by Brown, Ryk
“That,” she repeated.
“What?” he asked again, rolling over and opening his eyes slightly.
Another thud came, followed by one that was even louder and shook the house even more.
“Are you deaf, old man?” she wondered. “That!”
“Sounds like explosions,” the man said, sitting up and swinging his feet out of the bed. The thud repeated once more, shaking the house again as the old man stumbled on his way to the window. He threw open the curtain and gazed out into the foggy morning. The dawn had not yet broken. He could see a faint flash of light through the hazy fog as another even louder thud followed, shaking their home even more violently than before. “Stay here!” he ordered as he grabbed his boots and headed out the door.
The front porch of the small farmhouse swung open, and the old man came running out, his boots still untied and his coat hanging open. He strained to see something in the distance. The fog was not as bad as some days, but it was still too hazy to see anything other than a faint glow, as if something were burning.
An alert siren began its long wail in the distance, coming from the direction of the Answari airbase not two kilometers to the east of the old man’s farm. His wife came out onto the patio as well, her robe wrapped tightly around her. She, too, heard the siren. “What’s going on?”
“I’m not sure,” the old man admitted. He had lived on this farm for more than sixty years, as had his father before him. In all that time, he had never seen nor heard such explosions. He had heard the alert sirens from time to time as the nearby airbase conducted training exercises, but those had become infrequent over the past few years.
“Are we under attack?” his wife wondered.
“Don’t be silly,” the old man argued. “Who in their right mind would try to attack Answari? It would be suicide.”
A brilliant blue-white flash of light illuminated the hanging fog not more than twenty meters away from the old man and about forty meters above his fields. The flash was accompanied by the roar of jet engines as a forty year-old Takaran fighter, painted flat black and without markings, suddenly appeared from the flash of light and streaked across the field. The ship’s sudden arrival knocked the old man backward onto the ground. As he scrambled to his feet, the old fighter launched four cruise missiles toward the Answari airbase, then pulled sharply upward.
“Get inside, woman!” the old man yelled as he turned and started running toward the house, his boots flopping on his feet. “We’re under attack!”
“Going vertical,” Josh announced as he pulled the Falcon’s nose sharply upward and maxed out his throttles.
“Jump point in thirty seconds,” Loki announced. “Missile impact in twenty.”
“How many guns did they get?” Josh wondered.
“Stand by,” Loki told him. He started scanning the area of Answari with thermal imaging, knowing that the exploded air defense batteries would likely be by far the hottest places in the area. “Uh oh, I only count six hot spots.”
“That means there are still two of them in service,” Josh realized.
“Five seconds to missile impact. Fifteen to jump point,” Loki announced.
“We’ve got to do something about those guns,” Josh told him.
“We just shot off all our missiles, Josh.”
“Then we’ll hit them with guns.”
“Are you nuts?” Loki asked. “Missile impact. Direct hit! All four! That airbase won’t be launching anything soon!” Loki looked at the jump clock. “Four seconds to jump.”
“Loki,” Josh said.
“Josh.”
“Fuck it!” Josh pulled the nose back even more as he began backing off on the throttles. He pulled their nose all the way back over until the ship was headed back on a reciprocal heading before rolling the interceptor to bring their wings level to the ground below once again. He then pulled his throttles back even more and pushed the Falcon’s nose down, sending them into a dive.
“Uh, Josh, you missed the jump point, you know,” Loki reminded him.
“We’ve got to keep those guns busy while the first wave of shuttles jumps in, Loki. They’re going to come in high because they don’t know the city’s building layout yet. Those guns will pick them off easy.”
“We can’t take out one of those batteries with just our guns, Josh!”
“No, but we can keep them targeting us instead of the jumpers!”
“Oh, that’s a lovely idea,” Loki stated. “And just how are we supposed to get close enough to shoot at them? One of them is already swinging about to target us, you know.”
“Plot a jump. I’ll come a few degrees to starboard of the first cannon,” Josh explained. “Jump us in a few hundred meters before them. We’ll fly to the right of the first and the left of the second on the other side of the city.”
“That might work for the first one,” Loki agreed as he struggled against the increased G-forces as Josh pulled the Falcon out of her dive and into level flight fifteen meters above the surface of Takara. “But we’ll never make it across Answari before the second and maybe even the first gun manage to get a lock on us and turn us into ashes.”
“Then we’ll jump across the city to the next gun as well.”
“You want me to calculate two quick jumps and an escape jump, all within about a minute?”
“You gonna talk or plot those jumps?” Josh asked.
“I’m plotting. I’m plotting.” Loki began frantically plotting the next jump, his eyes darting back to the sensors that were locked on the closest air defense battery. “The first gun is coming to bear,” he told Josh. A red indicator flashed. “EVASIVE!”
Josh yanked his flight stick, rolling the Falcon into a tight, spiraling roll to port as a bolt of red energy streaked past them. He continued bouncing the fighter from side to side, changing his altitude frequently as more shots streaked past them. “Anytime now, Loki!”
“Jump!”
