Titan’s interior lights flickered on and off intermittently as she absorbed the terrible blows one after the other, clouds of debris spilling from her hull plating, and Vasquez saw her bow dip downward as she rolled to port, her helmsman and crew valiantly fighting to keep her between New Washington and the Aleeyans.
Titan struck the Aleeyan’s bow as she plummeted between the two massive craft, and although no sound could travel through the vacuum of space Vasquez felt sure that he heard the tremendous crash as the massive mile-long ships collided. A fireball blossomed at the impact site and spread between the two ships as they began tumbling erratically alongside New Washington, clouds of sparkling metallic debris and bleeding gases spurting out into space around the two behemoths as they descended alongside the city.
Titan’s greater velocity and mass forced her to descend more quickly than her Aleeyan foe, her hull shuddering beneath the combined onslaught of plasma fire and the collision, and he glimpsed the Aleeyan’s upper bow guns come into view over Titan’s hull.
‘Oh no.’
Like a terrible sunrise breaking over the horizon of a metal planet, the Aleeyan guns opened fire and three plasma shells rocketed over the hull of Titan and rushed toward the station. Vasquez heard the victorious cheers mutate grotesquely once more into cries of terror, and then there were no more screams to hear as the plasma blasts slammed into the station.
Vasquez instinctively grabbed hold of a street lamp’s shaft as he saw the blows hammer the station’s surface one after the other. New Washington shuddered beneath the impacts of the plasma strikes as though an earthquake were rippling through her superstructure. Lights quivered on the streets and screams echoed hellishly through the city as Vasquez held on grimly to the lamp post and watched as the plasma strikes spread out like bloody stains across the station’s transparent hard-light shields.
As the third strike hit the shields a massive crack like thunder boomed across the city and the shields failed. A deafening banshee howl screeched through the station as the crowds dashed in panic for the nearest cover as the atmosphere was suddenly dragged toward the breach. Vasquez held on tightly to the lamp post as he saw vapor condense out of the air and soar upward in a swirling vortex that turned to white ice crystals as the frigid vacuum of space chilled the moist air to minus two hundred seventy degrees in an instant and dragged it out into oblivion.
*
‘New Washington’s been breached!’
Marshall heard the tactical officer screech her warning and he whirled to see the vast orbital city’s northern quarter belching a growing cloud of crystalized gases out into the bitter vacuum of space as the Aleeyan warship’s salvo struck home and shattered her feeble defensive shields.
‘Hard to port!’ Marshall yelled. ‘Extend our shields to cover the breach! Divert all port power cells to shields and hold station!’
The bridge crew scrambled to divert the ship’s power to the shields as the array field was altered in shape. Marshall watched as Titan’s shields were warped from around her hull, a bubble of energy shimmering as it absorbed the blows from the Aleeyan warship nearby. Marshall saw the bubble spread over the city’s shattered surface and the escaping gases were pinched off.
‘Give the Aleeyan’s everything we’ve got!’ Marshall bellowed across the deck. ‘Call in the rest of the fleet and blast them back to hell!’
‘We’re too close!’ Olsen insisted. ‘The salvos could take us down too!’
‘Do it!’ Marshall yelled. ‘Divert all engine power to the batteries and open fire!’
‘We won’t be able to escape!’
‘We’re pinned here anyway or the city will lose its atmosphere!’ Marshall yelled. ‘Finish them while we still can!’
Olsen realized that if the Aleeyans had the chance to pull back and take another swing at them before the fleet caught up then Titan would be unable to manoeuvre defensively and avoid the broadside. Olsen’s voice boomed across the bridge deck.
‘All remaining available power to the starboard batteries! Let them have it!’
The ship’s internal lights dimmed as the vast quantities of power generated by the ship’s anti-matter engine cores were directed instead to the plasma batteries bristling across Titan’s starboard hull. The energy levels in the batteries shot up to maximum in a matter of moments, and Marshall clenched his fist as he shouted.
