The Army Of Light (Kestrel Saga)

by Fender, Stephen

  “I. Am. Not. Crazy!”

  Shawn slid the stick to the left and right, trying to deny the Temkorian fighter a clear shot at his tail. “I’ll bet you were the hit of all of the asylum parties,” he said aloud as he tried desperately to shake the enemy fighter. “You probably wowed them with your amazing skills at finger painting or shadow puppets.”

  “Mister Kestrel!” She yelled, still holding on to her armrest for dear life.

  Shawn pulled back the stick hard, causing the Mark-IV to do a tight nose-over. He grunted as the internal gravity tried to pull the blood out of his feet and into his cranium. “I’ll bet you were the loudest voice in the Old MacDonald sing-along.”

  Melissa’s hair flopped over the front of her face as Shawn attempted to stabilize the Mark-IV. “If you would please just shut-up and fly!”

  “Listen, I can’t talk and fly this bucket at the same time, so you’ll have to put on your own straight jacket for once and keep quiet!”

  Amazingly, the captain now had Sylvia’s Delight lined up perfectly on the more maneuverable Temkorian’s tail. Shawn flipped a series of toggle switches on the overhead console. Externally, two large panels on either side of the ships ventral surface slid back, giving the long laser cannons ample room to slide out and lock into place.

  “Trent,” Shawn sang into the intercom. “Are the lasers primed?”

  “They sure are. You’ve got maybe two shots each.”

  “That’s not enough to get through their armor, Captain, and you know it!” Melissa snapped.

  Shawn paid her little mind. “Trent, how about I have exactly two shots each or you’re fired.”

  “Well, as they say ‘you can wish in one hand and in the other you can—”

  “Yeah, I know what they say. Just give me two solid rounds.”

  “I can divert energy from the engines if you want—”

  “No, I need all the maneuverability I can get right now. Whatever Toyo charged the cannons with will have to be enough. Your priority now is to keep those engines going.” He closed the channel before his engineer could say something arguably witty. He briefly regarded Melissa as he tried to keep the Temkorian’s tail directly inline with his targeting sensors. “By the way, since when did you become the expert in the thickness of Temkorian armor?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” she replied. “I’m still right.”

  He did have to concede that, however she’d obtained the knowledge, she was indeed right. “Regardless, I’m not aiming to kill him… just slow him down a little.”

  “How?”

  Her eyes fell on the targeting display in front of Shawn. The targeting scanner on his computer switched from green to a beautiful amber. “Like this,” he said cheerfully as he flipped up the toggle on the end of his control stick and pressed the unassuming yellow button. A long beam of blue laser light emitted from the tips of each of the cannons, meeting perfectly at the starboard engine cone of the Temkorian fighter. The nozzle erupted in a shower of red and yellow sparks as the beams neatly severed the cone, causing it to drift slowly away from the fighter.

  “The Temkorian’s design their fighters in such a way that all of there weapon power is channeled through both engine reactor cores simultaneously.”

  “Huh?” she asked in stunned amazement as Sylvia’s Delight banked slowly to starboard and departed the Temkorian fighter to drift away helplessly.

  “It’s a flawed design that few people know about,” he said calmly as he checked his scope for the remaining fighters. “When one engine goes offline, the whole fighter becomes a floating brick. The pilots are unable to reroute power into the good engine.”

  She looked at him in disbelief.

  He smiled wearily. “Well, you hear the strangest things in bars sometimes. You never know what a drunken pilot might say, or when those words might become useful.”

  “You mean,” she began in shock, “that you’ve never done that before?”

  “No, but the theory seemed sound enough. Besides, it worked, didn’t it?”

  “Well,” Melissa began, straightened her posture after a moment and attempting to repair her disheveled hair, “I guess I should take back what I said about your flying abilities. You really are quite—”

  “Hold that thought for a second,” he snapped as he sent the Mark-IV banking to port. When the internal gravity generator failed to compensate in time, Melissa’s hair wafted down and nearly hit Shawn in the side of his face.