Josh hit the jump button next to his throttles. The cockpit filled with the blue-white jump flash for a moment. A split second later, it cleared, and they found themselves near the edge of the city, the first big gun coming up on their right. Josh turned the ship hard to starboard, sweeping around the backside of the air defense battery. “Say hello, Loki!”
Loki grabbed the gun controls and spun the turret cannon in the Falcon’s nose to starboard, opening fire as he did so. The bolts of energy spewed forth from the turret at an astounding rate, streaking through the hazy morning fog on their way to their target.
The Falcon’s energy cannon fire peppered the massive gun turret, striking all about her base and walking up its side and across its control house. The windows of the control house shattered, but the bolts of energy simply ricocheted off the control house’s armored roof. Although the men controlling the big gun may have ducked for cover, the gun kept moving laterally as it tried unsuccessfully to catch up to the Falcon as it streaked past in the foggy darkness.
Five blue-white flashes of light suddenly appeared over the city of Answari in rapid succession. When the flashes cleared, there were five small cargo shuttles, each painted flat black, descending toward the city below.
“They’re here!” Loki announced. “Come hard left!”
Josh pulled the Falcon to the left to get out of the way of the descending jump shuttles who had not expected the Falcon to be in the area.
“Are you still targeting the first gun?” Josh wondered, having noticed that they were no longer firing.
“I can’t target it with you whipping the ship about!” Loki argued. “Oh, shit! Both guns are swinging to target the shuttles.” Loki looked at the jump systems. “Come to one-two-seven now!”
Josh pulled the nose back to the right, bringing the ship onto the specified course. “One-two-seven!”
“Jump!” Loki ordered.
The Falcon disappeared in a brilliant flash of light. At the same moment, the first air defense battery fired, striking the closest shuttle dead o
n and turning it into a falling fireball of debris. The other shuttles dove quickly toward the surface, maneuvering wildly to avoid the buildings below.
The jump flash outside the cockpit of the Falcon faded away once again, and Loki opened his eyes and quickly verified their new position.
“Gun at eleven o’clock and passing, bringing the turret on target,” Loki announced. A moment later, the energy cannon turret in the Falcon’s nose lit up again, sending bolts of energy toward the second big gun emplacement. Although it made an impressive show, it did little to stop the gun from firing.
The first gun fired again, grazing the next closest shuttle in its aft port corner. Smoke billowed out of the shuttle as it continued to dive toward the surface. At the last moment, it pulled into a hover just five meters above the street. As her rear loading ramp swung down and away from her back side, two thick ropes came spilling out either side of the smoking shuttle’s ramp. She came to an unsteady hover, Corinari soldiers sliding down the ropes on either side, one after the other. As they hit the ground, they raised their weapons and scurried off toward the nearby buildings for cover, looking about for any resistance. So far, there was none other than the two air defense batteries that had somehow managed to survive.
After all twenty men were down, the shuttle began to climb away, the ropes quickly retracting back up into the shuttle. The damaged shuttle struggled to climb and bring her nose up to get to the proper angle to jump away. Her jump emitters began to glow at various points across her canopy. Their blue-white light spilled out quickly, connecting all the emitters and blanketing the entire shuttle in the jump fields. However, several of the emitters, most notably on the back corner of the shuttle, were damaged and did not light up. The jump fields flashed, and there was a terrible noise, like electrical energy shorting across a metal surface. A moment later, the flash cleared, and the back corner of the shuttle fell to the ground, having not jumped away with the rest of the ship.
“Come to three-two-two, nose up twenty and jump!” Loki ordered.
“Did they make it?” Josh asked as he turned the ship hard to port after passing the second gun emplacement.
“Checking,” Loki assured him.
“Three-two-two,” Josh confirmed. “Twenty degrees up. Jumping!”
The cockpit filled with light for a brief moment, and they found themselves back in space, approaching the staging area.
“Did they make it?” Josh asked again.
“Three made it, I think,” Loki answered.
“What do you mean, ‘you think’?”
“I saw one go down, and another get hit. The one that got hit dropped her troops and then jumped away,” Loki reported.
“Then where are they?”
Loki looked at his sensors again. “Staging platform is dead ahead. Wait… I found the jumper. It’s jumper two, it’s… Oh God…”
“Shit.” Josh stated in frustration, looking out of the front of his canopy as they passed close by Jumper two about fifty meters to port. The front two-thirds of the ship seemed intact. However, the entire back half was sliced away in an irregular line. The shuttle was rotating slightly as they passed by. As it turned, Josh and Loki could see inside the back of the shuttle’s main cargo bay. The shuttle’s crew chief was floating in the back of the shuttle, dead from either the sudden severing of his ship or the exposure to the cold vacuum of outer space. He could see all the way up to the cockpit of the shuttle, as the door that separated the cockpit from the cargo bay was open. He realized that the flight crew must also be dead. “Contact the C2,” Josh ordered. “They need to know about those guns.”
* * *
“There is no response from Jumper two,” the communications technician announced.
“Their mass is wrong,” Ensign Yosef told Cameron.
“Wrong?” Cameron asked from the plotting table in the middle of the C2. “What do you mean, ‘wrong’?”
“I mean, it’s not all there, sir,” Ensign Yosef explained as she continued to scan. “I don’t think the whole ship jumped back.”
