by Nick Cook
I didn’t have time to catch a breath as a fresh alarm came from my console and a new target arrow flashed at the top of my gunner’s screen.
‘Out of the bloody frying pan and into the fire,’ Tom muttered as he gazed at one of his information panels.
I was emotionally and physically wrecked; I had nothing left. We had no way to defend ourselves any more. We would never escape this. But I followed the targeting arrows anyway and spun my gunner’s screen up towards the sky.
A new TR-3B squadron of three ships streaked into view. Like avenging angels they came to a hovering stop directly overhead. A second target arrow appeared on my screen, pointing off to the right edge. That had to be the Mach 6 craft about to arrive too late to the party.
Tom didn’t say a word as he pitched our ship back towards the ground and accelerated hard.
Two shockwaves came from the ships on the left and right of the squadron. It was as if inside me a switch had been thrown and I was filled with a state of absolute calm. We’d thrown everything into this, but we’d lost and were about to die – and with that we’d probably sealed the fate of our world.
But Tom wasn’t giving up yet. Not by a long shot. He rolled us away in a fast corkscrew that made the view on my screen spin like a fairground ride gone mad.
The whole world seemed to shake as a huge bang came from our craft and it shook like a coin in a tumble dryer. The smell of electrical burning filled my nose as wisps of smoke slipped between the gaps in the floor. Gravity, no longer dampened, smashed me into the edge of my seat and my body screamed in agony from the violent impact.
‘We’re hit and we’re going down!’ Tom shouted as he fought the controls whilst the Astra shuddered and moaned, tumbling towards the ground end over end.
I breathed through my nose and what felt like several tons pressed directly into my sternum. There was no way we’d survive a second shot.
Our comm channel crackled into life. ‘You’ve got to eject now!’
That was Don’s voice!
‘Preparing to take those fucking bastards down!’ another man said over the channel.
‘Hold your fucking fire, Hell Demon!’ Don screamed.
Tom yanked at the handle in the floor next to him, but nothing happened. ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, the escape pod has been taken out too.’
Calm filled me as Tom released the joystick. The ship groaned around us, the dying cries of a hunter shot down. I closed my eyes, ready for the end.
And then the world stopped whirling.
‘How the hell did you do that?’ Don’s voice said over the radio.
I opened my eyes to see a now static view of the canyon and the three TR-3Bs hovering above us.
Somehow Tom had managed to get our drive back online. I turned to see him staring at his screens.
‘How did you do that?’
Tom shook his head. ‘That wasn’t me.’
The view on my gunner’s screen shimmered. For a moment I thought it was another glitch. But then a saucer-shaped craft rippled into view. ‘That will be thanks to Ruby distorting our gravitational field and extending it round your craft,’ Alice said over the comm channel. ‘It’s a tip we picked up from Lucy.’
I stared with utter disbelief at Ariel hovering before us on my screen, the most beautiful sight I’d ever seen in my life. I thumped the air and let out a whoop.
‘You’re pleased to see us then?’ Ruby’s voice asked.
‘That might be the understatement of the century,’ Tom replied.
A warbling alarm came from my weapon systems.
‘Like I said before, stand down, Hell Demon and Cat Fight,’ Don said over the comm link.
‘No can do, Archangel. We have our orders,’ a woman’s voice replied.
Two craft hurtled towards us in a swooping dive away from the central Astra now labelled as Archangel in my display, lining up to take the shot. Ariel might have come to save us, but she had no way of protecting either of us from that.
Despite the grief I felt that my friends were about to throw away their lives too, the stillness deepened inside me, growing into a lake of tranquillity in which I floated.
My mind snapped back as a clattering noise came from outside. It took a moment for me to realise that the sound wasn’t our craft being ripped apart, which was remaining rock steady within Ariel’s extended gravity field. It was coming over the comm link.
I focused back on my gunner’s screen to see a twin storm of tracer fire lancing out from two small domes on top of Ariel’s cockpit, straight into the two diving TR-3Bs. The projectiles tore through both ships, sparks erupting as they punched holes in the craft. Panels of metal exploded, billowing smoke as they were shredded away.
