Back Into the Fire, page 28
“Get out of here!” Josie hollered. She set her wounded charge down beside a splintered tree trunk and turned to sight her blastrifle on the inferno of the ridgeline above them. “Basilisks, take off!”
“Belay that!” Jerry barked, jolting out particle beams almost spastically now. With his free hand, he keyed the communicator. “Basilisk Five, break off and get down there!”
“—too hot!” Josie’s voice protested.
“Five,” Jerry snarled, “pick. Them. UP!”
If there was any argument, Jerry didn’t hear it. Because in that moment, the sky filled with the thunder of Hellhounds.
TIM felt the moment when every gun on the surface turned towards him. A dozen missile trails corkscrewed into the sky and angled his way. Targeting alarms squalled and the tactical glittered with fresh contacts as Alliance active sensors painted him and fusion bottles glowed with surging energy.
But by then, he and the rest of Second Squadron were already over the horizon and on top of them.
Tim let fly with the Number Four scatter-pack, each missile set to independent tracking and forgotten the moment they launched. Their wildly diverging paths and widely-spaced explosions a second later told him they’d each found and struck different targets. But he was already plunging through a whirlwind of blaster fire. A glance at the tactical showed him a flutter of schemata on the war book globular—mobile anti-starfighter batteries, hovertruck-mounted launchers, at least one hovertank.
Plasma blasts stitched across his starboard shield as he lashed over the Basilisk’s fiery landing zone. “Watch that!” He juked to port and put on speed. “Break clear to the south and come back around on them!”
Thrusters shoved the flight couch into his spine, carried him over the countryside at a punishing speed before he let up on them and banked into a starboard turn that’d bring him back north. Fresh smoke columns smudged the sky and new flames leapt heavenward as Hellhounds streaked and scattered over the Alliance ground forces. Energy blast traceries chattered and hosed across the sky. Actinic white flashes betrayed hits, but no Hellhounds took more than they could shrug off. Surprise had served them well.
It wouldn’t help them a second time.
“Lot of damned firepower!” Li called across the squadron channel. “Those quad-blasters have portable shield generators! Gonna be hard to dig ‘em out!”
Newly-birthed missile spreads reached for the sky and turned towards the regrouping Hellhounds. “Little more worried about that, right now!” Tim said. “I’ll draw them off. You punch through and pick off the launchers!”
“Take Nine and Ten with you!”
Tim kicked the thrusters and shot for the horizon. “Always glad for company!”
The separately-twining missile trails converged towards him like snakes drawn to mice as he came streaking in. Tim flicked the plasma blaster to AI-control and let Jeanie go to work. Cyan bolts ravaged forth instantly, clawing targets from the air with anticlimactic cracks and fire puffs. Nine and Ten from the Second swept up on Tim’s flanks and added their own fire, an eye-scouring tracery of bolts that send a dozen missiles fluttering to the surface in smoking shreds.
But there was a hell of a lot of them.
Tim touched a control, saw the defensive systems display blink green, and keyed the communicator. “Nine and Ten, break high! Let ‘em chase us and drop chaff and jamming pods!” He didn’t wait for acknowledgement—wouldn’t hear it over the squall of hostile targeting alarms, anyway—and wrenched back on the stick.
The Hellhound groaned as it lurched for the sky, shivering into a nearly ninety-degree angle. The alarm warble built to a teeth-gritting screech as g-forces ground into Tim’s marrows, despite inertial dampening. The aft display highlighted missiles climbing after him, branching off to chase Nine and Ten, too.
“Jeanie,” Tim grunted through the building pressure, “any time now...”
“Got it!”
Tim felt the chug of first the chaff pods, then the decoys pop free of the Hellhound’s aft underbelly. The former would light the missiles’ tiny AI-sociopaths up with flares like fusion reactors; the latter projecting momentary mirages of Hellhounds to chase.
Letting the Hellhound climb another instant, Tim killed the engines and let speed bleed away in a moment as he pulled back on the stick and feathered the maneuvering fields. His stomach leapt nearly to the roof of his mouth as the sky and the ground reversed positions before him and the starfighter turned end-over-end.