“Sir, I’ve got the Falcon on comms. They just returned.”
“Put them up,” Cameron ordered.
“C2, Falcon,” Loki’s voice called through the speakers. “Two of Answari’s guns are still in operation. Jumper one was destroyed, Jumper two was hit. By the looks of her, she unloaded her troops and then tried to jump back. The back third of her is missing.”
“What about her crew?” Cameron asked over the comms.
“They’re all dead, sir,” Loki responded. “We tried engaging the guns with cannons, but all we could do was distract them at best. Request permission to meet up with the Aurora and reload. Maybe we can put a few missiles into them.”
“Falcon, transmit all your flight and sensor logs to us for analysis, and stand by,” Cameron ordered.
“Sir, Jumpers three, four, and five just returned. They’re also reporting that jumper one is down. They’re moving in to dock up and reload troops.”
“Order all jumpers to load up and hold,” Cameron ordered. “No one jumps back to Answari until I say so…”
“Sir,” a sergeant operating one of the comm-stations interrupted, “Captain Waddell is down there with only eighty men. They won’t last ten minutes without reinforcement—not even five if the citizens of Answari pickup weapons and start defending their city.”
Cameron looked at the Corinari sergeant. The man had nearly twenty years in the service, and ten more before that in the imperial forces. The only reason he wasn’t down on the streets of Answari right now was because he had been injured during the raid on the Ancot garrison. It had been a lucky break for Cameron, however, as she needed someone with battlefield experience and an understanding of how both the Ta’Akar and the Corinari worked. The elder sergeant fit the bill nicely. “Thank you, Sergeant. I’m well aware of that fact. But we need to find a way to take out those last two guns so we can get those jumpers in and out. We can’t afford to lose any more jumpers or we won’t be able to get troops to the ground fast enough to sustain the battle.”
“Commander,” Ensign Yosef interrupted as she studied the sensor data that had been transmitted from the Falcon’s flight over Answari. “I think I may have an answer for you.” Ensign Yosef pushed some buttons and transferred the images from the scans to the plotting table. A three-dimensional image of the city of Answari appeared on the table. Ensign Yosef moved from the console to the plotting table as she spoke. “The two remaining guns are here and here,” she explained, pointing at the two gun emplacements in the floating image. “If we jump in here, over this plaza, the surrounding high-rises will shield the jumpers from those last two guns.”
“That’s not much room to jump into,” Cameron noted.
“They will need to make a two step jump,” Ensign Yosef explained. “First they jump out here,” she explained as she zoomed away from the image so fast that it rapidly changed into a view of the entire planet. “Then, they change course and turn into the planet, changing their attitude so that they are jumping straight down toward the plaza belly first.”
“They’ll need to have almost no forward momentum before they jump in,” Cameron said, “and they won’t have much of a margin for error, not while they’re going straight at the planet.”
“No, sir, they won’t,” Ensign Yosef agreed.
“I’m not sure,” Cameron admitted as she zoomed the image back in and focused on the target plaza itself. “If there are any shooters in the surrounding buildings, the jumpers will still be sitting ducks, as will the men getting off of them.”
“Put a few shooters on the ramps as they fast rope down,” the sergeant suggested. “They can provide cover fire.”
“They’ll be sitting ducks as well,” Cameron pointed out. “No, we need to get our forces to that plaza and secure it first.”
“That’s not exactly on the way to the palace, sir,” the sergeant reminded her.
“It can’t be helped,” Camero
n insisted. “You said it yourself, Sergeant; Captain Waddell needs to be reinforced.”
“Someone’s got to get the word to him, first,” Ensign Yosef said.
“Get the Falcon back on comms,” Cameron ordered.
* * *
“Jump complete,” Mister Riley reported from the Aurora’s navigation station.
“Contact, imperial cruiser dead ahead,” Mister Randeen reported from the tactical station. “Five kilometers out. Still maintaining same course and speed.”
“Actively jamming,” Mister Willard reported.
“We’re still matching his speed, Captain,” Mister Chiles reported from the helm.
“Snapshot one and two,” Nathan ordered.
“Firing one and two,” Mister Randeen responded as he pressed the torpedo launch buttons on his console for both tubes one and two.
“Helm, translate downward hard three hundred meters and maintain course and speed,” Nathan ordered.
“Translating hard down, three hundred meters, Aye.”
“One and two away,” Mister Randeen reported.
“Navigator, plot a jump, ten kilometers forward from our current position, and jump when ready.”
“Aye, sir.”
“Ten seconds to torpedo impact,” Mister Randeen announced.
“Stand by to fire tube five, Mister Randeen, and stand by on the missile pod. A full four shot.”
“Aye, Captain.”
“Target’s shields are coming up, Captain,” Mister Navashee reported from the sensor station.
“She’s turning to port as well,” Mister Randeen added. “Five seconds to impact.”
“Navigator, new plot, a thousand kilometers out, ninety degrees off our current heading,” Nathan ordered. “Helm, hard to starboard, come over ninety. Tactical, as soon as our aft tubes come to bear, snapshot tube six instead of five, fixed yield nuke.”
