The Lost Tribe (Sentinel Series Book 2)

by Richard Flunker

  “They’re here,” he said softly.

  Gheno shouted and motioned for the men to quickly close up their mini fort alongside their ship, and then he ordered Cove to lower the landing legs on the transport to drop it down. He didn’t need anyone sneaking in behind him under the ship. He jumped down and grabbed one of the men by the arm and sat him down next to the charger. He showed him quickly how to clip in the bottom of the rifle into one of the five charging pods. He hoped he understood. They would need every charge they could.

  “Karai, you might want to get to the back of the ship in case they fire up into the cabin,” he said over the com on his wrist. He no longer had the visor. “Cove, just,” he began, “I don’t have any assistance. Just inform me of everything that you can as you see it going on.”

  Gheno picked up a rifle and others followed suit. As he crawled up onto the ledge he stood up to look over their metal wall with confidence and was nearly blasted off the top with a barrage of gunfire from the creatures on the other side of the river. Gheno fell clean off the ledge onto the ground. He stood up quickly, still in shock and looked himself over. He had not been hit. As he quickly climbed back up onto the ledge, he noticed that it was covered in water.

  “Cove? Are they shooting water again?” Gheno shouted over the pelting sound on the metal crates.

  “It would appear so,” she replied.

  “How?”

  “I still do not know,” Cove answered, “but remember, the water is fired at a high velocity. It will tear your flesh off.”

  Gheno instinctively reached for his ear. He stopped short of actually touching it. He remained ducked behind the metal wall. Seven other men were up there with him. He looked down the ledge at them. He raised his hand and began counting down with his fingers from three. When his hand closed into a fist he got on one knee and began firing. He was extremely glad when he heard other plasma shots hissing off over the river. He had really hoped he hadn’t been the only one to pop up.

  The bolts of superheated plasma sped off across the park and the river, hitting the creatures. The black centaurs reacted immediately by firing their water bolts, mostly harmlessly against the metal crate wall. Gheno hit one squarely in the chest and watched with satisfaction as it liquefied and vanished in a puddle of black goo. He fired two more shots, looking down the scope on his rifle, until he saw dozens more of the creatures emerging from the woods.

  He turned to look down to his left. He was about to shout something and stopped short, knowing they wouldn’t understand him. He flinched for a moment and ducked behind the metal crate as water splashed behind him. He looked down ledge again just as one of the men was hit in the right side of his face. Flesh tore clean off of his cheek as he crashed down on the ground below, screaming through his mouth and the hole in his face. Gheno turned around quickly to look away. He closed his eyes tightly, then took a deep breath.

  “Oh, well,” he said, turning, reaching up and getting on one knee again to keep firing.

  Upon hitting a centaur just between the first two legs and watching it stumble into the river, Gheno turned his gaze on a set of trees crashing down. As the centaur struggled to reform and stand up again, Gheno pointed his rifle at the trees and swallowed hard as he watched a large black sphere with arms on either side come rolling slowly through the trees. Centaurs scrambled off of it and walked around it as well. With the sphere in its aim, Gheno fired two quick shots, and saw the plasma bolts do very little, if any damage. Then he began to panic as the sphere turned and aimed its arms at their makeshift fort.

  The impact from the shots knocked him off the fort.

  “I didn’t even see…” he blurted, standing up quickly. There was a large hole the size of a human’s head at the very edge of the fort. That sphere had fired clean through it.

  “Um….Cove….help?” Gheno implored.

  ***

  Karai had moved out of the pilot’s cabin but had stayed just out of the cabin in the main hallway because she hadn’t been able to drag the still incoherent Threadweaver out with her. He was a large man, very heavy, and her few attempts to dislodge him went nowhere. Even in his drug induced state, he was resisting her. She groaned and just sat around the wall in the hallway, listening to the thousands of small shards of water and metal hitting the side of their transport.

  She had never been in a firefight, much less even seen a gun of any sort other than on virtuavids. She felt a slight modicum of safety within the walls of the transport, but she was still terrified. She went back and forth between asking Cove to take off in the ship or just overriding the AI and doing it herself.

  “Um…Cove…help?” Gheno’s voice chirped over her com. She looked down at her tablet and saw the images being displayed from across the river.

  “Cove? What’s going on?” she asked out loud.

  “There is a new enemy on the field. A large sphere with heavier weaponry.” The AI responded with her feminine voice that lacked all sense of emotion.

  Karai stood up and peered around the doorway into the pilot’s cabin. The windshield was angled up too far, so she couldn’t see but the tops of the trees. Water dripped down the window, splashed with dirt and leaves and countless other things.

  “Karai, I will need your assistance,” the AI spoke again.

  Karai looked up quickly. “With what?”

  “I need help aligning our gauss gun,” Cove replied.

  Karai was surprised. “We have a gun? Why haven’t we used that yet?”

  “I have just located Sentinel’s subroutines. There is a gravity assisted gauss gun. I can activate the weapon but I have very limited information on the gravity measurements needed. I believe you are the expert on that matter.”

