by Nick Webb
Despite the bad news from the Arcturus listening post, and the current bombardment, Jake felt alive. This was what he was built for. This was why he signed on to the Space Fleet. He thrived on adrenaline and he knew it, and couldn’t help grinning inside as he ran.
And the odds were against them.
Even better.
Once outside, they bolted across the courtyard, and he tried not to look at the scattered, charred bodies sprawled on the ground—unlucky souls who hadn’t had time to take cover when the first missiles struck. Kit stopped at one of them.
“Kit, no time. He’s a goner,” Jake said.
“I know. I’m just taking his assault rifle.” Kit pulled the gun away from the blackened arms, and Jake had to grit his teeth to avoid becoming sick. As a fighter pilot, he was mostly removed from the gore. He had the privilege of dealing death to his foes from afar, and rarely saw the results of his gunner’s trigger finger.
They continued running, and Jake saw that Crash had caught up to them. He pointed up ahead.
“Look. Troop transports are landing. We’re being invaded,” said Crash, panting as he fell into step with them.
He was right. They watched as several oblong transport ships descended, one landing just behind the Viper hangar they were aiming for. In spite of the high probability they would encounter a firefight before they could get to their fighters, they quickened their pace, sprinting as fast as they could for the hangar bay.
Bursting through the side door of the building, their eyes were met by chaos. At the rear door, a few marines held up the advance of the encroaching invaders, but they looked far outnumbered based on the fire they were taking. One of the three fell, shot through the neck—one of the few places the ASA armor was vulnerable.
Crash bolted towards his fighter; his gunner was already making a dash for it was well. Jake and Kit ran towards their ship, flinching every time a stray bullet glanced off whatever fighter they were running past. They nearly stumbled over an Asian-looking woman kneeling on the ground next to a bloody figure.
Jake noticed her lieutenant’s insignia. “Lieutenant, he’s a goner. On your feet! Move!”
He could barely hear her over the din around them. “He’s my pilot.” She touched his bloody face. “He’s my pilot,” she repeated, “and I’m his gunner. What do I do?” Her voice sounded faint and weak, as if she were in a daze.
A barrage of bullets strafed the fighter hulking over them and they all ducked, including the woman. Kit yelled. “They’re breaking through the door! They took out the guard!” He took aim at the soldiers spilling through the door and began firing, dropping two of them with clean shots through the neck. “Get to the fighter! I’ll hold them off!” Without waiting for an answer, the short, balding gunner ran towards the rear door of the hangar bay, assault rifle blazing.
“Kit, no! Dammit,” Jake muttered, as he watched his friend take up a position near the door.
Regarding the lieutenant still crouching next to her dead pilot, he guessed she was in a state of shock, and felt sorry for her. But he also knew there was no time to feel sorry. He reached down and grabbed her wrist.
“Let’s go, Lieutenant. You’re with me.” She allowed herself to be led to the cover of the fighter. Another flight deck technician collapsed to the floor several meters away. The back of his head had been blown off.
“What’s your name, Lieutenant?”
“Po,” she murmured. “Megan Po.”
“We’re going to get out of here, Po. We’ve just got to get over to my bird. She’s the one right over there.” He eyed the back door to the hangar, where Kit and a handful of flight deck technicians were holding back the onslaught.
“Is he dead?” She didn’t take her eyes off the dead pilot splayed out on the floor a few feet away.
“Yes. Look, We need to get moving. Once we’re up there we’ll be more help than as sitting ducks out here. Ready?”
Her brow wrinkled, and she seemed to steel herself. Nodding slowly, she said, “Yeah. I’m ready.”
“Run!” He jumped up, and, still holding her hand, made an all-out dash to his fighter. Once he was up inside, he could blast the rear doorway with suppressing fire and Kit could join them in the cockpit. One of the technicians by the door fell, clutching his bloody stomach just as Jake wrenched open the door to the fighter.
“You good to shoot?” he yelled, jumping into his pilot’s seat.
Her only answer was to sit in the gunner’s chair, and switch on the console, wrapping the comm set and targeting viewfinder over her head. Good. At least she seemed to be coming out of it.
