by Nick Cook
I caught the look that she and the others gave me.
But then Jack nodded. ‘Right call, Lauren.’
‘It is, but I’m not sure how long we can survive this either.’
‘So let’s improve things in our favour and use the Overseers’ weapons against them,’ Ruby said.
‘How can we do that exactly?’ I asked.
‘Like this.’ Ruby pressed an icon on her screen and suddenly, around the edges of what had been the square of the underwater structure, dozens of torpedoes burst from the Overseer launchers stationed there. The missiles sped past us towards the surface.
‘Oh you absolute beauty, Ruby,’ Mike said as we watched torpedoes converge on the destroyer.
‘Why thank you, kind sir,’ she said, grinning.
The detonations lit up the surface of the ocean like the Fourth of July and New Year’s Day fireworks all rolled into one. But as the explosions faded, I wasn’t surprised to see the destroyer still sitting there. However, there was one key difference now, the destroyer was no longer invisible and its black angled sides were now clear for anyone to see.
‘Okay, not a kill shot but it shows that damned thing is actually vulnerable,’ Ruby said. ‘Are you seeing this too, Niki?’
‘Roger that. It suggests that if you hit that ship’s shield hard enough, we can get through it. But it will have to be one hell of a missile to pull that off.’
An idea immediately burst into my mind and I sat up straighter. ‘What about the X103 that you have slaved to you, Niki? There’s no one on it; could it be large enough to break through their shield?’
There was a momentary pause and then a laugh. ‘I like your thinking, Lauren. Let’s give it a go and see what happens.’
‘Just to make sure we have maximum impact, we’re going to fire all our Spearfish missiles at the same time in a coordinated attack,’ I said.
Ruby grinned at me. ‘Twisted thinking! I like it, Commander.’
‘Okay, we’ve just ordered Delphi onboard that X103 to begin a one-way attack run,’ Niki said. ‘Sending you the live feed that we are receiving from her so you can coordinate your own attack.’
Another video popped up on our virtual cockpit. In the far distance the angular shape of the Zumwalt destroyer was clearly visible and growing larger fast. An intense beam of green light burst from it and the X103 just had time to jink sideways out of its path as the light beam sped past.
My guts rose to my chest as the X103 sped straight towards it.
’All Spearfish torpedoes are away!’ Ruby shouted.
Ariel shuddered as our cockpit display showed five cylindrical shapes bursting from us, heading straight towards the destroyer.
The prow of the Zumwalt filled the video feed as the automated anti-aircraft systems desperately fired tracing rounds towards the X103. But the AI piloting the ship was faultless in its execution of the kamikaze manoeuvre and Troy, Eden’s most skilled pilot, would have been proud. Delphi spun the craft in every direction in its last seconds. The video showed the Zumwalt’s rear deck growing larger fast. In the last few frames it was close enough to see the individual rivets in the superstructure. Then static filled the window.
A series of massive explosions rocked the craft in a shocking display of raw power, ripping through the stern as the X103 scythed straight through it. That was followed by secondary explosions as our Spearfish torpedoes reached the Zumwalt’s hull, detonating along its length as the gravity shield failed. As waves erupted around the destroyer, it started to list heavily to one side, fires sweeping along its upper decks.
Ruby whooped and fist-thumped the air. ‘One serious take down – take that, bitches!’
But despite our victory part of me found it hard to share her joy. How many people had we just killed up there?
Suddenly a blinding light burst from below us and for an awful moment I thought the Overseers had left us a present in the form of a tactical nuke set to detonate if they lost control of the site. But when that wasn’t followed by a massive explosion that ripped Ariel apart, I looked down to see that beams of light were now shooting out of the chamber to converge on Eranos. And that wasn’t all. A large, spinning column of water had begun to rise up towards her just as she’d told me. The Resonancy Chamber was getting to ready to transmit the critical broadcast.
‘Quick, back us up to safe distance, Erin,’ I said.
‘Affirmative, Commander.’ She pulled the joystick and we shot backwards. About two klicks out she brought us to a stop as the column of water enveloped Eranos, who was starting to shine like a tiny star.
