by M. G. Herron
Elya tuned into the flight frequency. He was dropped into the middle of a conversation between Park and Osprey.
“Do you think they’ve engaged by now?” Park asked.
“Black Lightning and Viking squads went around the moon to flank them.”
A new voice crackled over the command channel. “Kryl drones positively identified. Permission to engage?”
“Granted,” Admiral Miyaru’s hard voice responded, flat and cold. It was one of the things Elya had always admired about the admiral. Every story he’d heard about her during the Kryl War spoke to her calm under pressure and her ability to think rationally in the heat of battle. However, the admiral was safe in the Paladin, not exposed in the cockpit of a Sabre. She had started as a pilot, but now it was up to people like them to put their necks on the line.
Elya wouldn’t have had it any other way. His unblinking eyes fixed on the little dots representing the offensive squadrons on his lidar. He readjusted his sweaty grip on the stick.
The speed of their orbital patrol increased as the pilots’ trigger fingers sought an outlet for their aggression. But they encountered no threats. They couldn’t even see the exchange since the moon blocked their view of the Kryl.
Elya’s wing had been involved, a couple years back, in putting down the Ezekiel rebellion. The class that Elya and Osprey belonged to had graduated after that incident, so at least half of the pilots he flew with now had never seen a Kryl drone except for those preserved in military labs and archival footage, himself included. If he didn’t get to see one today, who knew when he’d get the chance again?
“This is Viking squad. We have a man down.”
Elya’s whole body tensed. He gripped the stick with both hands. The action remained on the opposite side of the moon. He could sense its closeness.
“Black Lightning, engage.”
Elya referred to his tactical displays. Black Lightning had flown the opposite way around the moon, and now the Kryl force would be caught between the two squads.
“Stick to your flight pattern,” Osprey barked over their comms.
Elya lifted his eyes, saw that he had veered from his path. A gentle nudge put him back onto the line. Yorra, ahead of him, had also veered and quickly corrected.
“Back on track,” Yorra said in a shaky voice after she reoriented her fighter.
“Same here,” Elya said. He hoped the others didn’t hear his voice shaking.
Maybe Osprey had been right. Maybe he shouldn’t have been training so hard today. By this point, he was either ready or he wasn’t. There was nothing he could do to prepare further, no matter how much he wished it were otherwise.
He refocused, letting his eyes slide along the bulbous side of the nearest Mammoth’s silver hull, and the slight reflection that vanished when he tried to focus on it. Focusing on his surroundings kept his mind busy. He tried to ignore the panicked shouting now coming over the command comms from the battle.
The screams and curses coming from the two squads dried his mouth out and set his heart to racing. Adrenaline rushed through his veins. This was something no sim could train you for.
“Whoa! Did you see that?”
Elya’s attention snapped back to his comms. He thought that was the voice of the leader of Black Lightning. A raspy male voice came from Fleet Command.
“Black Lightning, report!”
Elya thought that was Colonel Volk, but he couldn’t be sure.
“We just lost a group of Kryl drones.”
“Do you have visual?”
“Negative, Colonel. A whole pack of ‘em just up and vanished.”
“Where the void did they go? I've never—”
“Whoa! Coming in hot.” The comm system crackled as some kind of electromagnetic interference disturbed the channel.
Colonel Volk’s voice came back a beat after the interference subsided. “—on course. Stick to the plan.”
“Loud and clear, sir. We see another pack up ahead.”
The interference returned a moment later. And then, as Elya came over the nose of a Mammoth and banked left to make another circuit, he came face-to-face with a Kryl drone. The shape of the teardrop ship had become so familiar in his training, yet he almost didn’t believe it was there in front of him. Like the others, this drone had an organic build to it, sleek metal panels fused together by seams of thick carapace, with tentacles trailing from its body. This one was freshly grown, without a scar on it, and seemed more aerodynamic and modern than the one from the sim database—slightly elongated, with more cutouts and curves than the older models stored in his sim. Looking down at his lidar readout, Elya saw that it wasn’t the only drone. His squad was suddenly surrounded by a dozen of them.