Missiles boiled off in every direction, looping after the decoys. Nine and Ten peeled off to either side, both still clawing for altitude with ghosts on their tails. But a few of the pursuers still rose true, speared straight for Tim. He had a palate-drying instant to wonder if this was the miscalculation where his luck would finally give out. Then Jeanie lit them up with a long, sawing burst from the chin blaster and fire blossoms spread before him. In another moment, gravity took hold and the Hellhound was plunging through settling flames.
Blisters of fire walked across the countryside below as Tim let the Hellhound dive. Li and the rest of Second Squadron were ripping over the Alliance gunners in knife-stroke patterns, leaving annihilation wherever they passed. It had an almost surgical precision, seen from high above. But Tim knew it was apocalypse below, men scurrying for cover, finding none in a hurricane of fire and shrapnel. Machines that had been as close as kin turned to infernos around their crews. Guns and launchers flailing the heavens with world-punishing fury, only to be answered with the same—as though it’d made no difference. It was just death. Everywhere.
Tim almost felt sorry for them.
Almost—he’d seen what they’d done to Kimball.
A lone stream of plasma quested up through roiling fumes, chased a Hellhound, caught up to it and peppered its shields in a curtain of white fire. White went ugly orange-red as shields failed and energy bolts feasted upon blastisteel plate. A screech cut across the tactical network, cut out just as quickly as the Hellhound tumbled, wings crumpling, then whirling off as the stricken fighter spun in a fiery rain across a hillside.
“Damn you!” Li’s voice snapped.
Another Hellhound—Li’s certainly—screamed through smoke columns to spear the anti-starfighter battery with the azure pulse of its particle beams. The hovercraft-mounted weapon hosed its fire in a wild arc across the sky to meet it and cyan crisscrossed blue-white in a duel at light-speed. Seemingly at the same moment, shields of Alliance quad-blaster and Hellhound flashed apart in fluttering nimbuses of energy. But it was the Alliance machine that shattered, a plate of fire scathing out to flatten or scorch every remaining tree in a hundred meters while flaps of hull leapt high and began to settle like a flock of startled crows.
The Hellhound veered off, but hadn’t escaped the exchange unscathed.
“Ah, shit...”
“Li!” Tim leveled off his Hellhound as he fed power back to the thrusters, with a burst of speed came up alongside the Squad Leader’s craft. Smoke trailed behind it and Tim could see the blackened fuselage, the scorched dimple where his shield generator had been. “You all right?”
“Do I look all right, Watkins, you dumb sonofabitch!”
Tim grinned with relief at the spirited answer. “I meant are you hurt?”
“Yeah...” A globular showing the other man shivered into being. His crooked-toothed half-smile looked had a pinch of worry to it. “I’m fine. My girl’s shot-up bad.” Tim saw Li’s grav drives flutter for a moment, the Hellhound wobbled dangerously close. “Shields are gone. Linkage between drives and fusion bottle looks bad.”
“Get out of here, then,” Tim said.
“Not leaving my team in a fight.”
Tim glanced at the tactical, then the aft view hologram. “Not much fight left.”
Smoke and flame wreathed the hilltops and slopes behind them, Hellhounds whipping by overhead, chased by desultory flutters of blaster fire. Explosions jabbed out from the infernal haze as wrecked vehicles burned and fuel or ammo cooked off. But little real resistance remained.
The Jesters had torn through the Alliance ambush in minutes.
“Damn,” Li said, dabbing sweat from his face with the back of a hand. “That was a hell of lot of hardware pissed away just to try to sucker us in. Almost seemed personal. Like they were looking for us specifically.”
Icy footprints walked up Tim’s spine. He thought about the words from that black-clad Guardsman, just before he shot Kimball. “I think they were.”
“Damn,” Li exhaled. “Still, I’m waiting on my Squad, Tim. I can hold it.”
“I know you can, tough guy.” Tim checked another quadrant of the tactical as he and Li followed a long arc, circling the conflagration around the dying fight. Looked like the Basilisks were starting to lift off. He keyed Rodann’s channel. “Jerry, we leaving anytime soon?”