‘What the hell is going on? It looks like that Angelus megastructure is trying to destroy that micro mind?’ Jack said.
I shook my head. ‘No, Eranos told me that she needed to act as a transmitter for the megastructure when it sends out a high power broadcast. This has to be part of that process.’
‘To do what exactly?’ Mike asked.
Of course, I still hadn’t had time to tell them what this was all about.
I beamed at the team. ‘To wake every micro mind on the planet, that’s bloody what.’
They all stared back at me, gobsmacked.
‘You’re shitting me,’ Ruby finally said.
‘I promise you that I’m not; I’ll tell you everything in that debriefing later.’
‘I’m increasingly looking forward to it,’ Jack said, raising his eyebrows.
’Damn it, we’ve got company,’ Niki said. ‘Those reinforcement TR-3Bs are here and have already locked weapons onto us. Our shields are glowing right across the thermal spectrum thanks to all the punishment Thor’s been getting. Not sure we can survive much more until our own reinforcements get here. Shielding is down to twelve percent.’
‘Just hang in there, we’re on our way,’ I said. I glanced at Erin. ‘Time to get up there and get into that fight.’
‘With pleasure. It’ll be good to see the sky again,’ she replied with a wide smile.
She pushed the throttle forward and with a surge of bubbles in our wake, we began to rise rapidly towards the surface.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Within seconds Ariel had reached the surface and burst through it like the flying sub from the old sci-fi series 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. To our port side the Zumwalt destroyer was well and truly alight. Fires were everywhere over its superstructure and clouds of black smoke billowed from the ship as it listed heavily over at a forty-five degree angle.
Much to my relief I caught a brief glimpse of lifeboats speeding away. Then they and even the sinking destroyer became dwindling specks as we shot up towards the aerial battle, where laser shots and railgun rounds were carving up the sky with light and vapour trails.
‘Ruby, give them hell,’ I said.
‘Oh I intend to. Switching our miniguns over to armour-piercing rounds.’
Darting black enemy TR-3Bs seemed to be everywhere, swarming Niki’s single disc ship Thor that had been made visible with our virtual cockpit display. I took in the considerable scarring in its ablative armoured hull, some parts of which were literally glowing red hot from the incoming laser rounds that its gravity shielding had no effect in stopping, unlike a projectile.
Erin slammed the joystick sideways as a welcome to the fight railgun round came barrelling out of the sky straight towards us. It hurtled past Ariel with a sonic boom that rattled the ship.
‘Time to return the compliment,’ Ruby said.
A lock box appeared on the cockpit around the triangular-shaped TR-3B and Ruby opened fire as Erin raced us straight towards it.
Impacts exploded all over the other craft’s hull and then detonations began to ripple beneath its plating, buckling in several places. As the TR-3B began corkscrewing down towards the ocean, its crew compartment ejected along with its reactor in separate pods. Parachutes burst from both a moment later.
We sped through the stricken craft’s trail of smoke as Erin spun our cockpit three-sixty to engage the next ta
rget. Then warning alarms were shrieking at us all at once.
‘We have multiple locks on us,’ Ruby said, her forehead furrowing as she stared at her screens.
Three railgun rounds came tearing towards us. Erin dodged two, but the third was too close to avoid. The deadly projectile sped straight towards us but suddenly veered off as it hit a Pangolin that had put itself in the way, its gravity shielding throwing it off. For a moment I thought it was Thor, but then five other Pangolins blinked into existence around us.
‘Did someone just order the cavalry?’ Alice’s voice said over the comm.
‘God damn it woman, talk about great timing!’ Niki replied.
Immediately the fresh ships started to engage the TR-3B craft.
‘Not that we aren’t grateful, Alice, but I thought you promised that you wouldn’t be involved in combat missions again,’ Jack said as Erin spun us away into a fresh dogfight.
‘I think to maybe paraphrase what my six-year-old self might say to you right now, no one’s the boss of me.’
Jack chuckled. ‘Fair enough.’
The shift in the battle with the extra craft was instantaneous, even despite the fact that our fleet was still heavily outnumbered by three to one.