“Contact!” Elya cried out.
“Permission to engage? I’ve got eyes on two,” Osprey said. “Command?”
“Fire at will.”
Osprey opened up her blasters. A stream of bolts skipped off the carapace of the first drone and were absorbed harmlessly by the shield of the Mammoth Elya had been circling. It was good someone had the foresight to activate those shields; he certainly hadn’t expected that the drones would actually make it this far. He didn’t think anyone else on his squad had, either.
“How the devil did they get here so fast?” Park asked. “Weren’t they just on the other side of the moon?”
There was no time to think about it. Elya took aim at the same drone that Osprey had just shot at and fired in tight bursts. The drone banked and weaved. When the blasters overloaded its shields, they flickered and died, and the drone cracked in half the moment before a bright explosion as its engines burst. The light momentarily blinded him.
“Got one!” Elya and Osprey cried out at the same time.
“No way you're getting credit for that, Fancypants.”
“I took out the shields.”
“My shot destroyed it.”
“Would you two quit bickering?” Park said.
Yorra sucked air in through her teeth. “Torpedoes at three o’clock!”
Hedgebot’s excited green light, which had been pulsing constantly while he and Osprey engaged the Kryl drone, darkened to a burnt orange color. The bot squawked several electronic tones in a sequence and scurried around to his right.
Turning to look in the direction Hedgebot indicated, Elya spotted the torpedoes. The drone he and Osprey destroyed managed to drop three torpedoes before it was obliterated—typical bait and switch tactics from expendable, unmanned Kryl drones. Elya cursed as the torpedoes blasted straight for the underbelly of the nearest Mammoth.
Elya switched to projectiles. They were more effective against torpedoes, whose shields were designed to deflect blaster fire but were less effective than projectile rounds. Elya split the shell of the nearest torpedo and it exploded harmlessly a hundred klicks from the Mammoth.
“One down, two left,” Elya reported.
“I’m on it,” Osprey shouted.
“Right behind you, Raptor,” Park said.
“Fancypants, with me on the other one,” Yorra called out.
Their flight split as a pair of starfighters dove after each torpedo.
Gears was a good pilot, but her maneuvering wasn’t as tight as Osprey’s. Elya soon pulled ahead of her. He had the torpedo in his sights but it, too, had gained momentum and was now outspeeding him. The torpedo was a small, nimble missile with a powerful engine designed to outrun starfighters and cut through defense arrays. The only chance he had now was to intercept it before it could hit the Mammoth.
“Come on, come on!” Elya rocketed forward, opening his engines to maximum. The G-forces flattened his body into his seat. He sucked oxygen through his mask as his cheeks were pressed back and his head felt heavy like an oversized bowling ball. As he came within range to shoot it down, another Kryl drone came up from below the Mammoth and twisted into his path. Unlike the torpedo, the drone’s shields were designed to handle projectiles. His shots bounced harmlessly off the drone
.
Yorra swerved around the Kryl, but she had been too far back to catch up. And though she fired at the torpedo, her shots went wide. Elya saw, out of the corner of his eye, the little flashes where her bullets hit the shields of the Mammoth and plinked harmlessly off. The torpedo, however, was not nearly so ineffective. It impacted the shell of the transport vessel and ruptured the Mammoth’s underside. The machine’s capably equipped shields soon contained the atmospheric leak, but not before a store of water had evacuated the body of the ship, crystallized into ice, and sent a cloud of sharp crystals drifting into the path of Elya and his squadmates. He banked away to avoid sustaining damage to the Sabre.
Furious, Elya pulled his starfighter around and angled back to chase after the drone that had foiled his attempts to take the torpedo down.
Fortunately, Osprey and Park caught the other projectile, so the torpedo that hit the Mammoth on his watch was the only one to cause damage. The chatter that followed coming from Command and from the rest of the squad became too chaotic to follow, but he picked out the admiral’s voice.
“Protect the Mammoths!” she snapped.