‘Fire everything!’
The massive warship shuddered as the entire starboard battery opened up on the Aleeyan warship as it attempted to get clear of both Titan and the orbital city and line up for a fresh attack. Marshall saw the immense barrage of plasma fire rocket across the gap between the two immense ships in a fraction of a second, and then the visual sensors were overloaded as the blasts hammered into the Aleeyan vessel in a massive fireball of destruction too bright for the photoreceptive sensors to shield.
And then, moments later, the huge Aleeyan warship vanished amid a fireball that obscured the view of Earth as her hull ruptured and her engine cores exploded.
***
XLVI
‘She’s gone!’
Schmidt’s voice was both alarmed and oddly calm, the doctor speaking as though he were observing the loss of a patient as the Aleeyan warship suddenly ruptured amidships with a blinding flare of light that for a moment competed with that coming from the sun itself. All around them, the interior of the ship disintegrated into billowing flames.
‘Hang on!’ Nathan yelled.
Nathan shielded his eyes with one hand against the fearsome glare as the warship’s massive hull burst all around him like a cliff face shattered by massive explosions. The Hawk fighter dipped below the outer hull doors as they were blasted clear of the hull, and Nathan rolled hard right to avoid being swatted like a fly by the immense spinning debris as all around his wings fearsome flames glowed.
The fighter tumbled and rocked as the blast radiated outward and the shockwave plowed into the craft from behind. Warning sirens blared in the cockpit as the fighter began spinning out of control.
‘Lateral thrusters damaged,’ Schmidt reported, ‘hull integrity at sixty four per cent and falling. Fuel lines ruptured on starboard nacelle.’
‘Give me some good news!’
‘We’re not dead yet.’
Nathan held on grimly as clouds and chunks of debris were blasted past the fighter in streaking halos of flame and sparkling gases crystalized by the freezing vacuum of space. The orb of Earth spun past in front of him, and far below he could see fragments of debris hitting the atmosphere and flaring up as bright streaks of light plummeting to certain fiery doom far below.
‘We’re out of control!’ Nathan snapped.
For a moment Schmidt did not reply and then his voice reached Nathan as though from afar.
‘Perfect.’
‘What?!’
Schmidt did not reply again as the fighter tumbled through the expanding debris field. Nathan saw glimpses of the huge Aleeyan warship’s huge hull, a massive collapsing leviathan of flame and tortured metal reminiscent of glowing lava flows amid black rock, trailing smoke and debris. The warship dove away from New Washington as Titan cruised high above, her vast bulk eclipsing the sun as plasma salvos continued to rain down on the stricken enemy vessel and shattered her wasted ruins further.
‘Stand by,’ Schmidt said.
‘I don’t have much of a choice,’ Nathan replied grimly.
The huge cloud of debris plummeted ever downward, drawn inexorably in by Earth’s gravitational field. Nathan sensed rather than saw Schmidt regaining control of the fighter as he systematically shut off damaged systems and re-routed power to others. The fighter rolled right-side up, the planet’s vast horizon level before Nathan as they flew along amid dense clouds of tumbling wreckage, some of which was beginning to glow as it rushed downward.
He smiled as he glanced down at Schmidt, who was looking back at him with a knowing expression.
‘Not bad,’ Nathan admitted. ‘Can you ge
t us down?’
‘The fighter is damaged but I’ve routed power away from the weapons and engines to the shields and shut down all unnecessary systems. In the middle of all of this wreckage we’ll be virtually undetectable, if they’re even looking for us, and you still don’t have an implant.’
‘I can’t be tracked,’ Nathan confirmed.
‘They will be searching for me though,’ Schmidt said. ‘Admiral Marshall knows that I’m still active, and right now he’s likely just become the greatest hero who ever lived.’
‘Can you get us close to Denver?’ Nathan said, trying to ignore the consequences of the battle that had just been fought: that Marshall’s hand had just been strengthened and that his and Schmidt’s plan was partly to blame.
