by Joshua James
“Okay, everyone from Blue Squadron who’s got their headsets on. Ignore the politician and listen up. This is Blue One. We’re gonna be responsible for attacking the main Atlas. We’ve got four fighters loaded up with our new toys, those hell-gel missiles. Our intel suggested that they’ll be critical in neutralizing that beast of a starship,” Blue One said, not sounding like he put much stock in it. “It’s a big assignment. But if you listen up, follow orders, and do your job, we’ll all see this thing through. So I need everyone to close and pressurize, do your system checks, and sound off. In order. Let’s start with you, Blue Two.”
It was strange hearing someone’s voice through headphones on top of her ears instead of hearing the voice inside her head. Ada pressurized her cockpit and waited for what came next.
“Ada, Blue Seven,” Ben said. “Do you read me?”
“This is Blue Seven, I read you, Blue Two.”
“You good?”
“As good as I’ll ever be.”
Yellow lights atop the bunker spun as an alarm went off, signaling the opening of the big rollup doors. It looked like that was indeed going to be the way they launched. The first AIC fighter ships were rolled into place by a big pulley system in the hangar’s floor.
Ada’s leg shook as she turned on nav systems and her radar. Angry at herself for being so nervous, she grabbed her leg by the knee and tried to forcefully stop it. Already set to automatically take off in line with the others, her ship moved up a length on its own as the first fighter took off up through the launch door.
One by one, the fighters took off. Ada slowly crept closer to her turn, feeling her stomach jumping around.
“Once you get out there, stick close to me, Blue Seven.” Those were Ben’s last words before his ship fired up and out the launch door.
Finally, Ada’s ship rolled up to the launch door. The ground shifted and angled nearly straight upward, her ship suspended there by the attached pulley locks. The ramp shifted again and slammed hard into place, bouncing her around in the cockpit.
In front of her, Ada saw a rectangular view out to the world outside, set against the darkness of the tunnel leading up to it. She focused on breathing. Long deep breaths helped her slow her heart rate and clear her mind.
“Prepare for ignition.” The words appeared on the cockpit glass directly in front of Ada. It counted down from five.
Ada’s ship started to shake as the engines spun up. She wiped her sweaty hands on her flight suit pants. She was ready for this.
The ignition countdown reached zero.
When the engines fired, Ada was almost immediately pinned back in her seat as her fighter shot up through the launch exit. Before she knew it, the vessel emerged into the skies above Vassar-1.
She was instantly under fire.
The battle up above Vassar-1 was already well underway by the time Ada joined in. Just emerging from the bunker, her ship’s shields were tested by the cannons of a pair of the Shapeless fighters, forcing her to take it off autopilot.
Ada quickly grabbed the piloting stick and proceeded to try and tame the wild beast her fate was tied to. She did her best to ignore the bullets flying all around her and the ships that sped by and narrowly missed her. It helped to focus on her fighter’s built-in HUD.
Now that she was actually out in the thick of it, Ada’s nerves washed away. This was a brawl, and she was always up for a fight.
On the glass, the ship automatically separated friend from foe. Enemy ships were surrounded by red halos, friendlies by green. Ada focused on the nearest red halos, finding one that was nearby and heading away from her. She tried to chase it down and shoot it out of the sky, but she struggled for control. Controlling the vessel was even harder than she thought, and her initial predictions of where and how the onboard cannons would respond weren’t good. She felt like she had as a cadet, just getting familiar with her rifle. She and the ship weren’t seeing eye-to-eye just yet.
An AIC fighter zipped past right in front of her. Ada couldn’t see who it was, but whoever was in that cockpit had two Shapeless fighters on their tail. On instinct, she followed and tried to get the enemies off her ally.
“Is that Blue Seven back there?” Ada head Ben’s voice through her headset.
“Saving your ass? You bet it is.”
Despite her bravado, Ada was still firing gingerly. She only squeezed off a few rounds when she knew for sure that she wouldn’t hit Ben.