“Last shuttle’s loading,” Rodann replied through a snarl of static. “Jesus, Tim...”
“I know,” he replied. They all felt it. This wasn’t just an ugly business—someone had painted a target on the Jesters’ backs. “Let’s skedaddle out of here before someone decides they want another try at us, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Tim keyed the general address. He’d told Li he’d have operational control, but didn’t think the battered Squad Leader would mind at this point. “All right, Jesters. I’ve seen enough. Let’s get out of here and back to the Hole.”
THE SKIES OVER THE Union positions were a tapestry of destruction.
Kelly dove her Hellhound through bursting flak and arcing plasma bolts and the wreckage of blasted missiles tumbling gracefully for the ground. Ground fire scathed up to grab her. Only a wildly juking course carried her through it untouched.
“There they are!” she growled.
On the tactical, her AI highlighted a battery of Alliance heavy artillery crouched in a narrow gulley ten kilometers south of the fighting. The war book identified them as medium field pieces, hovercraft-mounted, nothing fancy. But they were flinging hell at the Union marines buckling before the Alliance assault.
Nosing her Hellhound into a near ninety-degree plunge and feeling the quiver of the strain on the spaceframe, Kelly prepared to return the favor.
“Hostile targeting,” the AI announced and drew a halo around another contact, perched on the hilltop behind the howitzers. War book globular displayed another one of those damned quad-blasters. A moment later, its fire was slapping across the sky, then splashing off her port shields.
Clenching teeth and control stick, Kelly gave the Hellhound a quick twitch to throw off the storm of plasma. Fury rushed up at her like a scarred, smoldering wall. The icon laid over the blazing quad-blaster went red and she grinned fiercely as she stroked the trigger, sent particle beams stabbing down like blades of an angry goddess. Near-misses flanked the weapon with gouts of fire, then direct hits blistered away its feeble shielding and feasted upon blastisteel. It didn’t so much as explode as jump skyward like a kicked toy, spinning apart as it flew.
“Scatter-pack!” Kelly grunted as she dragged back on the stick to pull out of the dive and g-forces no inertial dampening could allay pinched down. “Number Two, fire!”
The Hellhound juddered as the missile spread left its hardpoint. She didn’t follow their course, focused on the horizon dropping before her as the starfighter shook and screamed out of its plunge and leveled off into a course northwest. She felt the result of the her run a moment later, a thunder that rushed out after her, buffeted the Hellhound’s tail and left her fighting the stick for control.
In the aft visual, a wall of fire belched as high as the wispy gray cloud cover, turning the gulley into an irradiated crack of instant slag. A ripple of smaller explosions as the artillery’s ready ammunition cooked off barely registered as an anticlimax.
Everywhere Kelly looked, the same scenes played out. Hellhounds shot out of the sky into crisscrossing energy beams, streaked through them, and unloaded scatter-packs or blaster volleys, kicking the countryside into an inferno. The Alliance had ample anti-starfighter defenses for their infantry and artillery, but apparently hadn’t reckoned on the Jesters’ sheer recklessness, their lunatic willingness to dive right into hell to savage them.
Annihilated foes across a dozen worlds could have warned them it was so.
But any glee Kelly might have felt as she arched around from the north to come in over the aerodrome defenses again shriveled as she beheld the full panorama of the battlefield.
The Alliance—those damned black-armored Council Guardsmen everywhere—was surging down out of the surrounding hills into the valley the Union position sat astride. Fiery wedges pointed out at least three thrusts, two of which clearly moved to encircle the aerodrome. Fierce marine resistance looked to be crumpling before the mass of the assault, the sheer willingness to take casualties.
Suicide, Kelly thought, sickened, knowing from personal experience the horror those attackers would be charging into. The hovertanks they’d counted on to support them burned brightly on the slopes behind them, picked off early by Union heavy weapons. Their first wave had disintegrated in the flail of the dug-in defenders. Only losses—and likely ammo shortages—had forced the Union to abandon their trenches and fall back to the air field. There, they’d dug in again and the Alliance was coming across, out in the open, with plasma and metal tearing into their faces and Hellhound death screaming down from above.