In spite of the continuing rat-a-tat of gunfire bursts, and seemingly constant shouts and screaming, his hands flew over the control board, initiating the gravitic drive and thrusters. “You’ve got power. Fire when you’ve got a clear shot.”
“We’re clear now,” she said, staring out the front viewport. Glancing up to see what she meant, his heart nearly stopped.
Kit lay propped up against the blood-smeared wall by the door, and it was clear by the gaping hole in his head that he was dead.
No.
“Shoot the bastards,” he muttered. Po thumbed the trigger, and red streaking gunfire erupted from the fighter’s quad guns, raking over the rear door even as a squad of enemy soldiers was running through it, blasting apart their bodies and spraying the walls with yet more blood and entrails.
“Keep firing. We’ve got to give everyone time to get to their birds.” Jake could feel the wrath grow inside of him, and it was everything he could do to refrain from pounding the console with his fist. Crash perhaps was his best friend in the fleet, but Kit was like a brother—he’d been his co-pilot and gunner for over a year. They’d logged more time together than Jake had with anyone.
Po kept her finger on the trigger, firing burst after burst through the door, while Jake glanced around the hangar bay. Now free of the strafing fire that had pinned them all down, the pilots and gunners left alive sprinted towards their fighters. Dozens of bodies littered the floor. After a minute or so, no one else seemed to be coming through the front entrance, and everyone alive appeared to be in their fighters.
“All right. There’s no one manning the bay doors to open them, so just blast the back wall. Maybe we can even take out a bunch of those bastards.” Even before he finished the sentence, a torpedo shot out the bow and blasted almost the entire rear wall backwards, ripping it away from the hangar bay and into several dozen enemy soldiers. When the dust settled, Jake could see the enemy troop carrier in the debris, and a few soldiers huddled behind it.
“Take out the carrier,” he said, and another torpedo leapt out from the ship into the other, which burst into a massive fiery explosion. He didn’t even see where the soldiers taking cover had been blasted to, and he didn’t care.
He thumbed open the comm channel to his squad. “Viper Squad, Shotgun. Is Commander Dippen alive?” No one responded immediately.
“I … I think I saw his body as I was running out here,” said Po, quietly.
“Very well. Viper squad, Shotgun. Everyone on me, I’m assuming command until I hear otherwise. First priority, protect Eglin base. When base is secure, proceed to our previous assignment.”
He wasn’t even sure if the squad’s second in command was alive, but he wasn’t going to wait to find out. People were dying out there. Good people. He gunned the engine, lifted the ship a meter off the ground, and shot through the hole in the back of the hangar, slamming into a fleeing enemy soldier for good measure, and he couldn’t help but feel a ghoulish sense of pleasure as the unlucky man’s body flew up and hit the front viewport before sliding away with the growing wind resistance.
“Po, assess the tactical situation and divvy out orders. I’ll concentrate on not getting us killed,” he said. He smiled as she snapped into action, jabbing at her console and scanning the ground below.
Her voice seemed transformed from earlier. Now confident, steady, and decisive, sh
e barked out orders. “Vipers three and four, lay down suppressing fire for the Hornet and Jackal hangars. Vipers ten and twelve, take out those carriers about to land at the Wolf hangar and blast the ground troops already there. Vipers nine and eight, secure Red hangar and Dryad hangars. Everyone else, relieve the pressure on the frigate crews trying to board their ships. Shotgun and I’ll take the fighters.”
He looked at her with raised eyebrows. “We’ll take the fighters? All of them? There’s got to be at least five up there.”
“Can’t handle the heat, stay out of the fire, Shotgun.” He couldn’t tell from her face if she was joking or not, but a strafing burst of fire hitting the rear of the fighter focused his attention back on his flying.
“Crash, on us. I need some backup, in spite of Po’s confidence in me.”
Crash’s voice crackled over the comm. “You’ve got Po over there? Where the hell is Givens?”