Already the TR-3Bs were reacting to the new threats, firing lasers and railgun rounds at the new arrivals. But the skill of our pilots in this battle was breathtaking, especially Alice, who’d lost none of her stunt pilot’s edge. Rendered in its full glory on our virtual cockpit, I watched her Pangolin spin and dive, avoiding every attempt to hit her craft.
Erin was also proving more than able in combat. Our X103 might have been smaller than the Pangolins, but Ariel was faster and certainly more manoeuvrable as skilfully demonstrated by our new pilot. She weaved the craft through a squadron of TR-3Bs like a whirling dervish.
And Ruby was every bit a perfect match for our pilot with her weapon skills. Our miniguns continuously clattered away as she locked onto target after target. A TR-3B made the mistake of lingering a moment too long as it poured laser fire into Niki’s craft and was duly given some instant karma.
With an extraordinary corkscrew role, Erin threw off a TR-3B that had been chasing us. Then our hulls practically kissed the cockpit of the craft attacking Thor as we sped over it. Our missile lock indicator immediately flashed up and Ruby’s gunslinger instincts had already responded.
‘ASSAM missile away,’ she said with icy calmness despite the beads of sweat that had broken out all over her forehead.
Before the enemy craft had a chance to manoeuvre away, Niki’s Pangolin cut off its escape route with an intense four-way stream of minigun fire.
As our ASSAM raced towards the hemmed-in enemy ship, puffs of silver chaff exploded around it as it tried desperately to jink around the sky, trying to evade our incoming missile. But Ruby kept the laser locked on to the enemy craft.
The missile flew straight through the clouds of foil, curving up into the triangular craft’s belly. With a loud whump it exploded, hull cracking open, then suddenly it was plummeting towards the ocean as its anti-grav drive died.
It was as I tracked its death spiral that I saw what was happening on the ocean surface.
A huge whirlpool at least a kilometre wide had opened up in the ocean, the surface churning around it with white water waves, the funnel extending all the way down to the Resonancy Chamber that was blazing burning white light. The crystal trees were crackling with energy discharges that lanced down and struck the parabolic dish of the curved glass floor. And just as Lovell did with radio waves back at Jodrell Bank, the dish focused that capture energy straight back upwards towards a focal point – Eranos’s micro mind. She hung like some sort of luminous spider at the epicentre of this maelstrom of energy as the whirlpool swirled around her.
’Goodness, will you look at all the fun that you’ve had without me,’ Lucy said, popping up in a video window. At the same moment her merged micro mind craft blurred to a stop in the sky, high over the battle.
‘You know us, it’s just one big party when we’re out on a mission,’ I said as Erin exercised a high-speed manoeuvre to avoid two incoming railgun rounds.
Lucy laughed and then her face grew more serious. ‘Okay, Eranos isn’t responding to my messages, but that’s hardly surprising as it looks like she has her hands full. But I’m reading a rapid increase in the power output that—’
She didn’t get a chance to finish her sentence because several huge beams of light suddenly burst from the underwater chamber, converging on Eranos. The micro mind blazed with brilliance and then with a blinding flash at least fifty light beams burst out from her, speeding away beneath the ocean towards the horizon. A number of them shot past us up into the sky.
‘Everyone avoid those energy beams whatever you do!’ Lucy shouted over our fleet’s comm channel.
At once Erin spun us away, along with our other battling pilots, from the beams blazing past. But one TR-3B, while being harried by Alice’s Pangolin, was struck directly by one of the white lances of energy and it passed straight through the ship. Rather than being instantly ripped apart as I thought it would, the ship stopped dead in the air, trapped like it was in some sort of tractor beam. Then the craft began to vibrate faster and faster until it seemed to expand, plates buckling, before blowing apart in a fireball of shrapnel.
‘Is that micro mind firing off some sort of energy weapon?’ Jack asked, staring at the light lines beaming straight into not just the sky but by the look of it, straight into space.
‘No, they’re intensely high-powered communication bursts across every available frequency,’ Lucy said.