The destroyer’s laser defense array took out a handful of drones before the pack moved out of range. Only three had survived the surprise attack.
Elya took stock of the distance and decided he could catch up to them. His eyes had followed the drone that had distracted him.
“Fancypants,” Osprey's voice snapped over the squad, cutting through the rest of the squabble and chatter. “Do not pursue. I repeat, do not pursue.”
“I can catch him.”
The Kryl drone looped around and began to make zigzags between the Mammoth longhaulers. The ships rose like canyon walls on either side of him as he pursued.
“By the Spirit of Old Earth,” Osprey growled. “You’re gonna get us in trouble, Nevers!”
“I’m not losing him,” Elya replied. Besides, he thought, isn’t this what I’ve been training for?
Elya hurtled after the Kryl, curving along the hull of a Mammoth at the edge of the cluster. Bursts of blaster fire alternating with the occasional missile kept the Kryl spinning and dodging, preventing it from getting a smooth heading on which to release another torpedo. Elya need not have worried, however, for after a dozen of these tight turns, looping over and under, it quickly became clear that the Kryl drone was merely playing with him. It didn’t seem intent on launching another torpedo attack at all.
“What’s your endgame?” Elya wondered aloud. Earth! The drone was quick. Park and Yorra took out the other two remaining drones, leaving only the one Elya was after. Debris from the shattered craft caused both Elya and the drone he was chasing to spin and dodge to avoid taking damage. And though this time Elya gained on the lone drone, he got the sense that the ship seemed to be enjoying the chase as much as he was.
It flew better than any of the other drones had…
Osprey had ceased barking at him. She drifted off his left wing.
“You’re gonna be in deep for this, Fancypants. You should have stayed with the rest of the squad.”
“I’m not letting him get away,” Elya insisted. But he heard the undertone of her criticism. You're not being a team player, she seemed to be saying. Your actions are selfish. And even if you do catch this drone, the rest of the squad will resent the way you flew. But it was too late now. A tenacious stubbornness wouldn’t let Elya give up the chase.
“It’s two-on-one. We’ve got it outnumbered.”
Presently, the drone veered away from the Mammoth fleet and accelerated toward Robichar. Seeing his opportunity, Elya opened his thrusters to full burn. Osprey tailed him, the two of them flying neck and neck like they had back at the academy. The next few minutes passed in tense silence. When they were a hundred klicks out from the fleet, the Kryl drone flipped around and shot backward at them without losing its momentum. It was even able to maneuver in reverse to avoid their shots when they returned fire, dipping and dodging. Impressive. That was the kind of flying Elya got criticized for. Osprey would have called it pretty but ineffective flying.
Kryl didn’t think like people. They were controlled by a remote Overmind that gave them abilities that human pilots could never hope to match. It was one of the reasons starfighters weren’t piloted remotely; starfighters needed every edge they could get.
Elya stayed close, keeping up the steady stream of attack and refusing to back down. Hedgebot scurried back and forth along the window over his head, keeping him on track with the Kryl’s erratic flight pattern. At some point, the starfighter’s internal AI determined that the G-forces were too much for Elya’s body to handle on its own, and a pinch at the back of his neck, followed by a relaxing of his muscles, told him he’d been injected with the dose of targeted chemicals that would sharpen his senses and make the G-forces easier to handle.
Hopped up on the cocktail of stimulants and stabilizers, Elya managed to close the distance between himself and the drone to within half a kilometer. At this point, the Kryl drone flipped back around and arced up overhead in a loop—the same maneuver that Osprey had cautioned him against earlier that day.
As it came around, Elya cut his thrust, repositioning himself and waiting for his weapons system to lock onto the drone. As he expected, the craft came down in front of him, and when it did he mashed on his trigger, only to watch his blaster bolts soar right through the craft.
“Impossible,” Elya whispered.
“Nevers, pull up! Pull up!”
