We were the last flight to deploy over Chorkal. Command was out of options, the Zephyr regiment had burned up, and the big Claseus carriers were hemorrhaging drones against the Altoi. Nothing was going according to plan.
“Four mikes to thermal bleed. Standby for heat seals.” Chip was in the back seat, running through the atmospheric entry checklists. I could hear the nerve buzz in his voice. “Weapon ports locked. Main engines locked. Main thrusters on fifty. Cockpit lock standing by.”
“Give us another minute or two. I want to see the burn-up start first.” The nose of the Kagi was splayed out in front of my cockpit, broad and orange with the old campaign paint from Ryker’s World. Chorkal was a green-blue ball in front of us, crowned with the flaming wrecks of the Zephyr cruisers. It would be raining radioactive shit down there for weeks, at this rate.
Not that the Altoi seemed to care.
More fighters floated around us, orange and silent in the void. Osa and Misaki were on our left wing, with Nariko and Raiden on the right, along with the rest of Bravo flight. We were fat and slow with the extra payloads, and the Kagi handled like a lazy orbital tug. Once we were through the plasma layer, we would have to dance - and I had no illusions left about what our chances were going to be at that point.
“This is Raiden - we are experiencing engine troubles. Dropping back at this time.” Hank’s voice was cool over the comms net. “We’re going to try a restart and then follow on your tails.”
A troubled bird, already?
“Copy that. Godspeed, Raiden.” I watched them fall behind the formation, angling upwards. The debris fields ahead of us were still thin enough to allow it - beyond the terminus line, it would be a different story.
“One mike to thermal bleed.” Chip’s voice again. Plasma was starting lick along the Kagi’s nose, bright ribbons spiralling back at my cockpit. It always reminded me of bubbles in water, and the summers I used to spend on Gavinson on my first assignment after the Academy. Lisa with the long hair, the beach days at Lake Okobasa, the evenings watching the ring belts spinning blue and grey above us.
Gavinson was gone now.
The plasma was licking at the cockpit frame when I finally reached out and punched the shutter release. Segments deployed from the fuselage, slithering upwards, until we were in the dark. Chorkal was unseen ahead of us now, a cliff wall that we were barreling towards.
“Switching to inertial guidance. Holographics coming online… now.” Infographics from the cockpit painted over the inside of the shutter segments, sketching out wireframe shapes, info boxes, the blobs of the rest of Alpha flight around us. It gave us an approximation of an idea of what was happening outside, even as the plasma layer around Chorkal swallowed us and coated the strike craft in blistering heat and electro-magnetic static.
Dead men, running blind into a storm.
The Kagi bucked and twisted around us, and I fought the control columns for a while. We were free-falling in, engines shuttered against the boiling heat outside, and only the armoured thruster ports were left. We had no power to kick, no legs to dance. We had to fall, soft and gentle like a leaf, around the chaos that the upper atmosphere was throwing at us.
My mind drifted.
I liked dancing.
Lisa had liked it too. We had spent most of our nights like that, under the stars, laughing and dancing until we collapsed next to the beach, too tired to walk or even stand. The nua-forests whispering around us as we shed other inhibitions in the dark, the crash of the waves as we finally drifted off to sleep.
“Plasma layer is thinning, we should have video feed available in thirty stan.” Chip was adjusting the radar screens, pulling up something on the side of the display. I kept my focus on the control columns, feeling the currents pushing against us as Chorkal tried in vain to throw us back into the void. We were too heavy, though, and too fast. We were burrowing in with a mission, and a little bit of atmosphere was not going to stop us for long.
“Video feed coming online. Delta channel. Holy shit…” Chip’s voice trailed off, and when I glanced at the delta monitor, I could see why.
The Altoi lands were below us, becoming visible through the scattered cloud cover and the streaks of burning Zephyr remnants that were cascading down. Vast cyst-cities covered the valleys below, visible even from our extreme altitude as bulging red and orange masses. Spires of gleaming flesh reached into the skies, naked electricity crackling and sparking along their crowns and the distended organs that bulged from their sides. Flights of harpies swarmed in black clouds below us, converging on the larger Zephyr wreckage and pushing the falling fragments off-course even as their own bodies caught fire and went up in smoke.
Something kidney-shaped pulsed in a distant valley, squirming and contorting itself as smaller Zephyr fragments dropped down upon it and into the lake of green fluids that surrounded it. Next to it, a vast pit of many kilometres across sunk into the earth, leaking steam the colour of old blood. Lightning flickered in the steam, and every few seconds something shot upwards through the drifting banks, heading for orbit.
“Where’s the Misaki?” I counted the craft around us, hoping that the camera angles were just missing something, but also knowing the truth in my heart even as the screens cycled.
