by G. H. Holmes
Valves hissed and the corridor filled with air.
A minute later, Juggernaut came walking out, broad-legged like an old-time gunslinger. His helmet was under his arm. When he saw the general in the gloom, he stood straight and saluted.
"Sir! Good day, Sir."
"At ease, Lieutenant," Ben said. "And don't take it too hard. Every real fighter jock goes through this. I myself once sat in a similar suit for three days.
"Three days!
"It was a long battle. Now, don't you tell anybody what I told you."
The general rolled his eyes and Jug had a hard time to keep a straight face.
"We no longer have eyes in the sky, Sir," the aviator said to his officer.
Jug knew about the communications troubles that the battalion had in-station. They were the reason why he had to monitor the drones scanning Kasaganaan's surface with his x-jet. Without personnel in one of the fighters, the drones were useless. Had the general thought of that?
"I'll go out myself," Ben replied, answering that question. He eyed the young man's helmet. "You mind loaning me that?"
Startled, Jug grabbed his matte-black helmet with both hands and stammered, "W-why no, Sir." He held it out to him. "I hope it fits."
Ben took it. "I'm sure it will."
He took his rifle off his shoulder and handed it to Jug. "Here, take this for just in case."
"Thank you, Sir."
The general hooked his thumb down the tunnel. "Walk a straight line and don't get thrown off in the modules that you will cross, and after ten minutes you'll be in camp. Say 'crickets' and the guard'll let you in."
"Aye, Sir." The pilot stepped from one foot on the other, but didn't leave.
"Get going then."
"Is there a bathroom in the vicinity, Sir?" Jug said. "I'd really like to empty that bladder."
"There's one around the corner. And don't make such a face. Be thankful that you have a suit that's equipped to handle this. There was a time when it was not so."
Ben sat in Juggernaut's untethered x-jet, accelerated and blasted away from Kasa Station. He vaulted towards the stars with whining engines. All day he'd looked forward to doing this. But now that he was at it, a strange mood came over him. This was the first time in seventy years that he sat in the bucket seat of a space-going fighter craft. His last flight hadn't turned out so well.
Once again he was thankful for Daniel von Schwarz and the man's dedication to goodness. Because nobody had made Daniel to go out of his way, risking his own life and that of his crew, to pursue the faint signal that he was picking up in deep space. He'd done it solely because he thought he might find accidental survivors from a catastrophe, perhaps in stasis, and he couldn't just let them perish. It wasn't even clear that he would be welcomed on arrival.
What if Daniel had run into hostile aliens?
The admiral had risked a lot to rescue him and Ben's heart was filled with deep gratitude.
After darting around for a few minutes and testing the craft's abilities, Ben slowed down, flew back to the vicinity of the station and cycled through the drone feed on the monitor. There was nothing exciting to be seen, only desert and blue water and more desert. And Kasaganaan City was a deserted ruin.
Outside, the sun was peeking over the rim of the planet—when Ben became aware of a thin black cloud streaming up out of the atmosphere, rising like a trail of black smoke. Intrigued, he engaged his engines and flew towards the phenomenon to see what it might be.
A few minutes later he saw that a flowing swarm of what… oversized flies? Locusts? Whatever this was made a beeline for Kasa Station.
The MARDET had aroused the attention of somebody on the planet.
Chapter 18
Great, Ben thought, staring at the drawn-out cloud of black cigars homing in on Kasa Station. We're coming under attack. And we don't even have a working first line of defense.
Were those bombs?
In that case, all was lost.
But no planetary leader in his right mind would destroy a major asset like this outpost in space for no better reason than it being visited by a handful of humans checking on their too-quiet neighbors. The MARDET had come on three inconspicuous transports, which had left right after depositing Ben and his troops.
There was no invading starfleet.
Unless that leader was specifically after the destruction of Ben Harrow, he would maybe check on the station with drones, but otherwise leave it intact.
Ben frowned. A bitter taste spread in his mouth. If the station would blow up in a few minutes, he wouldn't be in it. He'd be out here, observing the spectacle. He'd survive once again. But almost five hundred human beings, troops under his command, would perish. He'd be the sole survivor.
How could he go back to Terra Gemina without his companies? How could he face Admiral von Schwarz, who was trusting in him?
He definitely should have gone back to the Armory to wake up the rest of Gruzka's Chaos troops. His heavy weapons platoon was supposed to man the battle stations. Instead, they were lying around on the floor of the Armory, half buried in dust that made them hibernate.
And who was to blame?
Yours truly.
Crazy science, Ben thought. Dust that makes you go to sleep like death and keeps your vital systems active at the same time. But he was impressed, of course.
And now this.
For a moment Ben thought about alerting LeBlanc to the threat coming his way. His hand was already reaching for the command channel button on the glass panel by his right side. But then he decided against it and withdrew his hand.
What would his message accomplish?
Facing a mortal threat they couldn't do anything about, some troops might get real angry, some might despair. Some might panic. That was no way for Marines to go. Left alone, death would come while they slept.
But he wouldn't sleep. He'd fight. He'd take out as many bombs as he could. It didn't matter that he would run out of ammo and that they would accomplish their terrible work, because they were simply too many. He'd still fight them.
