by S M Briscoe
The collision was fierce, and though his own energy blast had the effect of acting as a shield, buffering him from being disintegrated, it was not enough to keep him in place. The blast impact took Jarred off his feet and sent him flying backward until he found himself surrounded by open sky. Realizing he had been thrown through the opening of the chamber and clean out of the building, he twisted himself around to catch a glimpse of Elora and Ethan’s startled faces before they raised out of view as he began to fall.
* * *
Sierra released the trigger on the gatling gun, cutting the ultra rapid laser flurry, her eyes wide with disbelief. Impossibly, her target still stood. Not only that, but it was completely unharmed, the chamber all around it lying in ruin. She knew that she had struck it with much of the barrage. Nothing could have survived it.
And yet this being, who’s appearance so eerily resembled that of a Usarion deity, had. And that being’s attention had now shifted, from Jarred . . . to them. It’s yellow eyes flashed brightly, and though she could not see it’s face beneath the shell of the mask it wore, a cold, sickly feeling in her stomach told her it was grinning. The being raised it’s hand, and Sierra was shocked again, as a shimmering energy conjuration emerged from and engulfed it, crimson as the laser flurry she had been firing.
The knot in her stomach tightened as she realized the being’s intent, and before she could give voice to the command to retreat, pull away, dive, anything that would remove them from the being’s line of sight, the ball of flaming red energy surged forward. Unable to look away, or even recoil, she could only watch as the red energy projectile bore down on them, a fraction of a second which seemed to stretch for an eternity. But the crimson fireball never reached them, halted before it had escaped the audience chamber’s outer wall, Jarred moving to place himself in its path.
It happened so quickly, Sierra could not say what had actually occurred, but instead of Jarred being instantly vaporized, which is what she assumed should have happened, there was a bright flash of light, pale blue mixing with red, and Jarred was thrown backwards out through the hole they had created in the chamber’s outer wall.
Stunned beyond comprehension by what she had just witnessed, it took Sierra a moment to snap out of her stupor and react. “Kern!” she shouted, over Elora’s cry of dismay, as Jarred dropped out of sight. “Take us down!” Kern had obviously seen him drop as well, as the ship was already dipping into a sharp descent as the last words were leaving her lips.
“I’m on it!” Kern called back, over the comm.
“Hold onto something,” she directed Elora and Ethan, next to her, who were already clinging to handrails along the inner hull. Her own hands still firmly clasped around the dual grips of the gatling gun, she pulled the weapon out of the boarding hatch opening and threw herself back into the nearest bulkhead, wedging her foot into the inner ledge of the hatch to keep herself in place while used one hand to attach a nearby thether to her belt.
“I see him!” Kern reported, the ship obviously banking, though Sierra couldn’t tell how much without being able to see out the boarding hatch. A problem if she was going to get to Jarred. She would have to see him to get a hold of him. Gripping the hatchway handrail she pulled herself forward, not an easy task against the inertia of the descending craft, and stabilizing her footing, peered out through the hatch. The rushing air current nearly pulled her through the opening and she strengthened her grip on the handrail. The tether would keep her from falling to her death if she was sucked out of the ship, but she would do no good to Jarred or herself if she was left dangling helplessly outside of it.
And then he was there, falling right along side them, only meters away from the extended boarding ramp. As he turned over, their eyes met and she tried to shout into her comm for Kern to alter their vector, the rushing air flow making her scream a bare whisper. Luckily, when it came to piloting, Kern was always at pace with her, if not a step ahead and the ship began to drift closer to Jarred. Straining to keep her grip on the handrail, Sierra pulled herself forward and reached her free hand out in Jarred’s direction.
* * *
Still dazed from the energy collision that had sent him tumbling out through the destroyed opening of the audience chamber, Jarred struggled to right himself as he plummeted. To one side and only meters away was the tower itself, it’s levels ascending so rapidly they were a dizzying blur.
