you.”

  He landed as close to Mitch’s fighter as he could and opened the cockpit. The blizzard hit his visor, and the wind roared in his ears. He grabbed his backpack containing emergency equipment, including a thrust pack, and crawled out of the cockpit.

  Mitch’s bird was just a blurry silhouette, a shade darker than the snow in the background. Jason trudged toward it, struggling against gusts of wind. Red dots appeared at the edge of his HUD map and slowly progressed toward him.

  “Mitch, report,” he shouted. “Mitch, do you hear me? Are you injured?”

  “I’m okay.” The answer was faint, as if coming from another stellar system. “No injuries, just bruises. But the cockpit won’t open. Jammed dead.”

  “Hold on, buddy, I’m getting you out.”

  Jason pulled a plasma torch from the pack and started cutting through the cockpit. Progress was slow. Made of multilayer transparent nanoalloy designed to resist blaster bolts and high-velocity kinetic impacts, the cockpit was tough.

  The red dots drew closer.

  “No time, I’ll have to use a directional charge,” Jason said. “Don’t move. Your suit should protect you from the shockwave.”

  He pulled a small charge and set it on the cockpit, making sure the blast would be directed away from Mitch. Taking cover behind a wing, he triggered the detonation. The resulting explosion made a hole in the nanoalloy, but not big enough for Mitch to get through.

  “The hell with that!” Jason drew his blaster, a standard issue 9-mm Wells sidearm, and fired at the cockpit.

  The flashes from the blaster bolts gave away their position, but that didn’t matter. No doubt the Taar’kuun troopers had already spotted the crashed starfighters.

  Mitch crawled out of the wreck, and they both trudged away from the hostiles, as fast as the snow and wind allowed.

  “They’ll catch up with us,” Mitch shouted over the roar of the gale. “We can’t take on five troopers.”

  Jason stopped and looked around. He couldn’t see anything even in light amplification mode, and his helmet scanners were equally blind. He grabbed a hand scanner, set it on structural analysis mode, and examined the glacier beneath the snow.

  “Well, Mitch, I’ve got an idea, but you won’t like it. The ice we’re standing on is pretty fragile. A couple of well-placed charges will make it collapse. That’s how we’re gonna get rid of the troopers.”

  Mitch gave him a bemused stare, probably wondering whether his CO was sane. “But sir, what about us? Won’t we fall too?”

  “We’ll have an advantage—we’ll be ready for this. How are you with thrust packs?”

  Mitch’s face went even paler. “Sir, you know that thrust packs are designed for space, not for atmosphere. In this storm—”

  Jason set his hand on the young pilot’s shoulder. “We’re ASF. We’ll make it.”

  He planted two charges in the snow, making sure that the blasts would be directed downward, then gestured to Mitch to get behind an outcrop.

  The Taar’kuun troopers charged.

  That’s when the storm hit with full force. The wind howled like a thousand demons. Jason and Mitch squeezed against the outcrop. They couldn’t see the hostiles, and even their scanners couldn’t detect them.

  A plasma bolt hit the outcrop, then another. The booms from the explosions barely covered the roar of the storm.

  Jason punched the detonation button. The ice trembled, cracked, and gave way under their weight.

  In freefall, Jason activated his thrust pack and grabbed Mitch’s arm. They spun in the air amid falling blocks of ice. A plasma bolt flashed, missing them by only a meter.

  “You’re fraggin’ kiddin’ me!” Jason glimpsed the figures of two Taar’kuun troopers barreling toward him, their flight pack thrusters blazing.

  Jason struggled with the thrust pack controls, holding Mitch with the other hand. The gale hurled them toward an ice wall, and he had to fire his thrusters at full power to avoid collision.

  The troopers tried to do the same, but one of them failed. He rocketed past Jason and smashed into the wall. His broken body disappeared into the void.

  “Hold onto me,” Jason shouted.

  Mitch grabbed his leg, freeing his hand. Jason drew his blaster and fired at the Taar’kuun trooper pursuing them.

  The first bolt missed. The second scored a hit, but was absorbed by the trooper’s biosuit. The third missed.

  Jason aimed at the blade of blue plasma shooting out of the trooper’s backpack and fired again. There was a spark, and the ensuing blast covered even the roar of the storm. The burning corpse swirled wildly in the wind, then vanished into darkness.