  Karai felt a surge of confidence. “Yeah, I can do that,” she said, standing up and rushing into the cabin. She nearly tripped over the Threadweaver again. Spinning the co-pilots chair around, Karai sat down and allowed Cove to bring up the calibration program on the screen directly in front of her.

  On top of the transport, a small hatch opened up. It was regularly used to store equipment that could be used in an emergency, usually the kind of emergency that involved being locked out of their ship in the vacuum of space. It was an emergency key. But the transport had its own lock: the AI. So Kale and Gheno had retrofitted the small space to mount a gauss gun which Sentinel had been modifying. It accelerated the shell magnetically, but then used gravity to spin the shell and tiny gravity touches just as the shell exited the gun allowed nearly one hundred percent accuracy.

  The problem was, Sentinel wasn’t on board the transport.

  “Ok, ok. I see the parameters. Simple enough. Cove, can we test this somehow?” Karai asked.

  On top of the transport, the gun rotated just a bit. Humming filled the air and with a loud whoosh, the gun fired one shot. The shell exploded just inches shy of the sphere, throwing dirt and water all over. Inside the transport, Karai had watched on the video feed from Cove the results. She also saw the sphere for the first time.

  “Oh god,” she exclaimed, typing on her console furiously to correct her gravity measurements. She corrected her numbers just slightly and entered the new numbers.

  “Try again…”

  ***

  Gheno had heard the first shell explode. When he looked over the fort, he could still see the dirt raining down from the explosion, and the huge crater just in front of the sphere. The black tank rolled forward right into the crater and fell into it. It fit just right and for a moment, the black sphere was stuck. But while it was stuck, its arms could still move freely. It started pulling its arms up and aiming at the transport.

  ‘Now, now, now,’ Gheno thought.

  Then the gauss gun whooshed again and Gheno heard a thunk, like a big heavy rock dropping just right, into deep water. The two arms disappeared in black goo, and Gheno could hear crackling, like static discharge.

  “I think you got him, Cove,” he said into his com. “But be ready for more.”


  ***

  “Break off. Dive on Vector C. Keep the cover tight on the wings.”

  Jayne heard the chatter come in over the headset. She meant to answer back, but she was completely focused on the two targets directly ahead of her as well as the Jaguar’s computer warning her of the three that were pelting her with particularly vicious gunfire from behind. She was trying to dodge them while attempting to maintain the two directly ahead of her in her aim. The internal gravity within the ship completely eliminated all the jerking and jostling, so her flight was very smooth, but with the 360 spherical view provided inside of the ship, her brain was fully immersed in the rapid movements of the ship. Her heart rate was up and she was sweating.

  There was no central joystick as was so common among single fighter craft. It was a remnant from atmosphere only fighters. Instead, flying modern single-man fighter craft was done with their feet. Pilot’s feet were fitted into a boot sleeve. These could be turned, pulled and pushed to move the craft forward, backwards and in all fashions of twists and turns in 3D combat of space. It took an atmosphere-bound pilot some time to get used to it, but once trained, the ability to have your hands free for anything else was advantageous. In Jayne’s case, she was moving her arms a thousand miles an hour pulling up data and setting new targets. She also continually updated the Galaxy with her data, as well as Graham down below on the ground.

  A single black drone was no match for a Jaguar. Twenty black drones didn’t stand a chance against a single Jaguar. But their odds in the sky over the Gadoni ocean were nearing one hundred to one. She had already suffered two casualties. One had gone down safely in the forest, but the other had crashed hard into the ocean. She hadn’t heard anything from that pilot and she could only assume the worst.

  Jayne reached out and tapped the com screen, bringing up the Galaxy’s channel.

  “Admiral, we could use some help.”

  The response was a bit distorted, but she understood it well enough. “All our orbital weapons are offline.”

  Her pilots were the best, but they were still human. Even if each one killed a thousand black drones, fatigue would set in, and mistakes would begin.

  “Wing A lead, are we doing anything to stop the bombing runs?” she asked.

  “Negative. Far too many for us to counter.”

  As she suspected. “Let’s take this fight down into that mothership. If we don’t somehow stem the flow drones, we’re going to drown in them.”

  She repeated the orders to all the wings, and she was happy to see that Wing B was returning from escorting the shuttles to safety. They were flying low along the coast from the north. She relayed the command: fly low and close to the superstructure to see if it had any anti-aircraft weapons and see if they could disable the hangars.

  “Find the targets and line up for bombing runs if possible.”

  Jayne turned her Jaguar back east and spun into a dive. She fired seven times, each shot knocking one more drone out of the skies. She kicked out hard with her left leg, sending the Jaguar spinning as it dove, then pulled both feet in, leveling the craft and pulling out of the dive as three drones were hot in pursuit of her. She had setup the simple dive to go right into her wingman’s path, and he easily took down the three drones. The wingman then spun about quick and formed up next to Jayne as he followed her directly at the large spherical mothership planted in the ocean directly in front of them.

  “That thing is huge,” the wingman chimed in.

  Jayne caught herself nodding in agreement. Their tiny ships would have nothing that could damage something that large. Even if they survived, they’d not defeat it.

  “Seven miles, no return fire. Some drones following, most just doing their bombing runs on the coast,” the commander of Wing A reported.