The icons on the x-jet's screen were unmistakable in their simplicity and their meaning easily grasped, even for somebody who hadn't sat in a fighter for decades. As he approached the flowing cloud, his finger came down on the green button shaped like a shield. The shield engaged and his world turned yellow. It got cold, too, and static electricity made his scalp to itch. His ears were throbbing from the pressure that suddenly filled the cockpit.
Minding the danger, Ben cautiously drew closer to the black trail and expected to get sought out or fired upon at any moment, but that didn't happen.
The flying objects ignored him. He watched them float past like a river.
When they were still a hundred kilometers away from Kasa Station, he revved his engines and raced towards the front, where he flew wide circles around the floating mass. He cycled through the available weapons and selected the repeller, which promised to shoot cones of energy from a movable muzzle located in a small dome on the bow of the slender craft.
Ben flew to the front of the onslaught, faced it head-on and aimed the wide green circle on the target display at the black cigars. The circle turn red and Ben squeezed the trigger on his HOTAS-stick.
A melodious pinging filled his ears as a red energy cone shot out from the front of the x-jet and hit the cigars, plowing through them like a supercharged mole. The objects it was hitting drifted away like debris. They no longer pursued the station. But a million others that followed them took their place.
Again and again Ben blasted the black river with the repeller and watched it getting derailed. But what was he accomplishing? After a few minutes he was getting mad. This was like plugging holes in a floundering dike. Ridiculous.
In between impulses, he cycled through the available energy weapons and studied them.
Suddenly an idea jumped into his mind.
Those locusts—or whatever they were—were flying, if not exactly in formation,
only spaced something like five or ten meters apart. What he was planning to do might just work.
Cycling through the fighter's arsenal, Ben settled on the plasma jet. This was really a weapon of last resort as it drained all energy from the power banks; even the powerful fusion reactors in the wings took a while to replenish that energy. Ben staked everything on his idea. If what he had planned worked, he'd save the world before breakfast. If not, he and the station would be history.
Once again Ben in this x-jet faced the black river head-on. The cloud came right at him. This time he waited until the flying cigars were only five hundred meters away. Then he punched the crimson plasma button on the display.
The gun in the bow fired off a white-hot jet. It was pencil-thin, but it still prompted Ben to squint because of its brilliance. The first objects it hit lit up like a swarm of fireflies. But the jet was way too powerful to stop there and ignited dozens of flying bombs in its way. Some didn't explode, but some did. Those in turn ignited others around them. Soon they went off like old-fashioned cluster bombs hitting a mountainside. In no time the river was burning.
Elated, Ben stepped on the pedal and flew up to watch the spectacle from above. The spent x-jet sputtered, but Ben managed to get away.
The firestorm grew and raced along the cloud until it seemed that a giant burning, exploding snake was hovering above Kasaganaan.
Ben had set off a chain reaction, just as he'd intended. With some luck it would continue until it reached the source of the black cloud. In that case, its proprietor would have a rude awakening.
Ben shut off his craft's now-flimsy energy shield and dialed himself into the battalion command channel.
"Mr. LeBlanc, this is the general speaking. I'm out in space as you know. Please rouse our troops and find a way for Aleph Company to man the battle stations. Try Berlin, too. Chaos Company up in the Armory is presently not able to fulfill that task."
"Sir?"
"Time is of the essence," Harrow said. "We will come under attack in the next one or two hours and need our defenders in place."
"Sir, the tunnels leading to the battle stations are still unexplored," LeBlanc said.
"Well, explore them in a hurry," Ben replied, "and send Gargoyle and Rambler into their crafts. Their expertise is going to be needed out here. They're not sleeping anyway."
After a silent moment LeBlanc said, "Aye, Sir."
"This is serious, Piero. Get a move on. I'm counting on you."
Ben cycled through the drone feed until he got to the one monitoring the black pyramid in the northern desert of Kasaganaan. It showed nothing exciting. Still, this was probably where the trail of bombs had originated. If he had gotten to it earlier, he might have seen them fly from the summit of the pyramid like smoke from a blockhouse chimney.
Below him, the river of bombs was still exploding. It reminded Ben of a fuse that had been lit and was now burning up with lightning speed, eager to reach its destination.
Ben kept the feed of the drone watching the pyramid on his monitor. He slewed his craft around and flew back to the station. When he got there, his target display suddenly lit up and notified him of small flying objects close to the station. Intrigued, he zoomed in and discovered that they were cigars he'd only derailed earlier.
Ben's heart sunk.
If these were bombs, the station might sustain damage after all. He couldn't take them out, either, because they were too close to the installation. But then he realized that those little cigars only approached the vitrum tunnels and hovered in front of them like bumblebees. They didn't hit them; there were no explosions.
Ben realized that he was dealing with drones. Somebody had sent up his eyes into the sky. For a moment he wondered what kind of machine they used on the ground, that was able to digest the feed of a million drones.
Ben concluded, whoever was down on the planet, invisible to the eyes of his own drones: they were many. Anybody launching such a multitude of drones obviously had equipment to spare. His conviction grew that there would soon be fighters galore in the sky around him.