A large sphere shot out from the ship on the left – the pilot’s pod ejecting. But I saw no such thing from the one on the right, which slammed into the ground with an awful life-ending impact.
‘Surprise, surprise, you bastards,’ Ruby’s voice said over the comm link.
Don’s Astra tilted towards Ariel, bringing its rail gun to bear on the saucer-shaped ship.
I punched my comm button. ‘Don and Zack, for god’s sake, please stop this. There’s been enough blood shed already. The same goes for you, Ruby.’
‘Oh, I can take them in a straight fight,’ Ruby replied.
‘I’d like to see you try,’ Don said, his voice solid iron.
I cut in before Ruby could bait the flight crew more than she had already. ‘Don, I can only begin to imagine how angry you are, but you have to listen to me.’
‘And why should I? That craft has just butchered the rest of my wing! Who are you, anyway?’
‘I’m Lauren, the woman you saved by telling your commander I needed help.’
‘Oh Jesus. We wouldn’t be here now if I’d ignored you.’
‘But you didn’t and it was the right call, Don. I heard what you and Zack said about not agreeing with your orders to target the Tic Tacs. And you’re right about that too. Your superiors are the ones in the wrong here, not you. They’ve picked a fight with the wrong aliens, namely the Greys.’
Alice’s voice cut in over the open channel. ‘This is the captain of Ariel. You need to listen to Lauren extremely carefully. Everything she has just told you is the absolute truth. What your superiors should be worried about is an invasion force known as the Kimprak. They are currently on their way to destroy our world.’
‘The who?’
‘The Kimprak. They’re a mechanised species who’ll suck the life out of this planet unless we find a way to stop them,’ I said. ‘Alvarez and his kind are on the wrong side of history here. Please don’t make the same mistake that they have. Fight for our world and not against it. This is your chance to do that.’
Alice’s speech was certainly impassioned, but would Don and Zack see sense?
‘Even if I believed you, and though I might not have agreed with the actions of the rest of my flight wing just now, I’m afraid I still can’t let you go. I have to follow the chain of command.’
‘A good soldier sometimes needs to question orders and make decisions that take pure guts,’ Tom said in his fake southern accent.
There was a long pause as the radio link went quiet.
I could only begin to imagine the difficult conversation going on in the other ship. Don and Zack were good guys. They’d make the right call, I just knew it.
A sigh came over the comm link. ‘I’m sorry, really,’ Don said. ‘But we don’t have any choice in this.’
The TR-3B started to rotate its rail-gun port down towards us.
Before I could say anything, twin streams of cannon fire roared from Ariel.
‘No!’ I screamed.
But the rounds were already tearing into the open gun port of the triangular craft. Flames belched from it instantly as it was ripped wide open. Don’s reactions were lightning fast too, though, and his TR-3B rolled away.
I leant forward, staring at my gunner’s screen as Ruby
poured an unrelenting stream of deadly cannon fire into the other ship, walking it across the hull to slice it open. The line of bullet holes reached one of the glowing orange lift engines. With a bellow the engine blew into a fireball that briefly engulfed the ship. As it emerged again, their Astra tipped over to its side like a listing ship and slid towards the ground, trailing smoke and plasma.
I cupped my hands over my mouth. How had it come to this? Relief surged through me as a black sphere burst from the burning craft, hurtling away on small propellant rockets up into the sky. Seconds later the stricken TR-3B ploughed into the ground, throwing up a geyser of dirt.
I sagged back into my chair. They’d made it.
‘I really didn’t want to do have to do that,’ Ruby said over the open channel.
‘I know…’ I replied.
‘It shouldn’t have to be like this,’ Alice said. ‘We should be working together, not fighting each other like wild dogs. Once again, this is all on the Overseers.’
‘We can discuss the morals of this situation later, but we need to get out of here before another squadron turns up,’ Tom said. ‘I for one have had as much as I can deal with for one day.’