“Saving me? Far as I can tell, there are still two of those bastards on my tail.”
“Easily remedied,” she replied, before letting go with a longer burst. She still missed, but this time she forced the pair to shift positions, and for a moment one flashed across her firing scope.
She fired, and the ship didn’t so much explode with the impact as melt away where her super-heated slugs impacted it. But she stayed with it, and after a dozen rounds the fighter lost its aerodynamic characteristics and began falling back to the ground.
She banked hard and turned, looking for Ben to help get the second pursuer off his tail. But a red blinking light in her cockpit HUD told her she’d picked up a bogey of her own.
Shit.
She yanked hard left and right on her stick, but considering she was already struggling for control, she had to reduce power to keep from going into a flat spin. The bogey stuck with her like they were linked together by an invisible rope.
“Put on the auto-evade, Ada!” Ben yelled.
Ada stared down at the instruments. “Where the hell is the auto-evade?” She went over her reliable memory, but couldn’t pull up any information on any automatic evasion features.
“Under the…hold on,” Ben said.
Ada saw a thruster burn out of the corner of her eye, and what she assumed was Ben’s fighter pulled up sharply—so sharply, in fact, that he inverted for a moment. The bogey that was trying to stick with him chose to spin out of the maneuver and bail rather than leave himself vulnerable. Ben flew inverted for another second before swinging down behind Ada and the bogey on her tail.
He made that look too damn easy.
A couple of short bursts and he’d clipped her pursuer’s wing. Ada watched the fighter peel away, its wing crushed and useless, then go into a death spiral into the ground, its structure crumpling up like a balled-up piece of paper.
Ada waited to see an impact explosion on the ground below, but instead of a fireball crashing into the ground, the fighter broke up into a pair of very much intact Shapeless creatures before hitting the ground.
“So about that auto-evade!” Ada yelled. Her whole ship shook as her shields absorbed shot after shot from a second fighter that had slid up on her tail.
“Under the engine regulators. See it? It should be a yellow button!”
Ada scanned frantically. At last she found the yellow button. She reached down to press it just as her fighter took a major jolt. Flashing red exclamation points covered the cockpit HUD, as did a message: “Shields Depleted.” As if the bogey on her tail knew it, a pair of missiles released from its wings.
Everything else in the world around her, except her ship, went silent after Ada pressed the auto-evade button. The ship snapped into a barrel roll and banked hard. One missile sailed over the cockpit, so close she thought she could feel the heat from its thruster.
She wasn’t so lucky with the second missile. It tore into the very tip of her right wing and detonated. The wing shattered right back to the base of the fuselage; then, in the blink of an eye, it was ripped clean off.
Ada stared in shock as the universe began to spin lazily around and she was thrown forward against her restraints.
In this moment, at least, Ada’s memory didn’t fail her. With her arms flailing around the cockpit, fighting against the g-forces that were growing exponentially around her as the fighter spun faster and faster out of control, she could picture the ejection handle on the side of her seat. She grasped the seat and spider-crawled her hand down the edge and over, until
she found the handle and yanked it. A split second later, a pair of emergency thrusters roared under her seat, and the entire cockpit detached and blasted away from the crippled fighter. The g-forces instantly lessened as her seat lowered so that she was lying flat. The now pod-like cockpit flipped and began gliding toward the ground.
As the view out the cockpit window stabilized, she saw the rest of her damaged fighter careen into the ground, smashing through the roof of what looked like a downtown mall. She knew in that moment that the city below was most likely deserted, but she still winced at the thought of the destruction her fighter had wrought. But that same destruction was happening everywhere below her.
A second later, the whole cockpit filled up with oxygenated impact foam, obscuring her view of everything and anything.
Her cockpit glider smashed hard into the streets of Vassar-1 before coming to a stop next to a fire hydrant. Ada felt none of it, immersed as she was in the foam. A second later, sensors released the cockpit canopy, sending it off explosively. She sat up, shoving the foam away from her face as she did so. Her headset was broken into pieces on the floor of the cockpit. No calling for help from that.