Insane.
But it was damned near working.
“They need help down there!” Red called across the Jester network. “Re-group! I need a flight putting punishment over the airfield!”
Kelly was about to reply when new alarms sounded. The tactical blinked as fresh icons swept up from the southwest. Kelly didn’t need the war book program to know what they were. “Valkyries inbound!” she shouted. “Twenty seconds out! Harrison Wing, reform on me! We’ll give ‘em a welcome!”
In the confusion of the scrum, she had no idea how many of her badly-scattered group was in a position to assist, only that she was. Angling back to the south and putting on speed, she kept her Hellhound low, skirting the conflagration of the fight and moving to cut across the Valkyrie’s axis of approach. Looked like nine of them, an understrength squadron. She wondered if any were stragglers from the space battle a week ago.
Whoever they were, they weren’t fooled by her low altitude. Alarms blatted from her computer as hostile targeting found her and half the oncoming fighters plumed with missile spreads. The alarms quintupled as the trails twisted towards her, all of them acquiring her drive signature at once.
Kelly wanted to say she’d gone beyond feeling fear, but the gut-tingling sensation filling her sure felt like panic. “Scatter-packs,” she squeaked at the AI, “all remaining, counter-salvo on my mark.” She flicked the weapons selector to slave the plasma blaster to the AI. Then, “Ready all chaff and ECM.” She watched the missile trails converge towards her while the Valkyries slowed, hung back to watch her fry. “Fire scatter-packs!”
Her Hellhound shivered as the remain pair of hardpoints vomiting their missiles complements into the sky. It seemed they’d barely left their launchers when they began colliding with the Valkyries’ fusillade in a garden pattern of fire blooms. Then the plasma blaster was hammering away and the sky completely filled with fire. And every alarm wailed its warning of certain death.
“Chaff and ECM!” she barked, faintly notice the flutter of the decoy pods and flares spiraling out to either flank. The Hellhound screamed into the storm of still-exploding missiles and hurtling shrapnel. Shields glared all the way through the spectrum to the white of near-overload.
But nothing found her.
Then she was through, gray sky opening up and Valkyries peeling away as the Hellhound they’d expected to be overwhelmed shot into their midst, instead. One reacted too slow, hung before her holographic sights in a perfect, slow-motion silhouette. Targeting halos crimsoned.
Kelly stroked the trigger and let particle beams lash out. A white flash followed by the black of a smoke trail rewarded her. Then she was veering off to port, barely avoiding collision, and the Valkyrie was wobbling off across the sky, smearing it with fumes and debris, but still aloft. Jaw clenched till pain slivered along it, she reversed course, banked to starboard and lunged after the stricken craft.
But energy bolts slammed across her nose just as Kelly’s holographic sights slid over her prey again and she had to bank the opposite direction as a Valkyrie slashed before her. Forward shields crashed into white fire. Then they cleared and it was a real rat-race, starfighters twisting in a whirlwind of hurtling machines and slicing death while the ground burned not so far below them. Seconds were eternities of struggle. Vision was fire and blur.
With a jolt to the thrusters, Kelly drove the Hellhound clear of the scrap, clawing for open sky with speed. She shot out to the northeast, away from the ground battle. A pair of Valkyries stuck on her tail, though, and it was just as she’d warned Tim; with the drag of atmosphere, the Hellhound was the slower, less nimble machine.
Kelly dipped low, into a darkly-green valley untouched by the war to this point. She brought it with her, bolts like slices of midday sky chopping past her to kick up gouts of flame and splintered trees. A dozen forest fires started in her wake as she juked to avoid particle beams, was slapped to port by a near-miss that left damage control alarms warbling.
She tore back on the stick and braked with the maneuvering fields, sent the Hellhound rocketing straight up. The Valkyries split and roared by to either side, missing her as she climbed desperately. But at least one of them wasn’t fooled, she could see in the aft display, a delta shape peeling up after her. Its particle beams flicked out, thundered against the gray dome of Fury’s sky, questing closer, closer to her hull.