‘You and me both,’ I said.
‘Then we’ll give you a tow home,’ Alice said.
‘We’d certainly appreciate it,’ Tom replied, casting a forlorn look at his dead controls.
I kept my eyes on the parachutes of the capsule as they floated down towards the ground a few miles away from the burning wreckage of the downed TR-3B. Then the scene was suddenly blurring away into the distance as Alice took us home.
Adrenaline slowly ebbed from me, leaving an echo of it in my blood. I tipped my head back into my seat as numbness took over. Impossibly, we’d somehow survived.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Enveloped by Ariel’s gravity field, we raced back towards Eden in the stolen TR-3B. At Alice’s request we’d blanked our navigation screens so we wouldn’t know where we were headed. Alice had assured us there was no way the Overseers would be able to track us at long range. Thankfully, their newly developed sensor only seemed effective at very short distances.
The remaining hum of adrenaline in my bloodstream had finally started to subside. I still couldn’t believe we’d managed to survive our encounter with two squadrons of TR-3Bs. Alvarez would be spitting bullets when he heard what’d happened.
‘We have some time before we arrive back, so we should talk,’ Alice’s voice said over the comm link.
I’d been bracing myself for what I knew was coming. Alice clearly didn’t want to waste any time before laying into me. She probably had Niki preparing a nice tiny cell for me back in Eden. And I deserved all of it.
‘Absolutely,’ I replied, jumping in before Tom could. I was going to try to get answers first. I needed to know what had happened to Ruby. ‘Thank god you’re alive, Ruby, but how?’
‘It was a close-run thing, Lauren, with all those incoming fifty-cal rounds,’ she said. ‘If I were a cat, I’d probably have lost several of my nine lives, but somehow I managed to get back to our X101. Without those TR-3Bs there to pick me up I circled round in the X101 in the chaos and collected Jack and Mike just before a patrol of pursuing Humvees caught up with them. Although I had a hard time persuading Jack to leave you behind. He was absolutely frantic with worry.’
Relief surged through me to hear that Jack and Mike had made it out too. ‘Well, as far as I’m concerned you made the right call.’
‘Thanks, Lauren. I didn’t really have much choice…’ Her voice trailed away. ‘But I just wanted to say that it took real guts to do what you did. Not everyone would have stayed behind so that Mike and Jack could get away.’ There was a longer pause. ‘You’re all right, you know that, Lauren.’
There was no hint of sarcasm in Ruby’s voice. Jack had been right when he’d told me she’d come round when she saw me operate in the field. ‘You know what? You are too, Ruby.’
‘Hey, I’ll take that,’ she said.
‘Talking about people being worried, Tom, losing all contact with you put us all on edge,’ Alice said.
‘I’m very sorry about that, but needless to say it was a necessary move,’ Tom said. ‘After I managed to infiltrate Area 51, any attempt to make contact would have been extremely risky. I’m afraid things didn’t go quite according to plan when Lauren crashed the party.’
‘You were both in Area 51?’ Ruby said. ‘What the hell?’
‘It’s a long story,’ I replied.
‘Looking forward to hearing it all over a drink or three,’ Ruby said.
‘The important thing is that you’re both OK, but…’ Alice’s tone became tense.
Tom traded a frown with me. ‘Alice, is everything all right?’
‘No, no, it isn’t. I need to bring you both up to speed on some developments, specifically you, Lauren.’
My stomach did a slow flip. Ruby had mentioned Jack and Mike, but there was one key member of our team that hadn’t been brought up yet. One who I would have expected to lead the cavalry charge to rescue us.
‘Is it about Lucy?’ I said in a small voice.
‘I’m afraid it’s bad news, Lauren,’ Alice replied. ‘Those TR-3B pilots who chased her managed to get in a lucky shot. Lucy crash-landed in the Everglade swamps in Florida. Moments before she crashed, she managed to radio back to us at Eden to tell us what had happened and reversed the security protocols that she’d used to lock down Eden’s flight bay doors. Finally, in those last seconds before we lost contact with her, Lucy beamed us her coding back door of the military spy satellite network.’