He tried not to look that way.
Everywhere else, he was left with a view of the vast city skyscape, the pace of his fall seeming less dramatic when measured against it, though the illusion did little to comfort him. Far below, the ground, and his death, were inevitably growing nearer. That end seeming a foregone conclusion, he found himself stunned yet again when the mass of a ship appeared in front of him. Inside, Sierra hung half into the opening, staring back at him and screaming something he couldn’t make out.
Not wasting any time trying to figure out what she was saying, or what pilot was crazy enough to pull off a maneuver like this, he twisted and contorted his body around to create enough drag to allow him to glide closer to the opening, or the boarding ramp that was extended from it. Closing the short distance, he managed to take hold of the ramp’s edge, though his grip was tenuous at best. The shear force of the rushing air, coupled with his weakened state, made climbing the sideways ramp and a seeming impossibility. Looking up, he could see that Sierra was reaching out to him, though her hand might as well have been on the other side of the universe. He was unable to pull himself forward, every ounce of his strength allocated to the task of simply maintaining the hold he had on the ramp, one that was growing more difficult by the millisecond.
As his grip began to fail, and he realized he would in fact fall to his death, he felt a hand take hold of his own. A strong hand that nearly crushed his own in its vice-like grip. Jarred looked up into Tarik’s brutish face as the Toguai, his self appointed guardian, pulled him aboard the free falling vessel, his razor sharp claws keeping him in place on the ship’s ramp. Jarred fell in an exhausted heap on the deck of the hold, hearing indistinguishable voices calling out to him, his ears ringing from the whirlwind he had been pulled from.
“. . . got him! he heard a woman’s voice call out, the words fading in and out. “Get . . . out . . . here!”
Jarred rolled over in time to see the boarding ramp seal shut and Sierra starting off toward the flight deck, the ship screaming as it righted itself and powered into hard acceleration. His vision was then filled by a pair of faces, Elora and Ethan’s, as they threw themselves down in front of him, wrapping him in a combined embrace.
“Are you alright?” Elora asked.
“I’ve been . . . better,” he answered her, honestly, still trying to catch his breath. He looked back and forth between them, their faces wearing warm smiles he was more than glad to see. “You came after me.”
“Of course,” Ethan said, his eyes bright with excitement. “You came for me.” He appeared to have aged ten years since the last time Jarred saw him, though his boyish grin was still just that. Jarred patted the kid on the shoulder, gripping it so that he and Elora could help him to his feet.
“We weren’t going to leave you behind,” Elora said, her eyes conveying a myriad of emotions Jarred could feel building within himself. He wanted to give in to them. To take her in his arms. Feel her lips on his again. But he resisted the powerful urge. Now wasn’t the time. They weren’t out of trouble yet. Instead, he returned her warm smile and glanced back over his shoulder at Tarik.
“Thank you,” he said to the stalky creature, who simply grunted in return. His eyes then caught sight of someone else and he shifted his gaze over to where Orna stood in the rear passageway. She wore her usual unreadable expression, but Jarred detected something almost knowing from her. Perhaps she knew what he had seen in the audience chamber. Knew that he knew what she was. The moment of silent pondering passed in an instant and Orna nodded to him.
“Welcome back, Jarred Arch
er.”
He returned the gesture. “You should go and strap yourself in. It’s about to get a whole lot bumpier in here.”
There would be time for questions later. Maybe.
* * *
“We’ve got multiple bogeys,” Kern reported, as Sierra reentered the flight deck, “coming in hot.” A fraction of a second later the ship was rocked by a laser volley, sending her stumbling, accentuating his statement.
“Shields?” she asked, obviously concerned.
“Raised,” he assured her.
“Go evasive,” she ordered, her voice moving across the deck behind him to the nearest control seat. “Let’s give them a run for their credits.”