“No visual on the Misaki, and no ident either. She’s gone.” Chip’s voice was subdued. “Standby for rollbacks in twenty stans.”
The jostling and bumping from the entry was fading, thin air starting to bite over control surfaces where plasma had burned moments before, and I waited for the countdown to hit zero. My left hand wanted to cramp up, suddenly stiff after the struggle through the atmosphere.
“We’re clear. Cockpit shutters up. Main engines open, main thrusters back to one hundred.” Chip rattled off checklists as the Kagi woke up again around us. “Weapon ports unlocking. We are go-go for atmospheric operations.”
With the cockpit shutters up again, I could count the rest of the flight myself again. Screw the cameras. The Misaki was gone though, regardless of what looked for her.
“Alpha flight, does anyone have an eyeball on the Misaki?” I pinged the rest of Alpha flight, and got negatives back across the board. No-one had seen or heard anything. I checked our rear cameras, saw the boiling atmosphere behind us. Something was burning up in the distance, but whether it was Zephyr debris or something else was impossible to tell.
Two down, three to go.
Bravo flight had peeled off, heading for a different target, and were gone in the ochre clouds that curdled around us. I checked our own coordinates against our target, and adjusted the nose of the Kagi a bit to the east - or at least what the remaining satellites were telling us was east.
“Alpha flight, keep your eyes peeled for any interceptors. We are twenty mikes to the target. Start your arming cycles when you are ready.”
“Copy that. Osa is arming now.”
“Copy that, Nariko also arming now.”
Kilometres below us, some of the harpy flights were starting to spiral upwards, clawing for altitude.
Lisa had worked in a radiology lab. A field of science hundreds of years old, and they were still finding new uses for it every year. I had barely understood half of what she had talked about, but her excitement was always infectious. Gavinson had been one of the first places where they had deciphered the Altoi communication techniques, and learnt to monitor it.
It was also where we figured out that the Altoi could hear our own radio transmissions, and follow it.
“Chip, get our own arming cycle going as well. I want to drop that payload the moment we have a firing solution.” My fingers were fast over the keypads now, trimming the Kagi into shape for the fight that was coming. We were faster than the harpies - but there were more of them, always more. Black clouds swarmed below us, contorting through the orbital debris and reaching for our shapes above them.
Our target was something that Command called the Neuron Cluster. Big blob of what looked like brain tissue, something like three kilometres across. We had orbital images of it, and the impact scars from the failed Icarus strikes around it, but that was it. Nothing could get close enough to hit it from orbit, the bile towers and the static spheres were too dense. The Zephyrs burning up above us were testament to that.
So the plan was to send in smaller craft, approach from different angles, and hit it with stand-off neuro-bombs that were too small to trigger the static spheres that surrounded it. Their discharges would arc up and touch anything metallic that approached from the air, and nothing - nothing - survived that touch. The neuro-bombs were a gamble. Only once they were in the air, would we know if they were going to work.
The Altoi seemed to have it figured out though. The harpy clouds behind us were darkening, rising higher and higher to reach us - and ahead of us, more clouds were boiling upwards too, creating a wall of darkness reaching for the fire raining down from above.
They had hit Gavinson with a plague carrier of some kind, when they first entered the system. Something that fell from orbit, hit the jetstreams, and circled the planet before we even knew about it. People died - first slowly, then quickly. I got a last message from Lisa, and then she was gone. Nothing more from Gavinson, and a week later the Hyperion Armada moved in and began to sterilize the planet from orbit. There was no point trying to reclaim it at that point.
“Alpha flight, prepare for contact. We have harpy swarms dead ahead at this time, fire and evade as you can.” Gun ports on the Kagi were opening up even as I talked to the rest of the flight, fingers on the controls. “Fifteen mikes to launch.”
Black clouds became black dots, and an eye-blink later the Kagi was butchering its way through a flying mass of flesh and ichor. I focused on the flying, avoiding the denser clusters and punching through the open channels with the wide nose of the Kagi spitting fire and ceramic shells at whatever crossed our path. Chip ran the defense turret on the spine, punching shells sideways and backwards and every which way, flaying wings and puncturing leathery hides around us. Something streaked past us, red eyes rolling and foam streaking from a gnashing beak, and the Kagi’s port wing eviscerated it in a spray of gore.
Roll, dive, finger on the trigger, blasting through a blood-misted gap in the wall. Blue sky for only an instant, then more black cliffs as the harpies closed the gap and hemmed us in again.
“Osa going down, I say again, Osa going…”
I caught a glimpse of the stricken craft trailing smoke, something black and bony gummed into one of its engine ports while still clawing at the fuselage - and then the Osa was gone, lost below us. Someone screamed over the radio, and the Altoi chittered in unison, a cacophony that rattled the cockpit windows and set my teeth on edge.