"Exec, is the MARDET in motion?" Ben said into his microphone.
"Commencing, Sir," LeBlanc replied.
Ben regretted not to have searched the station with his troops as soon as he had the opportunity. He should have worked them harder instead of letting him rest. Then he remembered that it had been only an hour ago that he had disabled the station's active denial systems. It seemed to him as if it had been ages ago.
Ben followed the fly-like drones on his monitor, but they were just flitting around and getting lost between the massive tubes of Kasa Station. He chose to ignore them. Instead, he wove through the tangle of tubes and tried to find any of his troops in the vitrum tunnels on their way to the battle stations. For the next twenty minutes he searched for them and kept an eye on the monitor for the feed of the pyramid, but it only sat black and portentous in the barren landscape that surrounded it.
Suddenly he detected motion on the four corners of the pyramid. Lightnings seemed to flash straight up from them and Ben realized that four enemy fighter craft had been thrown into the air.
He flew back out into space.
After three minutes another four bright lances stabbed upward from the four corners of the pyramid. A second volley had been released.
Three minutes later a third one followed.
Chapter 19
Static scratched in Ben's ear before he heard a voice say, "Rambler and Gargoyle reporting for duty, Sir."
Ben craned his neck and saw two jets come up behind his own. The young men were assuming their wing positions, just as they'd been trained to do.
"It's getting hairy in a few minutes, guys," the general informed them. "Kasaganaan has just released twelve interceptors. They'll be here in less than an hour. As soon as you get a reading on them, you engage your shields and if they attack you, you may fire at will."
It took Rambler and Gargoyle a moment to reply, "Aye, Sir."
"Twelve against three, Sir," Rambler said. "What if in the end we have to eject?"
Ben couldn't blame the kid for being dismayed. A ratio of four to one was a heavy load even for veteran pilots.
"Lock your nav-system onto the Kasa Station transport bay," Ben ordered. "If all goes well, your bubble will float in through the rescue hatch.
"But we're not there yet.
"I admonish you not to exit prematurely, because, depending on how far you're out, you may never make it into the station. Don't forget, guys, you are flying state-of-the-art fighter craft devised by master builders on Bagong Lupa. Last I checked, they were the best in the system."
"Your take on the incoming bandits, Sir?" Gargoyle said.
"I haven't had a chance to analyze them yet," Ben replied. "But whatever they are: once you're in a furball with them, let your computers do most of the flying. Don't try to fly and shoot at the same time. You are your own weapons officers, so concentrate on your gun. Your gun's your priority. Aim for that final kill. And conserve your energies. We don't know if more will come."
"Aye, Sir," the two pilots said.
Up in the Armory, Pere Gruzka was once again a seeing man. When he saw his troops sprawled in the dust, he couldn't help himself. He took them one by one, scooted them towards the wall and propped them up against it in a sitting position.
None of them woke up, though.
When he was done, Gruzka remembered the general's order and once again climbed into the bucket seat of the giant gun that dominated the center of the room. With his sleeve he wiped off the thin layer of dust on its control panel. When he touched the On-button, the screen came alive with blue and yellow colors.
Seemingly out of nowhere a giant target screen came down in front of his face. On it he saw the gun's barrel pointing at the starscape beyond the vitrum dome. Gruzka grabbed the joystick between his legs and moved it—and found that the gun responded. He pushed the joystick to the right and the entire setup, including his seat, began
to rotate rightward. Just for fun's sake he pushed the stick left and the gun swung leftward. He pulled back on it and looked straight up into space. Gruzka pushed forward and the curvature of the planet came into view. Pleased with all this, he quickly familiarized himself with the gun's target system and the energy rounds it fired.
Gruzka was engrossed in his studies—when he heard somebody by the wall cough. His gaze went in the direction of the noise and he saw that a soldier was waking up.
This was wonderful.
The soldier coughed again and spit out some red dust, crawled around on the floor for a second and got up.
"Soldier!" Gruzka boomed. "Stay where you are! Don't move until I get to you."
He quickly climbed out of his bucket seat and strode to the Marine who was squinting and rubbing his eyes with thumb and forefinger.
Gruzka put his hand on the man's shoulder. "Open your eyes, soldier. Look at me."
The Marine did as told. He blinked and stared into Gruzka's steely eyes.
Thank God, this soldier wasn't blind.
Behind them, somebody else groaned and stirred. Pere's heart rose at the spectacle. After no more than ten minutes all but three or four troops were back on their feet. None of them seemed hurt and only a few of them were blind. Those who were he assured that their blindness would be temporary and that he'd been blind himself, which calmed them some.
"Listen up everybody!" Gruzka said. "Chaos Company, how are you doing?" His eyes went from one troop to the next. He was eager to know.
"All right, I guess, Sir," one soldier croaked.
"You feel nauseated?"
The troops checked for a few seconds and then shook their heads. "No, Sir."
"I've felt better," somebody interjected.
"Any of you hungry or thirsty?" Gruzka asked them the same question the voice had asked him when he'd woken an hour ago.