“Way ahead of you,” he replied, already pressing the engines to their maximum. The ship’s speed was a definite advantage, but the superior maneuverability of the smaller patrol vessels in pursuit would be a problem in their current locale. They needed to go for altitude and they needed to do it soon.
“That was some fancy flying,” another familiar voice put in, though weaker and more hoarse than Kern recognized. He didn’t need to turn, and wouldn’t have under the circumstances, to know it was Jarred.
“Thanks,” he replied. “Glad to have you back.”
“Glad to be back.”
The ship was rocked by another hit, Kern descending sharply to take them down between a pair of mid sized towers, banking and climbing hard once he had cleared them, hoping to shake or at least put some distance between them and their pursuers. “Looks like you made it just in time to be vaporized with the rest of us,” he quipped.
“I don’t think so,” Jarred said, sounding sure of the statement. “Not with Orna onboard.”
“But they don’t know she’s onboard,” Kern argued.
“They don’t know she’s not,” Jarred rebutted. “And they won’t take the chance. They’re trying to disable us, just like before.”
“Well, they’re not going to do it without a fight,” Sierra put in, determinedly. “Weapons systems are primed. Selecting targets. Let’s see if we can’t shake a few of these pests loose.”
On his own display, Kern saw as Sierra began painting targets, which had grown to nearly double his original count, with the ship’s rear defenses. Selecting the torpedo tubes, she fired off a pair of the projectiles which fragmented, almost immediately into dozens of smaller segments, four of the closely following patrol craft disappearing from his grid as they were torn apart by the hail of explosive shards.
“Nice shot,” Kern commented, noting that the remaining patrol craft had increased their distance from them, while intensifying their fire rate. He banked the ship again, a storm of laser fire missing them to tear into a complex of buildings, and again dove for the cover of some tightly packed towers. “But I can’t keep this up all day. Shields are down to fifty percent.”
“Can’t we just activate the cloak and disappear?” It was Ethan’s voice that asked the question. “Then we could just fly out of here.”
“That’s the plan, kid,” Kern answered. “But not with these patrol craft all over us. We’d have to drop the shields to bring it up and if we do that-”
They took another hit and Kern had to cut his explanation short, putting them into another series of evasive maneuvers.
“We’ll get vaped,” Ethan finished for him, not sounding thrilled about the conclusion.
“Or disabled,” Kern said, based on Jarred’s theory.
“Then how do we get out of here?” Elora asked.
Apart from the sounds of the roaring thrusters and the screams of near miss laser blasts, the flight deck fell silent. They stood no chance of losing all of the patrol craft already on them, not to mention the endless squadrons that would be sent out to join the pursuit. Dropping their shields to engage the cloak would end their escape real quick. They needed a window. Enough time to get clear, and that was something they weren’t likely to get.
Jarred was the one who finally answered the question, his voice carrying a tone of finality that caught Kern, and everyone else, he guessed, off guard. “We don’t. We can’t outrun them. And we can’t fight them all off. We’re just delaying the inevitable.”
“So what do we do,” Sierra demanded, her outrage obvious. “Surrender? There’s no way. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather die fighting.”
“My thought exactly,” Jarred returned. “And if we’re dead, there’s no need for them to be chasing us.”
“So what,” Sierra scoffed, “you’re suggesting we go down in a blaze of glory?”
“I am,” he answered her. “For anyone who’s looking.”
“You’re crazy,” she remarked, dismissively. “I think you knocked something loose back there.”
“No, he’s right,” Kern said, realizing what Jarred was saying was true. Dying was there only way out of this. And in spectacular fashion at that. Tapping the armaments actuator on the grip of his control yoke, he quickly cycled through the ship’s available ordinance, while at the same time altering their course and ramming the throttle again, taking them down into the rows of tightly clustered skyscrapers.
“You can’t be serious?” Sierra exclaimed. “You’re actually agreeing with him? To just let ourselves be killed. You agree with that?”