The drone braked and though Hedgebot flashed a bright red warning, Elya was too slow and too close to do anything except brace himself. To his complete and utter astonishment, the Kryl drone phased through his ship. His starfighter should have cut that drone in half, killing them both; instead, it passed through him, unharmed.
For a frozen moment, Elya’s Sabre occupied the same physical space as the Kryl drone. The craft was twice as large as his Sabre… and though he had expected it to be unmanned, it wasn’t. A vicious and deformed-looking Kryl with a midnight-black carapace and six arms terminating in skeletal claws, veered past him clacking its mandibles.
Above the mandibles, Elya met a pair of eyes set deep into a face that seemed far too human. He blinked and it was gone, the pilot once again hidden behind the hull of the Kryl drone.
“Nevers!” Osprey shouted, forgetting to use his call sign in her concern for him. “Nevers, are you okay?”
His starfighter beeped a warning as the drone’s weapons system locked onto him from behind.
“Oh no.” A cold spark of fear shivered through him, and his skin burst out in tingling gooseflesh. Elya’s body rocked violently as the drone’s weapons landed a direct hit on the rear left wing of his Sabre, taking out one of his two main engines. Warning systems blared, his control panel lit up, the filaments along Hedgebot’s back flashed red. Another targeted salvo from the Kryl took out two of his maneuvering thrusters. Elya’s Sabre went into an uncontrollable tailspin, pulled in by the gravity of the moon.
The blinking white of an explosion behind him told him that Osprey had landed a hit on the drone and damaged it. Elya didn’t think it had been taken out of commission completely, though, as it veered away from them.
Captain Osprey wavered between pursuing the damaged drone and sticking with him, but eventually she stuck with him.
“Nevers!” Osprey called. “Hang on! I’m coming after you.”
Elya did his best. He fought to regain control of the starfighter, but it had been lost to him. Caught in the gravitational pull of Robichar, Elya spiraled down toward the colony moon. As his starfighter spun, the movement overwhelmed even the cocktail of stimulants in his system, and he lost consciousness.
Five
When the Kryl drone disappeared from the lidar and then reappeared a moment later, Admiral Kira Miyaru sat bolt upright.
Did that Kryl drone just drop off the scanners? Drones shouldn’t be able to do that. No spacecraft should.
Her fingernails
dug into the underside of the command couch’s padded arms. Every officer on the bridge inhaled and tensed with her. She’d let Colonel Volk give most of the orders during the engagement—she preferred to remain silent as much as possible, projecting an air of calm and letting her officers focus on their work. They knew their jobs and didn’t need their commander barking at them; that was Colonel Volk’s job.
“Starfighter down!” Colonel Volk turned and raised a salt-and-pepper eyebrow in her direction. “He’s gonna have a rough landing on Robichar.”
Kira drew a deep, measured breath. Several officers pulled their caps off their heads in a sign of respect.
“He’s not dead yet,” Kira snarled, a gust of emotion momentarily lifting the lid she’d been keeping on top of her fury. She released the chair’s arms and the foam expanded, filling the crescent-shaped indents her nails had left behind. “Dispatch a Search and Rescue team.”
“Aye, sir.”
She wouldn’t even think of leaving a starfighter pilot on an abandoned moon to fend for himself during a Kryl invasion, and she wanted everyone to know it.
But there was something else, too—whatever trick that Kryl drone had pulled was pregnant with potential strategic significance. The brief disappearance of a Kryl drone from a lidar monitor could be explained away as a glitch in the tech; Earth knew none of their equipment worked perfectly, and it was a running joke that every destroyer spent twice as much time under repair as other ships in the fleet. Video footage from the cockpit of Captain Nevers’ Sabre was another story. That footage could be the evidence she needed to finally convince the Colonization Board—even the Emperor, if he ever came out of his endless orgy—to finally listen to her. This was evidence that the Kryl were not merely keeping to their volume of space out of fear of the Empire. The twelve-year peace the galaxy had enjoyed had been a temporary reprieve. Instead of minding their own business, the Kryl had been biding their time, gathering their strength. They were on the move again and apparently they had come back armed with new tricks.