Before I could ask where the beams might be aimed at, our cockpit was flooded with the sound of intense, whale-like song that echoed around the ship so loudly that we had to cover our ears. Then suddenly the sound stopped dead, leaving my ears ringing.
Now visible through the shaft of the whirlpool, the light in the chamber had died to nothing. Then the Resonancy Chamber began to shake, the crystal columns of the tree structures splintering apart and beginning to topple onto the glass bowl collector and crashing through it. Eranos, far above the destruction, was beginning to rise away from where she’d been hovering.
The Zumwalt destroyer wasn’t so lucky. The currents of the whirlpool had dragged it towards the edge and the ship had begun to tip over it. As it did so a series of explosions detonated across its hull as its back was broken. Then it tipped into the funnel, kicking up spray as it crashed towards the chamber. The whirlpool began to close up on it like a giant throat swallowing a piece of food whole. I caught a last glimpse of the Zumwalt being torn into fragments as it crashed straight into the Resonancy Chamber. Then the ocean rushed back in to claim the site and the destroyer for its own, leaving nothing but a cauldron of white water boiling on the surface.
‘Incoming railgun round!’ Ruby shouted.
Erin just had time to shift us sideways to avoid it.
I gazed out at the six remaining TR-3Bs coming back in for an attack run.
’Okay, time to wrap this up,’ I said.
Lucy nodded from the video window. ‘You’ll need to cover both Eranos and me because our gravity shields will be down during the merging process, which by the way has just kicked in so we can’t stop it now.’
‘You’ve got it,’ I said. I pressed the comms button. ‘All ships, protect the merging micro minds at all costs.’
Lots of affirmatives came back over the channel.
Erin was already on the case, tucking us in tightly behind Eranos as she rose past.
Niki and Alice’s ship had done a similar manoeuvre around Lucy, forming up around her to shield her from the TR-3Bs, which unfortunately included two laser-turreted variants, currently being engaged by the rest of our fleet.
I spotted one of the TR-3Bs dive towards the rising micro mind, lining up for a railgun shot.
‘Ruby!’ I shouted, gesturing to the threat.
She shook her head. ’I’
m out of ASSAMs and its too far away to hit with our miniguns.’
‘Then allow me,’ Erin said.
With a rotation of the joystick she manoeuvred us straight into a position between the TR-3B and the micro mind.
A shape blurred towards us from the enemy ship and slammed into our gravity shield, deflecting it but making the whole craft rattle. But the job was done because the railgun projectile arced harmlessly towards the ocean.
Things didn’t go so well for the TR-3B that had taken the shot, as it had left itself as something of a sitting duck. A Pangolin was already speeding towards it, miniguns blazing and slicing through the crew compartment. The enemy ship exploded into a cloud of shrapnel.
‘Oh crap, I have more incoming radar signatures – at least thirty more craft travelling in at hypersonic speeds,’ Ruby said.
‘Jesus, that’s going to be more than enough to overwhelm us,’ Jack said.
‘Don’t be so sure,’ Lucy replied.
Then all around the aerial battle were white pill-shaped craft coming to a dead-stop. I recognised them instantly. These weren’t Overseer reinforcements but craft I hadn’t seen since a mission that had ended up taking me to Area 51 in pursuit of one of these craft’s pilots, namely an alien Grey.
‘Well paint me surprised, those are Tic Tac craft,’ Ruby said, swinging her targeting reticule away. But her hand twitched the sight back towards them as blue energy beams lanced out from each and every one of the alien ships.
However, rather than our craft being the target, they struck the remaining TR-3Bs. Each one dropped out of the sky like a stone, tumbling end over end until they hit the ocean far below, sending up great plumes of water.
The others in the cockpit stared at me.
‘Was this all part of the plan too?’ Jack asked.
‘Not as far as I know,’ I replied.
Lucy’s voice cut in. ‘The Greys piloting those ships picked up Eranos’s radio broadcast. It seems they decided to turn up on their own volition to help out, not that we necessarily needed any by that point. Anyway, I’ll talk to you on the other side of the merger. My systems will be offline during the procedure.’