Schmidt hesitated as his digital brain performed a series of complex mathematical computations.
‘Close enough,’ he replied finally. ‘Most of this wreckage will come down over Montana and Alberta, but I think we can break off and land. I’ll run the descent program now and plot a course.’
Nathan looked about him and saw the vast fields of debris begin to trail plumes of glowing flame, flickering like tumbling stars as they plummeted down and began colliding with Earth’s tenuous upper atmosphere at seventeen thousand miles per hour. Nathan knew that at such a tremendous velocity, even thin air was as hard as steel and the friction generated would annihilate anything but the largest pieces of debris.
A brilliant flare of light burst out above Nathan and he looked up to see the Aleeyan warship still being pounded by Titan’s guns, the massive hull breaking up into smaller pieces of flaming wreckage.
‘Marshall,’ he growled, ‘the man’s insane. Havok and his crew are long gone.’
‘He’s protecting the planet,’ Schmidt defended the admiral, ‘trying to shatter the bigger pieces of wreckage before they hit the atmosphere so that they don’t reach the surface intact.’
‘Why do you keep defending him?’ Nathan demanded. ‘He shut you down!’
‘He did what he had to do,’ Schmidt replied. ‘I don’t hold it against him. If it had been up to me, I’d have done the same in his shoes.’
Nathan said nothing and watched as Schmidt allowed the fighter’s internal navigation system to take over. The nose pitched up as a halo of fearsome red light appeared from beneath the hull, flickering red tongues of super-heated gas glowing uncomfortably close to Nathan outside the cockpit as the craft descended amid streaks of flame and Havok’s flagship burned up all around them.
Nathan recalled what Foxx had said about people’s last journeys after death, their remains burning up as shooting stars in Earth’s atmosphere, and he realized that Havok and his crew would be somewhere amid the spectacular display that raged around them.
A screen lit up on the control panel before him and he saw text whip across it.
‘What’s that?’ he asked.
‘I’m sending a message before we descend too far and contact is lost with New Washington.’
‘Who are you sending it to?’
Schmidt smiled apologetically. ‘We’re going to need help, Nathan.’
*
New Washington
Vasquez stood alongside the precinct building and listened to what sounded like a vast ocean crashing against distant shores but was in fact tens of thousands of jubilant voices crying out as they watched the Aleeyan warship crumbling before them and plunging to its spectacular, fiery doom far below.
The station’s defensive mechanisms had now fully sealed the breach, and though Vasquez could barely bring himself to think about the lives that had been lost in those horrific few minutes he knew that the battle was over and that every living thing on New Washington owed it to Titan, and to Admiral Marshall.
The massive warship cruised by outside the station, her guns silent now and the Earth below streaked with countless thousands of burst of light as the enemy warship’s shattered remains began to burn up in a dense shower of shooting stars. Pairs of CSS fighters zipped this way and that, swarming around Titan as the battered flagship of the fleet began to ease away from the station.
Vasquez looked out across the crowds surrounding him even as a woman he had never met rushed up to him, smiling brightly as she threw her arms around his neck and kissed him. Vasquez blinked and she was gone, embracing strangers, criminals who had moments before hated each other now high-fiving and punching the air as Titan soared by outside.
‘Vasquez!’
He turned and saw Allen hurrying through the crowd toward him.
‘Man, that was somethin’!’ he said as he reached up to high-five his partner. ‘Did you see the way Titan hit them?!’
Vasquez belatedly realized that his partner’s face was pinched with concern, and suddenly he realized. Ironside had been aboard the Aleeyan vessel. He turned, saw again the immense debris fields burning up in the atmosphere.
‘Nathan,’ he uttered, his voice a whisper.
‘Vasquez, we gotta get out of here.’
Allen grabbed his shoulder urgently.
‘The battle’s won man,’ Vasquez replied, ‘and Nathan’s gone.’
Allen pulled him close.