He saw her eyes narrow. “Down,” he said. “Kit too. Looks like Po has to settle for me.” He paused, cocking his head at her. “You’re Grizzly, aren’t you?” he said, referring to her callsign. He’d heard it before over the comm, but had never associated the callsign with her name or her face. Viper squad didn’t spend terribly large amounts of time socializing as a group, and he only somewhat remembered her face from a few briefings.
“Yeah.” She didn’t blink as her fingers dashed across the terminal and her thumb squeezed the trigger. An unfortunate enemy fighter exploded in a fiery streak and crashed into the central courtyard of the base.
Jake whistled. “Nice shooting, Grizzly.” He pulled up hard on the controls and they shot straight into the air, then arced and feinted towards one enemy fighter before changing course and darting towards another one. Po easily picked them off too. Jake had never flown with a gunner that could match his speed and adapt to his unpredictable flying. And he kind of hated her for it, like he would be betraying his late friend by appreciating her skill—the image of Kit slumped against the wall forced its way into his mind, and he shook his head to be rid of it.
Crash shouted over the comm. “Nice one, Shotgun. I’m dizzy just watching you. But get a load of this.” Out of the corner of his eye he saw Viper two come to a dead stop, then plummet straight down before flipping, shooting away in the opposite direction she had been facing, and coming up hard on the tail of a hapless enemy bogey, which met a fiery end.
“Oh yeah?” Jake smiled. He loved his back and forth with Crash, though he and Kit he almost never chalked up as many kills as the man. But somehow, he now felt a new confidence that permitted him to pull out all the stops, trying unorthodox maneuvers he was sure his old friend never would have tolerated. Po kept up without batting an eyelash. She was made of a tough cloth, apparently. He eyed her thin, black eyes and black hair tied back in a no-nonsense bun. Her flight uniform was perfectly pressed, except for some stray blood from her pilot, and thin-rimmed elegant glasses hung on the bridge of her nose. She looked like a grandma, he thought, but twenty years younger.
He made a mental note to never, ever tell her that.
“You asleep?” she asked.
He turned back to the viewscreen. “No. Just planning out our next moves.”
“We’ve got one bogey left. The other fighters have nearly secured their hangars and the other squadrons are starting to take off. We should move on to our assignment. I’ve been trying to raise HQ on the comm, but we’re being jammed.”
He shook his head. Sure, the Asian Republic tended to be slippery in foreign and military affairs, especially the Russian bloc, but he would have never guessed they’d launch an outright attack. “What about fleet HQ in Miami? Are they being hit? And Dallas? Resistance headquarters?”
She scanned her console, and nodded. “Both Miami and Dallas report they’re under attack. No requests for assistance, yet.” She looked up. “But there might be jamming there too.”
According to Admiral Gutierrez’s briefing, they still had perhaps twenty minutes before they could count on the arrival of the imperial fleet. He ran a quick calculation on the console. “There is a battlegroup stationed at Miami spaceport that needs to get off the ground if we’re going to have any chance at this thing, and another based in Dallas. We’re about ten minutes from both. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
She bit her lip, then nodded.
Jake thumbed open the comm to a wide spectrum bandwidth, hoping something would make it past the jamming. “Viper group. We’re making a quick pit stop in Dallas before we patrol lower Earth orbit. Make a hard ascent to the upper atmosphere, then gun to Texas and take out the Charlie there. Hornet squad, do the same for Miami. Everyone else, head to your previous assignments and whoop some ass.” He wondered about whether the Hornet squad leader was hearing him and wondering why a lieutenant was ordering him around, but he didn’t stop to find out.
“Ready?” He looked over at Po.
“When you are.” She inclined her head once, maintaining the same steely, grim expression that graced her face since they climbed into the fighter. He gunned the gravitic drive, and they accelerated upward as fast as wind resistance would let them. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he could see the edges of the fighter start to glow a dull red from the compression of the wavefront in front of the leading edges, and so he accelerated until they glowed bright red.
Soon, the glow disappeared, signaling to Jake that the atmosphere was rarified enough to hightail it to Dallas. Reorienting the nose towards the west, the fighter shot away like a bullet, followed by thirteen other Viper squad birds.