  Melissa let out a loud “Whooooaaaaaa!” as the Mark-IV righted itself for a split second before the captain banked the ship hard to starboard.

  “You don’t need to reaffirm your skills, Mister Kestrel. I’m willing to concede your flying abilities.”

  “I’m not trying to prove anything! I’m trying to save our lives! This maneuver is called a split-S. It’s used to evade missiles… like the one that’s hot on our tail right now!” he shouted, continuing to juke the ship back and forth.

  “What does the ‘S’ stand for? Stupid? Because that’s how I’m starting to feel about trusting you!”

  The Mark-IV slid left and right as the missile attempted to find its intended target. What had initially been a small rhythmic vibration in the control stick was quickly becoming a more pronounced tremble.

  The captain dispensed a quick look over to Melissa. “Hit that blinking green button over there. The one on the rightmost panel.”

  Melissa looked to the panel in question and saw a score of blinking green buttons interspersed with blue ones, yellow ones, white ones, and a few red ones that were unblinking. “Which green one? There must be ten of those over here!”

  “There are twelve of them, to be exact. The one I’m talking about is the one that’s on the top right corner of the far right control panel.”

  Melissa found the control and pushed it. Nothing happened. The Temkorian was still on their tale. She feared that this was just another part of the vessel that wasn’t working correctly.

  “What did I just do?”

  “You turned on the intercom. I can’t take my hands off these controls,” he said as he leaned in closer to the microphone. “Trent, what’s going on with the engines?”

  “I can’t believe it,” the mechanic shouted angrily through the speaker. “I just can’t believe it. I spent all that time repairing the ship just to have you blow it up again. And there’s no way you’re getting out of this argument, because we both know who’s to blame for this.”

  “Quit your yammering,” Shawn shouted back in frustration. “I need engine status, now!”

  “Overheating fast, Captain. Starboard will go critical in about five minutes.”

  “Critical?” Melissa asked apprehensively. “That’s bad, right?”

  Trent replied dryly through the speaker. “Last time I checked, ma’am, blowing up was never a good thing.”

  “No argument there,” Melissa offered ironically.

  Trent’s voice crackled back through the speaker. “You could always try slowing down, Skipper. That might save us the trouble of dying in a huge fiery explosion.”

  “Great advice, pal. If I slow down we’re goners and if I keep going we’ll be just as dead.”

  Melissa checked the tightness of her seat harness. “Remind me to file a formal complaint against the Old Flamingo with the Intergalactic Better Business Bureau when I get to heaven.”

  “We’re not dead yet,” Shawn replied defiantly. He watched the radar screen as the missile got closer, knowing he had only a small amount of time before it caught up with him. He turned the ship to port, then kicked in the engines over burners. Normally used for a quick atmospheric deceleration, they provided the Mark-IV just enough of an advantage to reach his goal: the remains of the long dead moon circling the planet.

  Melissa looked out of the view port in horror as the debris field became larger. “Are you out of your mind?”

  “I might just be,” he gritted, holding the stick tightly and angling directly for the first l
arge fragment that came their way.

  It was immense, easily the size of a small mountain. It was a jagged, rust brown chunk of the long pulverized moon spinning slowly on its own axis. Shawn flipped Sylvia’s Delight under the asteroid, then pulled up sharply and skirted the contours of its belly. The missile was still following him precisely.

  “It’s still back there,” Melissa shouted as she watched the sensor scope above her head. “Got any more bright ideas before we all die?”

  Shawn pointed the Mark-IV towards a mile wide cloud of smaller debris, the largest piece no bigger than a baseball. He flipped a handful of silver toggles on the overhead console, which was followed by a series of thumps reverberating across the overhead.

  “What was that?”

  “Counter measures. A little present, courtesy of Toyotomi. They should attract the missile and—” before he could finish there was a bright burst on the scope, then the missile was gone. Shawn looked to Melissa triumphantly. “See, I told you we’d be fine.”