Ada grabbed her pistol and jumped unsteadily to the ground. She could hear gunfire and explosions all around her. She needed to find shelter and a better weapon.
As she took off running, she knew she should be embarrassed about her short-lived career as a fighter pilot. But if she was honest, she was happy. Happy to be alive, sure, but also happy to have her feet back on the ground and a gun in her hand. In the end, she never should have been up there.
“I never thought I’d say this,” she murmured to herself as she ran, “but Ace was right. I should never have been in that fighter. This was pointless.”
Twenty-Three
“I got a bad feeling about this,” Ace said as he and Tomas headed up the ramp to the bunker entrance. Already he could hear the fighters roaring out of the hangar behind them.
“Isn’t that every day of the week for you?”
“This feels worse than usual.”
“You’re a self-fulfilling prophecy with that shit,” Tomas said.
Ace shrugged. “I never expected to live this long, so I can’t complain if I kick it now.”
Tomas opened up the door that led out to the base of the Senate Circle’s steps. “Shut up, Ace. No one’s dying here.”
“Oh, plenty of people are dying out here, Mr. Ruis,” a familiar voice said.
Ace jerked back, raising his rifle halfway to his shoulder before he placed the voice. “LeFay? Ada said you left to find your favorite fellow spook.”
LeFay was leaning up against the wall just outside the bunker entrance. She pointed up at the skies, where a truly epic battle raged. “See that? It’s just the beginning.”
“Funny. Those folks in there think it’s the end.”
“That is funny,” LeFay said. She threw down an empty smoke cartridge.
“So what about Clarissa?” Tomas asked.
“I figured Engano was gonna send somebody to make a run at Clarissa, so I waited to see who it was gonna be. Gotta say I’m surprised it’s you two.”
“It was Ben’s plan.”
LeFay smiled. “I’m sure he thinks it was. That’s how Engano likes to play it.”
“Well, don’t sound so disappointed to be stuck with us.” Tomas checked his weapon.
Ace did the same. Both he and Tomas had been fitted with incendiary rounds before they’d left. Not as deadly as that goop the fighters were trying to spray on the Atlas up there, but close enough.
“Just figured I’d get Ada or Ben,” LeFay said.
Ace pointed up at the sky. “Up in that mess.”
LeFay pushed herself up away from the wall. “Well, I guess you schmucks will do.”
Ace rolled his eyes. “Okay, LeFay. You know where we’re going?”
He followed after LeFay, who started to cross the Government District back towards the secret entrance from which they’d gained entry earlier that day.
“I do,” LeFay said. “Unlike the rest of you, I was ready for that alien-EMP wannabe. My systems were protected. So my systems are functional, which also means that I can keep tabs on the tracker that I embedded in Clarissa’s body. I thought at first they’d be smart enough to look for something, considering they found her in the operating room of my, you know, bio hacks business. But they aren’t that smart, it seems.”
“You embedded a tracker in her?” Tomas said, sounding stunned.
“Pretty standard bio hack,” LeFay said. “And not my first one without permission, although I did do this one damn fast.”
Tomas shook his head. “The ethics of that are…wow.”
“You can take back my merit badge later,” LeFay said. “You want to know where she is or not?”
Tomas nodded.
LeFay pointed straight up. “She’s right there.”
“Right where?” Ace asked.
“On the Atlas,” LeFay said. “Or whatever that thing is.”
Ace stopped walking. “You gotta be kidding.”
LeFay didn’t stop as she glanced over her shoulder. “Have I struck you as the kidding type so far, sweet cheeks?”
“How the shit are we supposed to save her from an alien dreadnought?” asked Ace.
“We’re going shopping,” answered LeFay.
LeFay peeked through a storefront across the street from the Copper Square Mall in downtown Vassar-1. She made sure to keep out of sight as all hell broke out above, and it looked like there were Shapeless patrolling the roads below.
“What do you see?” Tomas asked.