Jake glanced at the ETA readout. Five minutes to Dallas. Plenty of time to get to know his gunner. He knew he would feel more comfortable with her if they talked to each other a little, and he wanted to help take her mind off the harrowing experience in the hangar bay.
“So,” he began, looking at the ring on her hand, “married?”
“Was,” she replied, without elaboration.
“Was? So you’re divorced?”
“I’d rather not talk about that now, if it’s all the same to you.” She studied her sensor readout and punched a few buttons. “We’re past the jamming. Orbital listening posts are reporting the arrival of the fleet in Sol orbit as of half an hour ago. The Helios science observatory is reporting the direct visual contact of sixteen capital-sized ships and a swarm of smaller ships, but resolution is limited at this range. The sun is eight light-minutes away, and the Sol to Earth gravitic shift requires the average capital ship to charge its cap banks for around thirty to forty minutes, so they could be here any second.” She paused to think. “They could already be here, for that matter.”
“Understood. We’re four minutes away from Dallas. As soon as we mop up there, we’ll come back up to orbit.”
He held the controls steady, and she didn’t say anything else. In spite of his adrenaline, he understood her need for silence. He still could not bring himself to think about Kit. Or the bloody corpse of her former pilot. Or the charred remains littering the cratered Eglin base courtyard.
She breathed in deep, as if preparing to plunge into frigid water. “My husband was killed when the imperials struck a Resistance base in California two years ago. After he was gone, I had nothing left, so I joined the service. Was decent with sensors and console readouts, and I don’t mind flying, so I became a space jock.”
“Sorry,” he said. Still, he thought it was strange she kept the ring on, until it dawned on him—she probably didn’t want some drunk schmuck in a bar hitting on her, and keeping the ring on was the easiest way to avoid that, short of carrying a loaded pistol and pointing it at the drunk schmucks who tried. “How long were you married?”
“Eight years.”
“Kids?”
He knew as the words came out of his mouth that he shouldn’t have said them. Her jaw tightened.
“I told you I’d rather not talk about that right now if it’s all the same to you,” she repeated, almost robotically.
&nb
sp; “I’m sorry.” He glanced at the ETA readout. “Thirty seconds. You ready?”
She nodded once, her lips tightly pursed. Her voice was cold. “Let’s go give these bastards a fucking they’ll never forget.”
And that’s when Jake decided to never, ever cross Megan Po. The grizzly. The cold grizzly.
“Contacts. Multiple bogeys swarming downtown Dallas,” she said.
“How’s Resistance HQ?”
“Looks mostly undamaged, but the battlegroup is struggling to break free from dock.”
The massive city started to come into view below them, and Jake could just make out the jumbled forest of skyscrapers and the ten block square section that comprised Resistance headquarters. The ten tallest skyscrapers in this section served as the city’s spaceport, and about a dozen frigates remained moored to the tops of the towers with hundreds of smaller ones moored farther down.
Dallas had burgeoned into one of the world’s supercities, a vast cosmopolitan financial and defense powerhouse that eclipsed even New York City, London, and Buenos Aires—the gargantuan capital of the South American Republic. The mile-high skyscrapers stretched out to the distant horizon, not giving way to suburbs until well past thirty klicks from the city center.
“Ok, there they are,” he said, eyeing the flurry of fighters swarming their frigates. “Ready?”
“Do you have to ask?” she said, with a straight face.
“Engaging. Be ready for some quick stops and starts,” he warned.
“Show me what you got, Shotgun.”
And with that, he pushed the ship forward into a lightning-fast dive, then changed directions upward so fast it was as if they bounced on a pocket of air. He twisted the ship around one-eighty towards an enemy bogey, which Po dispatched with ease. “Next,” she murmured. Jake was starting to like the cold grizzly.
Out of his peripheral vision he saw other Viper birds swoop down on the targets swarming the tops of the skyscrapers, raking them with streaking red fire. Jake winced as he saw one of their own burst into flame and crash into the side of a building.