  She smirked at him, then turned forward and let out a scream of horror. “Watch it!”

  Another mountains rock quickly spun into their path, and it was all Shawn could do to bank ninety degrees and push the stick down, expertly sailing under the rocky mass. A millimeter closer and the asteroid would’ve scratched the paint. The captain righted the craft and slowly maneuvered the ship to the fringes of the debris field where the particles were smaller—or so he hoped.

  Another bust of green plasma told Shawn that his friends were still out there, and on cue one of the three remaining fighters pulled away from the group and got in behind Shawn. Instantly formulating a plan, he reached to his left and flipped a series of controls.

  Melissa watched as a small panel directly in front of her slid sideways into an alcove as a control stick, identical to the one held tightly in Shawn’s hands, folded out and stopped ahead of her tightly locked knees.

  “What’s this for?” she asked, waving at the control stick with disapproval.

  He flipped up several more switches on the control panel to his left—or was he switching them off? Melissa couldn’t tell from where she sat.

  “You need to take control of the ship for a second.” Shawn reached across his lap, unbuckled his seatbelt and began to rise from his chair.

  “What?” she exclaimed, shocked at the overall casualness of his statement. “I haven’t a clue what I’m doing.”

  “Well, that makes two of us. Just keep doing what I was doing and don’t stop.” As he drifted passed her, he gently squeezed her shoulder, then quickly retreated through the compartment doors without another word.

  “Wait! Captain! Get back here this instant!” she said as she turned to look over her shoulder, but the door had already closed behind him.

  “That’s great,” she mumbled to herself as another volley of laser blasts rocketed past the ship. “Do what I was doing”, she mocked the captain’s words with a bassoon tone. “That’s perfect. What on Third Earth does that mean?”

  The soothing voice of D’s onboard computer took the opportunity to chime in. “Based on past flight logs, the best course of action is to damage the ship as much as possible, while simultaneously breaking every interstellar flight rule, in an attempt to safeguard all human occupants while completely disregarding my advice.”

  Another series of blasts soared past the ship, sending teeth jarring shudders throughout the hull. Melissa looked down to the control panel for an instant. “Well, since you’re so smart, what advice would you give in a situation like this?”

  The computer was oddly silent for a moment. “No one has ever asked me that before. Stand by while results are tabulated.”

  *

  After exiting the command deck, Shawn sprinted through the small passenger lounge area, then down the narrow passageway adjacent to the berthing spaces to finally end up at the first of two consecutive air lock doors that led to the aft cargo area. He turned to the right before reaching the airlock, and before him was a yellow door with a band of alternating yellow and red stripes framing its outer edges, the words ‘Engine Room: One’ painted across its surface. He entered a five digit code into an illuminated keypad and the door slid open to reveal a passageway that abruptly turned left after only a few paces into the tight space. He jogged around the bend, then down the few steps that led to the long, narrow port side engine compartment that Trent had affectionately named ‘the port bowling alley.’

  To Shawn’s right was the ships primary jump drive computer—a smooth, towering monstrosity of rounded corners and sharply cut lines, undulating with layers of flashing lights and crisscrossed wires that fed the ships various power needs. Beyond it was one of the two drive engines that were currently on the verge of melting down. Barely audible in the cockpit, the engines were a whining, writhing thing in the small engine room. Some parts turned, others pistoned up and down, while still others oscillated. The whole of the thing was encrusted with status lights and conduits running in a half dozen different directions. All in all, it looked too big for the compartment that housed it, but it did its job well anyway, despite the fact that it was a tight fit. Amazing as it was to watch, it was even more extraordinary that Trent knew what each component did, and how best to keep it doing what it was born to do.

  Currently, the mechanic was monitoring the cooling gauges on a series of monitors as he tried in vain to keep the engine from internally melting into a puddle of useless technological goo—again.