  Jayne looked at the reports on her HuD. Wing B was just five miles away and was already streaming data of the hangars on the super-sphere. Two had already begun to line up to drop their single Implosion bombs. Jayne watched on her screen as the two Jaguars simultaneously dropped their bombs and turned away. The drones were ignoring them. These creatures surely had the numbers, but their tactics were juvenile, at best.

  Jayne watched with satisfaction as the two bombs hit the hangar port. The implosion caved in a section of the hull and for a moment, the stream of drones stopped, at least from that hangar. The sub-commodore was about to give orders to the other Jaguars to begin bombing runs when two more hangars opened up and drones began streaming out of those.

  “No good,” Jayne heard over the coms. “Still, no anti-aircraft guns. Nothing. Too bad we don’t have anything stronger.”

  “Commodore, check data feed thirty two,” she heard over the coms. She quickly switched the screens. A third hangar door had opened on the far side of the largest sphere. An entirely new craft was flying out of it. Images from Wing B sensors showed a black craft, shaped oddly like the alphabetic letter M. It was much larger than the smaller bombing drones.

  “This is their response.” Jayne tagged all wing commanders and said. “Heads up. New inbound. Prepare for dogfighting. Defensive engagement. Let's see what they can do.”

  She took her Jaguar into a climb and watched from her own optics as the Jaguars engaged the new M drones. Their lightning weapons were still very effective. Her pilots were still knocking them out of the sky and the M drones were not returning fire.

  “What kind of weapons do…” she began. She then saw a Jaguar take a dive down directly in front of an M drone. There was a flash of light that blinded her optics. When she blinked and looked again, the black drone was attached to the Jaguar and they were both spinning out of the control towards the ocean beneath them. She watched in terror as the M drone sprouted spider-like legs and then plunged into the Jaguar, spearing right through it.

  Third loss. Ten percent of their very few ships.

  “Very close range weapons!” she shouted into the coms. “Stay out of range.”

  Jayne looked up and saw the skies darkening. There were hundreds of the M drones now and it was becoming increasingly difficult to keep the Jaguars away. She saw two more Jaguars get attacked by the flying parasites. Her lips pursed in anger. When she looked down, she saw a message from the Galaxy: ‘Retreat. Pull back to city.’ She tapped on button on her screen and the message went out through the network at high priority. The message was now being displayed in big red letters on everyone’s HuD.

  Jayne banked her Jaguar. Retreating meant flying through a gauntlet of M drones.

  She hated retreating. She gave a dispersal order. All ships to fly the quickest route out of the cloud of M drones and then regroup at the city. Her wingman linked into her ship, allowing her to fly both ships at the same time while his ship turned into a turret. Lightning flashed as rapidly as their weapons allowed.

  Three more Jaguars fell as their displays greyed out on her screen. All good men and women.

  A light began blinking. She tapped the light and her wingman chimed in.

  “Commodore, new readings. We have more new inbounds from the west.”

  “Great.” Jayne kept her voice composed, but angrily hit the sensor screen with her hand. Hundreds of new flying craft were coming from the west, from over the mountain range.

  “I thought all the spheres landed here? Where are these coming from?” she asked her wingman.

  “These aren’t drones commodore. They’re…” he began, stopping for a moment to try to get a better read on the sensors, “They’re something else.”

  He fed the sensor readings to her screen, followed by some optics. What she saw made her blink.

  “What is…” was all she could say.

  ***

  They had at first been firing water bullets at them. It was unlike anything he had ever seen. The large creatures had fired water bolts that could easily tear the skin off any human being. Thankfully, their armor had easily taken the brunt of the initial assault. Most of the marines were soaked, though. The creatures had come
climbing up the small ridge directly in front of the towers, oblivious of any cover, firing at the marines. There had been some bloody, torn clothes but no casualties as the soldiers had beat back the first wave. Two Cairns had fully deployed in a line and were digging themselves in, when the second wave came. This time, the bullets were something else, something much harder.

  The black centaurs walked directly at them in most cases, not taking any cover or defensive measures. At first, it was a shooting gallery as the marines, especially those on turrets, mowed down the centaurs. The plasma bolts ate through their black goo and a few good hits to the torso was usually enough to take them down. For the first ten minutes, Graham thought his Marines would hold the lines easily. Then the ten minutes passed, and he realized that they had been fighting nonstop the entire time.

  He began checking in with the leaders all over the field. They all reported the same thing. They were easily repelling the centaurs, but the centaurs appeared to continue coming at them. When they switched over to their new black metallic bullets, the marine armor was no match. For that matter, a lot of their barricades were being destroyed by this ultra-hard material. It had only been ten minutes of fighting and already some leaders were asking about redeploying further back, possibly back behind the towers.

  “They are coming again!” Graham heard someone shout from a distance. Marines ducked behind trees and debris and began opening fire. Graham himself was about fifty feet back from the first layered line of Marines that had entrenched themselves in. Whenever possible, they had dug trenches into the ground and those that found themselves with several feet of dirt as a barrier fared the best against the incoming fire. The new black bullets shattered wood with ease, and those behind the trees and wooden barriers shared the same fate as the wood.