Kern understood her bewilderment over the suggestion. He had felt the same way up until the moment it clicked. “No,” he admitted. “We’re not going to let them kill us. We’re going to blow ourselves up.”
“More accurately,” Jarred added, “we’re going to make it look like we’ve blown ourselves up.”
Sierra was silent for a long moment before replying. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of that.”
“It’s been a long day,” Kern assured her. “Don’t beat yourself up.” He launched them into another set of gut wrenching evasive maneuvers, taking them deeper into the heavily packed tower structures while doing his best to avoid the bustling traffic lanes. He wanted to escape this mess, but he didn’t want kill a whole lot of innocent people in the process. That wouldn’t be any easy task, considering the city’s dense population. A quick glance at his nav display, and the local city layout, presented the solution he was looking for. Altering their vector, he started on a weaving course that lead to his target area.
“What are you doing?” Sierra questioned him.
“Saving our lives, I hope,” he answered. “Arm another pair of those fragmentation torpedoes.”
“What are we targeting?” she asked.
It was a good question. Unfortunately, Kern didn’t have the answer. Not yet. “I’ll tell you when I see it.”
After another half minute of high speed maneuvers and a half dozen strikes to their ever weakening shields, Kern began to see a reduction in the number of high reaching towers, indicating he was nearing his target area. It resembled a graveyard of sorts, partial skeletons of buildings erected into the sky, but it was just the opposite. Giant cranes and high yield scaffolding rose up along the girders of hundreds of half built skyscrapers.
“Good thinking,” Jarred said. “Construction district. That should present some good opportunities for a show.”
“And reduce any civilian casualties,” Kern added, diving beneath a sky crane to thread the narrow path between a pair of half erected towers. Laser fire tore into the structures all around them as the growing numbers of assault craft intensified their barrages. Apparently they had been holding back as well in the more heavily populated governing district, most likely in an attempt to avoid any bureaucratic casualties, than civilian. Either way, the heavy construction area appeared to have left them clear and open to less loose with all of their firepower. That was just fine by him. It would help with the big finale. Another round struck their aft, a shield failure alarm blaring in his ear and banked hard again. If they made it to their big finale.
“We can’t take much more of this,” Sierra commented, almost sounding worried.
“You’re right about that,” Kern returne
d, his eyes catching sight of one of the opportunities Jarred had preluded to, and he adjusted their course, pressing the throttle for a dead run. “You got those torpedoes ready?”
“Armed and loaded,” she answered. “You have a target yet?”
“A big one, dead ahead,” he said, his eyes locked steadily on the half constructed super skyscraper growing steadily closer in the viewport. The area was riddled with skycranes and scaffolding so condensed he almost doubted he could navigate it. Almost. “I'm going to punch us a hole right up the middle of it.”
“That’ll give them a show,” she commented. “Let’s just hope we survive it.”
“Just get ready to frag our friends back there,” he replied. Almost in range of the super structure, Kern waiting for another laser score, which didn’t take long, and immediately reversed their throttle, engaging the repulsers on one side of the ship only, the technique causing the vessel to buckle and dip down on one side dramatically. The result was they would appear to have taken a much harder hit than they had, and their pursuers would believe they were about to lose control completely. A little bit of showmanship that would set the table for the fireworks that were to come.
“On my ready,” he said. They passed the range marker he had set by eye, nearly passing through the heavy scaffolding network, and he punched the throttles hard again. “Now!” He heard the familiar sound of the rear tubes firing their ordinance and waited the three count for the frag detonations to occur. Not bothering to check the display for any destroyed bogeys behind them, he righted the control yoke to send them straight for the center mass of the super skyscraper and triggered his own ordinance, a pair of xion penetrating missiles, one a fraction of a second after the other. The warheads rocketed away, striking the structure in two spectacular explosions, the second drilling deeper into the skyscraper than the first and the outline of a hole began to form, as pieces of flaming wreckage blew out of the structure.