  The shockwave from the explosion destabilized Jason’s flight. Mitch lost grip. Jason looked down and saw only Mitch’s thrusters flickering chaotically as he tried to stop the fall.

  Jason threw himself downward. As they descended, the wind weakened, and he was able to better control his trajectory. He could almost touch Mitch’s hand when he glimpsed a block of ice rushing toward them from above.

  18

  Minos Station

  Adrian owed his survival to Sergeant Mortensen. Sitting at the terminal in Prof. Tenev’s office, his hands still shaking, he tried to access the video-log. He struggled to remain focused, the visions of the slaughter haunting him.

  Having repelled the first attack by the hybrids, the landing party had pushed further into Minos Station. All the station personnel they’d found were dead. Adrian was happy he wore a helmet, as he could only imagine the stench of rotting corpses that pervaded the facility. It took all his self-control not to throw up.

  “We should’ve evacuated,” he muttered, scolding himself. “I don’t even know if I can decode this log.”

  “On the bright side, we found Lieutenant Okoro,” Mortensen boomed.

  Her squad had suffered heavy casualties. Only Okoro and two of her marines had survived by hiding in a room behind a blast door. They had tried to call the ships in orbit, but all comms had been scrambled.

  “Yeah, but we lost people when the hybrids launched their second attack,” Adrian said. “We don’t even know what happened to Riley.”

  Adrian shut his eyes, the images of the fight replaying in his mind. The assault was as swift and ferocious as the first. It was chaos. Okoro and Mortensen protected him, and they took refuge in Prof. Tenev’s office, defended by auto-turrets. They were separated from Riley’s squad during the fight and couldn’t reestablish wireless contact with her.

  “I’m sure Commander Lance is fine,” Mortensen tried to reassure Adrian. “She must have delivered the research data by now, and she’s on her ship, warm and cozy.”

  “We don’t know that,” Adrian said darkly. “We should’ve evacuated all together once we recovered the research data.”

  “We still had to rescue the nerds…sorry, the scientists,” the sergeant pointed out.

  “Doctor?” Lieutenant Okoro called Adrian. “We don’t have much time. Are you making progress?”

  Adrian forced his eyes open and stared at the holo-screen of Tenev’s cyber-terminal. “I need more time. The video-log is encrypted. Maybe I can start with the research data—”

  “Negative, doctor,” Okoro cut him
. “You’ll have time to study the data once we return to our ship. We need to know what happened during the last few hours.”

  “We also need to know how to kill those hybrid bastards,” Mortensen growled. “With all our firepower, we didn’t manage to end any of them. Never encountered such tough sons of bugs. Even Biozi black squads are pussies in comparison.”

  “To find an effective way of fighting the hybrids, I must study the research data,” Adrian insisted.

  “Doctor, I’m the ranking officer here,” Okoro reminded him. “Please follow my instructions. Decrypt the video-log as quickly as possible.”

  Adrian nodded and concentrated on his task. He successfully decrypted three video-log entries and played the first one.

  “I never imagined that would happen,” Tenev’s hologram said in hollow voice. “We succeeded. Yet this success gives me no joy, no sense of accomplishment or pride. The retrovirus worked. It worked as intended, and even faster than anticipated. Subject Nine is reverting to Jotnar genotype, and we didn’t find any of the anomalies and deformities detected in previous subjects. His bionic implants were not rejected by his body and are adapting well to his new physiology.”

  The researcher made a short pause. His eyes were set on the holo-cam, yet his gaze seemed unfocused. “Despite strict security protocols, Subject Nine escaped, slaughtering every living being in his path. I still can’t fathom how that was possible. Our containment measures were more than adequate, but I found evidence of a glitch in the cybernetwork. Malfunction or negligence? We’re all overworked and sleep-deprived, so I can’t rule out human error.”

  Tenev rubbed his eyelids. The tips of his fingers were trembling. No doubt he was reliving the massacre in his mind.

  “At any rate, what’s done is done,” he concluded. “We have created the most efficient and brutal killing machine in the galaxy, and now it’s on the loose. The hybrid butchered Dr. Ivanov right outside my office. I was sending my progress report to Neo when I heard her scream. I rushed to the door, but it was too late. Subject Nine butchered her before my eyes. I could almost sense rage emanating from in him. So much hatred… He glared at me with his orange eyes, but spared me. I don’t know why.”