‘Nathan’s not gone,’ he insisted, ‘and the battle’s far from over. We’ve got to move.’
Vasquez responded instantly, following his partner even though he didn’t have a clue how Allen could possibly know that Nathan was still alive.
‘What’s goin’ on bro’?’ Vasquez demanded. ‘We can’t get off the station, it’s in lockdown!’
‘We got clearance to leave,’ Allen replied. ‘Don’t ask me how but my guess is Nathan somehow hacked us out.’
‘How do you know that he’s alive?’
Allen reached an elevator and looked his partner in the eye.
‘Marshall isn’t our savior: he’s the one that caused all of this.’
Allen gestured around them and Vasquez shook his head. ‘No way man, we all just watched him blow the Aleeyans to hell, risked his entire ship and crew to do it!’
‘It’s a false flag war,’ Allen insisted. ‘Marshall set the whole thing up and is planning genocide, selective removal of parts of the human race, starting with New Washington.’
Vasquez’s blood ran cold. ‘Seriously? How the hell do you know all of this?’
‘I got a message. C’mon.’
***
XLVII
Denver, Colorado
The darkness of the night reminded Nathan of his childhood, hanging out with kids his age in the wilderness that had been just a few minutes’ walk from his own front yard.
‘I don’t like it out here at night,’ Schmidt complained.
Nathan smiled, for once feeling at home. ‘I grew up here,’ he replied. ‘Fresh air, open land, you guys don’t know what you’re missing.’
‘Coyotes, bears, wolves, scorpions, spiders,’ Schmidt uttered and appeared to shiver slightly. ‘I know very well what I’m missing, Mister Ironside.’
Nathan crouched in the bushes alongside a low, silvery building that sat alone on an isolated lot within a couple of miles of Denver itself. The city skyline twinkled in the darkness, smaller than Nathan remembered it and with taller, more elegant structures striking up into a night sky that was filled with streaks of fiery debris raining silently down as though the very stars were falling from the sky, the most spectacular shooting star show in the history of mankind.
‘The light show is keeping people occupied,’ Nathan observed as he saw a pair of security guards manning the compound gates staring up at the striking display and pointing at the endless shooting stars. Nathan could see one particularly bright star, New Washington, far above them and toward the Eastern Horizon, from where the majority of the shooting stars appeared to be emanating.
‘Come on,’ Schmidt urged him. ‘I don’t have much power left and you won’t be getting inside this compound without my help.’
Nathan moved swiftly but silently through the darkness, hugging the
shadows as he circled the compound’s tall razor-wire fences in search of some weakness. He found one at the rear corner, deep in shadow, where wild animals had burrowed beneath the wire fence to create ratlines and trails from one copse of trees to another.
Nathan crouched down and pulled up on the fencing, and with an effort he managed to squeeze in beneath it and rolled inside the compound. A bright light flared into life and illuminated the rear of the fence line as Nathan scrambled out of sight behind the building itself as a voice called out.
Nathan remained silent and still in the shadows as the two guards emerged into view, one of them walking toward the fence where Nathan had slipped in. The guard strolled up to the fence and looked down at its tattered edge, then at the animal trails winding their way into the darkness where Nathan crouched.
‘You got something, Jenson?’ came a distant call.
Jenson scanned the trails for a moment longer, peering into the darkness not ten feet from where Nathan crouched silently and hoped that the guard could not see him clearly enough.
‘Nah,’ the guard replied finally and turned away. ‘Just more damned rats back here! You seen the ship come down yet?’
‘No big pieces man, just little bits o’junk.’
The voices trailed off into silence as Nathan risked a peek around the wall of the building and saw the guard, Jenson, disappear to the front of the compound again.
‘Let’s go,’ Schmidt whispered.
Nathan eased his way through the darkness at the rear of the compound and found a door, access to the building alongside large shutters that were firmly locked in place. The door had a small panel, illuminated by a tiny red light.
Old Ironsides Page 32