Two left.
On the long-range radar, Bravo flight was winking out one by one as well.
We lost altitude, the dense mass of xeno-flesh above us leaving no open routes but downwards, and the air became thicker with Chorkal’s atmosphere. I watched the cockpit indicators glow and dip, and when the air density hit the red line on the Maybachs, I punched the ramjet scoops open. Something clunked and complained in the belly of the Kagi - had we hit something, taken damage? - and then the ramjet indicators started switching from red to orange to green, and it felt like a giant had kicked us in the ass.
Chip yelled, exuberance mixed with fear, and I watched the retro-cameras fill up with the blue drive plumes that built and built behind us. Harpies crossed the plumes and ignited, black paper effigies thrown onto a bonfire. Nariko was on our starboard wing, blue volcanoes erupting from its rear as it kept up with our dash. Nothing else could keep up with us any longer.
“Eight mikes to launch.” I watched the indicator drop into the seven-and-change level, and when I looked up, the harpy was dead ahead of us. The Kagi sliced through its chest and one wing without even noticing - but the head and jagged beak was lined up with my screen, and the shutter panels caught it and bounced it over the cockpit. The Kagi lurched, Chip yelled something over the intercom, and then he and the turret were gone, disappearing behind me. Something puffed and ignited in the drive plumes, a shimmer of smoke that disappeared before the retro-cameras could even properly focus on it.
Lisa had shown me a trick with the candles at Okobasa. How to use them, along with the dispensary cups, to make little traps for the native mosquitoes. We laid under the mosquito nets that covered the big bed and watched the little insects disappear into the flames. Not even ash remained.
Someone was yelling over the radio, and this time it was Nariko, asking for my status. The cockpit interior whistled and howled as air leaked in somewhere along the back where the turret housing now bled sparks and hydraulic fluids into my slipstream.
“Kagi here. I’ve lost my turret and gunner. Assuming primary weapon functions at this time.” A thumbs-up to the craft screaming at my side, unsure if Stefan could even see me. I felt numb, watching my arms moving on their own. The targeting grids were starting to appear on the cockpit screen, yellows and greens and ticking numbers overlaying the misshapen Altoi growths visible on the other side.
“Two mikes to launch.”
The Neuron Cluster was still over the horizon. Our bombs would travel on their own, dipping down at the last moment to hit the mountain of grey matter which we hoped would shut the Altoi down. We just had to get the bombs in the air, and let gravity and ordnance code do the rest.
“Nariko standing by to fire.” The voice came at the same time that I finished the pre-launch checks on the Kagi. Everything nominal. The Nariko was starting to pull ahead slightly, my torn-up spine slowing me down by a fraction.
“Nariko weapon bays open. Firing one. Firing two. Bombs out.” Twin plumes of white appeared underneath the craft, and accelerated away.
I toggled the last switch, waiting for the Kagi to tell me it had opened its belly to reveal the neuro-bombs.
Red light. Error messages began to scroll down the delta screen.
Shit.
“Kagi on hold, I have launch issues at this time.” I tried backup routines, circumventions, even a partial reset of the one sub-grid system. The red light stayed on.
“Abort, Kagi, abort - follow us up and out.” Stefan’s voice was calm as he curved the Nariko off to the side and began to climb again. Black clouds still churned around us in the distance, and I could see where his route would take us.
“Negative on that, Nariko. My turret’s gone, I’m a sitting duck if I hit that cloud.” Fingers stabbed at more of the controls, but the error message was a stubborn red blot that did not want to budge. The two neuro-bombs from the Nariko were thin white lines ahead of me, railroad tracks heading to the last station.
Last station, and last rounds.
I opened the radio channel to the wide-band frequency, and began to sing. It was a song they used to sing on Gavinson, about the first ships that had settled there. Lisa taught it to me at Okobasa, because the heroine in the song had the same name as her. We sang it together when we danced at the lakehouse at night, and I sang it to her on the last night before I left. She had smiled, called me soft, waved as the lifters took us into orbit.
I pushed the ramjets the rest of the way, and, still singing, followed the neuro-bombs as they started to converge on a grey lump on the horizon. Around me, black clouds were coalescing into streams that chased the Kagi, shadows chasing fire.
Lisa was waiting for me.
Exciting but really confusing! Not sure if this is a stand alone or part of a series. I had the definite impression this mission turned kamikaze at the last minute. I’m sure I’d enjoy an expanded version but would need way more grounding in this world.
Loved the fighter and bomber action!
Now that's what I call a sci fi short, nicely done m8!