LeFay glanced back. He and Ace at least weren’t getting in her way so far, which she’d take, and she’d need them for this plan to work. As much as it pained her, she doubted she could pull it off by herself. That was the reason, after all, why she’d waited for them—at least for this part.
“There’s three of them between us and the mall’s entrance.” LeFay scanned the area with her artificial eyes. She changed the filter to look past the concrete and into the mall itself. “A lot more inside.”
“Why are we going to the mall again? Doesn’t seem like the best of times to go shopping.” Ace’s gaze darted back and forth. Twisted burning fireballs that had once been spaceships were falling from the sky all over the place.
“There’s an Aero-5 in there. It was supposed to be won in a raffle on Founders Day, but it doesn’t look like that’s gonna happen.” LeFay’s gaze dug deeper. She found what looked like a vehicle. Stats popped up next to it, confirming it was the Aero-5 she was after.
“An Aero-5? You kidding me?” Tomas, not a typically excitable person, sounded eager.
“I see we got a fan of speedy planet hoppers.” LeFay smiled as she marked every one of the Shapeless she saw in her own internal system’s HUD.
“Who the hell doesn’t like to go fast?” Tomas said excitedly.
“How’s about me?” Ace raised his hand. “This is stupid. We’re going to try to fight our way inside a mall to get a planet hopper?”
“Not just any planet hopper,” LeFay said. “The fastest one ever made, at least at that size. She’ll go from initial burn to docked on that ship up there in five seconds.”
“That’s not possible,” Ace said.
“That’s an exaggeration,” Tomas answered, “but not much. That thing is epic!”
“Throttle back there, Turbo,” LeFay said. “First things first. We gotta get there.”
“First things first,” Ace said. “Are you sure it’s actually flightworthy? Not just a prop? And that it’s fueled up?”
“I did some serious work for a couple of the guys on security here. Extra arms, custom weapons embeds in their skin, the works.”
“Extra arms?”
LeFay glanced over at Ace and enjoyed the look of horror that crossed his face. “You have no idea what I can do, pretty boy,” she said. “The point is, they kept it flight-ready because
the Aero execs would come by a couple of times each week with clients and want a show. It’s a cavern in there. The mall is practically a hangar, the space in the middle is so open. They pulled down all the trusses to clear space for this thing. Trust me. It’s the real thing.”
“So how do we get in there?” Ace asked.
“You got those incendiary rounds, don’t you? Looks like it’s time to use ‘em.” LeFay stepped out of the storefront, pistol with incendiary rounds in one hand, oversized grenade launcher in the other.
She just heard Tomas ask, “What the hell is it with this woman?” before he stepped out behind her. She knew that between him and Ace, they had a shotgun with incendiary rounds and a flamethrower, pieced together in the bunker.
LeFay didn’t bother looking up or behind her. She’d had heat sensors installed in her shoulders years ago to give her a pretty accurate three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of her surroundings. Few things sneaked up on her.
It didn’t take long before one of the Shapeless spotted her as she strolled out into the middle of the street.
“LeFay! Watch out!” Tomas knelt down on one knee, took aim, and fired at the Shapeless that approached her.
LeFay could see that the incendiary rounds were an improvement. It slowed the Shapeless and seemed to momentary blind it as its shape mutated wildly for a moment. But then it seemed to regain its senses and charged, limbs flailing, screeching so loudly that she could hear it above the sounds of war in the skies above them.
LeFay aimed her pistol at the charging creature. Her systems scanned it for a weak point. A throbbing red dot appeared right in the middle of it, so that was where she first shot her pistol three times: perfect aim in that exact spot. The heated rounds opened up a hole in which she placed her grenade round, blowing the Shapeless up.
“Whoa,” Tomas said. He was still on one knee on the edge of the street.
“How about you don’t just sit there?” LeFay said. She turned back around when she sensed something above. Her head spun around on a swivel. One of the Shapeless fighters was screaming down from the sky, straight at Tomas. “Move!” she shouted, pointing upward.