A sudden chill rolled through my body. ‘And?’ I asked.
‘We were able to pinpoint the exact site where she went down after replaying the footage from a military satellite over the area. The one glimmer of good news is that, despite the Overseers sending in half their air force to recover her, Niki and a security team took out an Armadillo and managed to reach the crash site deep in the swamps first. They were able to recover her micro mind ship before the Overseers arrived.’
‘And the bad news is?’ Tom asked, casting me a frown.
‘There was significant damage to her crystal matrix and she’s completely shut down. Jodie’s only hope is that you can activate her self-repair function, Lauren, when you get back here.’
I swallowed, my throat suddenly tight. ‘But what if I can’t? What then?’
Tom turned towards me. ‘Don’t forget we have another part of her consciousness down in the hold. Maybe you could reboot her with that?’
I felt myself relax a fraction and nodded. ‘That might actually work.’
‘You mean your mission was a success, Tom?’ Alice asked.
‘It most certainly was. We have Lauren to thank for that,’ Tom replied. ‘I couldn’t see a way of sneaking the micro mind off that base until she turned up.’
I stared at him and then at the speaker. ‘I thought you said you didn’t know where Tom was, Alice?’
‘I’m afraid that was a deliberate subterfuge on both our parts,’ Alice admitted. ‘You see we picked up some intelligence that the Overseers had managed to recover a micro mind and had taken it back to Area 51.’
Tom nodded. ‘But we weren’t entirely confident in the reliability of the informant. So Alice and I decided that I should go on a lone-wolf infiltration mission. Obviously that’s not what you and the rest of the team were told.’
I already knew where this was heading. ‘It’s the same reason why none of us knows the exact location of Eden, isn’t it? So if we fell into enemy hands, we couldn’t compromise your mission?’
‘Exactly right,’ Tom replied. ‘And it was too good an opportunity to learn what the Overseers were up to at that facility. Not to mention the chance to gather intelligence about the top-secret projects going on down there, including their TR-3B development programme.’ He gestured at the cockpit around us. ‘Of course, even in my wildest dreams, I hadn’t thought we’d
end up stealing one of their ships, but this is one heck of a bonus.’
‘It most certainly is,’ Alice said. ‘Jodie won’t believe her eyes when she sees what you’re bringing back for her. Tom, is there any news about the Greys the Overseers have been keeping in Area 51?’
‘It’s as we feared,’ he replied. ‘They’ve been actively experimenting on them.’
‘More like torturing them,’ I said. ‘I saw them open up the skull of the Grey they recovered from the downed Tic Tac. Talking of that, it was the Grey that showed me you, Tom – in my mind as a telepathic image. Well, not you, exactly, but the disguised Commander Jenson version of you. I think he was trying to let me know that you were a friend.’
‘The Grey communicated with you?’ Tom asked, sitting up straighter.
‘Yes, Lucy mentioned that they use some sort of telepathic link. For some reason he chose me to link to – why, I’ve got no idea. But how did the Grey know you?’
‘Well, you’re not the only one it communicated with. I sneaked into the lab to see it. Like you it seemed to know I was a friend. And it showed me in my thoughts why there had been so much increased Tic Tac activity recently in our world – in the same way it obviously communicated with you.’
‘Guessing it’s nothing to do with an invasion?’ Ruby asked over the link.
‘Yes, quite the opposite, in fact. The Grey showed me an image of the Kimprak asteroid ship destroying populated planet after populated planet, and then Lucy’s combined micro mind ship – accompanied by the impression that she was a friend too.’
‘So they know about Lucy? That has to be significant,’ Alice said.
‘I agree. It suggests they must have had some prior contact with the Angelus. Anyway, the next thing the Grey showed me were their Tic Tac ships flying all over Earth. I somehow knew in that moment exactly why they were here.’