  Trent turned around and gave Shawn a question look. “Sorry, Skipper. I don’t have time for a guided tour right now and—oh, wait—never mind,” Trent said, scanning for something over the captain’s shoulder. “You seemed to have left your little buddy up in the cockpit. I swear, I think that woman is part Velcro,” he turned back to his instruments and, placing his hand against the graphical representation of a control knob, turned it as if it were a physical thing, releasing a steady stream of super-coolant into the port flux isolator. “What’s shakin’, Captain?” Trent then asked nonchalantly.

  “We are, if you haven’t noticed.”

  Trent Maddox turned around and went wide eyed with derision. “We are? Oh my God! You’re right! What are we going to do? Wait! I know,” he said with a snap of his fingers. “Let’s get Trent to pull something out of his—”

  “Calm down, will you? Did you forget to take your pills today?”

  Trent dismissed him with an innocent shrug. “Sorry. One too many donuts for breakfast this morning. What do you need, anyway? I’m a little busy keeping this thing together.”

  “I need your keys, old buddy.” Shawn said, holding out his upturned hand.

  “Keys? For what?”

  “That toolbox you got stowed away on the cargo deck.”

  “You picked a fine time to fix that broken toilet seat. Although, that last maneuver you did almost gave me my own little accident, if you know what I mean?”

  Shawn wasted little time in punching Trent in the shoulder for his crassness. “Just give me the damn keys, and make it snappy, will you?”

  Trent reached into his left trouser pocket. After a moment of searching he reached into his right pocket. “Hum, not there either.”

  “Are you serious?”

  Trent continued talking to himself as if Shawn wasn’t even there. “Now, where did I put those?” he asked himself, patting his chest pockets and the back of his trousers. The moment seemed to stretch on for eternity.

  “If this was a woman’s contact number, you’d know right where it was.”

  “If I had a woman’s number I wouldn’t be out here in this thing with you and little miss sunshine up there,” he inclined his head towards the cockpit as he continued to rummage through his pockets. “I’d be on the beach, sipping mimosas or some other kind of frou-frou drink, getting fanned by a giant palm leaf while having my feet rubbed by some exotic woman named Natasha.”

  Shawn could only roll his eyes, wondering if Trent meant that he wanted
a single, multi-limbed woman to do all of that simultaneously. “You do realize we haven’t got all day?”

  Then the epiphany hit Trent and he snapped his fingers in delight. “Oh yeah, that’s right. The keys are in my jacket pocket. It’s hanging on a hook right between the tool box and a small paper bag that says ‘I should have listened to my father and become an accountant’.”

  Shawn lightly slapped Trent on the face. “Thanks buddy. This might just save our lives,” then he turned to rush out of the space.

  “Hey, just remember to put everything back where you got it from. I’ve got a filing system, you know,” Trent cried uselessly to Shawn as the captain whisked himself out of the bowling alley and back to the airlock.

  *

  Rushing up to the first of the two airlock doors, Shawn speedily punched in the access code to command it open, but the computer responded with a chipper, yet negative reply to his benign request. Two more times he attempted to enter in the correct sequence of numbers, twice more he failed, and twice more the computer cheerily responded that he was denied access. In his nervousness he realized he was probably hitting the numbers too quickly, and that some things in the ship responded more positively to a slower and gentler approach. The ship shuddered again—signaling another near miss by the Temkorian’s weapons. Shawn had to give credit to Melissa; she appeared to be doing an admirable job of avoiding the plasma blasts.

  Knowing, however, that they’re luck was rapidly running out, Shawn held his hand to his mouth and closed his eyes, taking a deep breath to steady himself. He reached out and slowly typed in the sequence once more. This time the computer blissfully accepted the input and the doors began to part agonizingly slow. In his haste, Shawn turned sideways and dashed through them when they were wide enough apart to accommodate his frame.

  Trent’s jacket was exactly where he said it was, although the paper bag he’d described was curiously missing. Shawn quickly began to turn each of the pockets inside-out in his search, and it was in the last of them that he found his prey. The captain grasped the keys triumphantly for a brief second.