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KN02 Danrik 001
The Grajeda System, Williams Quadrant, Avalon Sector
MAY 06 2793/2793.126; 0405 Hours (CST)
“Here goes nothing... oh, shit!"
Vell Ricaud hit the afterburners and jerked on the controls as the sixteenth green energy volley fired at him was narrowly avoided through his quick handling of his personal Danrik fighter.
The sons of bitches were fast, he had to give them that. He couldn’t even get a shot in edgewise before he had to dodge or weave. Whatever it was they were shooting, it sure wasn’t conventional firepower.
Finally, an opening!
After rolling out of the last volley he had one of those smooth, gray and green, egg-shaped Steltek drones perfectly lined up in his sights. He hit it with full-guns, pummeling the ship’s shields with a continuous barrage of all five of his Kraven Mk4 lasers, following it up with a Banshee missile the second he had lock.
The drone exploded.
Vell felt like shouting out in victory, as from what he could tell, he’d just scored the first kill for the Terrans.
"DISARM YOUR WEAPONS AND SURRENDER YOUR SHIPS TO THE MAGISTRY," the voice of the Steltek commander cackled over the comm, ever the conversationalist. "DO NOT MAKE VINDICATION ANY MORE DIFFICULT THAN NEED BE."
Fat chance of that. Not without a damn good fight!
Vell had already targeted and was preparing to fire on a second drone ship when he was jolted forward in his seat. Maybe it was just his imagination, but the whole cockpit seemed to crackle off green plasma for a split second. Sensors were reading major depletion of his aft and starboard shields. Vell responded, swerving and sending his craft into a wide spiral that carried him up and over in a tight loop.
His maneuvers allowing him the time to assess the maelstrom of a battle being raged around him, Vell began to survey the scene. At least three hundred allied capital ships were unloading their supplies of long and short range ordnance and weaponry, letting the Steltek mothership have it with all they had at their varied distances apart. Meanwhile, the dozens of fighter squadrons swarmed over the area not unlike a storm of mosquitoes, duking it out with all those drone ships.
Vell looked up just in time to see the pyramidal inner structure of the mothership pulsate and emit a ball of pure green plasma the size of an entire capship. Before he could even blink, the ball lanced out and connected with the hull of the heavy fleet carrier Enforcer. The massive Confederation flagship’s shields didn’t even give off a spark before a sudden explosion swept out to engulf its entirety.
"That was Tierson’s ship!" a frantic voice over the comm shouted. One of the other Confed carrier commanders, Vell assumed. He was too mesmerized by the sudden turn of events to even notice that the comm was working again.
"They got the space marshal!" came another voice.
Panic only gets you killed in battle, Vell’s father once told him as a child.
He gripped the controls a little tighter, preparing to pull into a nosedive. Before he did so, the mothership abruptly unleashed four more plasma bursts in quick succession, each one finding a target amongst the Confed-allied carriers currently moving to encircle it. Then another four, and another. Each volley unwaveringly destroyed four carriers per salvo; each exploding with such speed, intensity, and sheer force it seemed the capital ships were being wrenched from the very fabric of space.
A rush of comm chatter ensued. A bunch of worried commanders trying to fill Tierson’s boots were yelling at all the carriers to maintain continuous evasive maneuvers, for all the good that would do against the ship-killer blasts.
Hell, that mothership was cranking out those drone ships as fast as they were being able to destroy them—probably faster. They were swatting at flies. To hell with it. If he wanted to win this thing for the good guys he was going to have to take the battle to them. If Vell could take out the central structure—the pyramid structure amid the cluster of interlocking struts and green orbs that made up the boomerang-shaped vessel—they just might have a chance. It didn’t look like the boys in blue were bright enough to figure that out. The Steltek ship was almost certainly thoroughly shielded, probably immune to whatever damage Vell could dish out, but what else could he do?
"Melissa?" Vell called into the comm.
"Hmmm?" Melissa banks murmured back. White brackets appeared over her ship’s blue dot on Vell’s radar as she spoke, singling the Fatale out from the hundreds of other ships congesting his screen. "That you, Vell?"
"Look, I’m going for the mothership’s core and need some backup. Flank me, ’cause I’m going in."
He didn’t wait for her confirmation. He just brought the Steltek mothership back into his sights and hit the afterburners.
It was then that the impossible happened.
Breaking its pattern of singling out Confed-allied capital ships
and firing on them, the mothership unleashed a new ball of plasma.
This one was flying directly into Vell’s flight path.
F-3500D Excalibur 101
0410 Hours (CST)
No time to think about it, just do it!
For the first time in years, Blair let instinct and reflex take over. He targeted and fired his "Hellraiser" torpedo the instant his latest generation of Excalibur finished decloaking, hoping his maximized speed at full afterburning velocity would give his projectile the speed necessary to counter the Steltek mothership’s plasma ball. He had to hit it before it could strike the Danrik fighter and its unsuspecting pilot. He had but microseconds to do so.
Once the resulting scattered plasma cloud dissipated, it was clear his effort had been successful.
He pulled his Excalibur fighter hard to the right, swooping directly by the neutral-tagged ship he’d just saved. Blair activated the comm. "Next time," he advised, "try not to fly into any more capship killers."
"Hey, thanks, man," the pilot’s voice came back over the comm. He sounded young, perhaps half Blair’s age. "You really saved my ass. The name’s Vell Ricaud. What’s yours?"
"You probably wouldn’t believe me if I told you." Blair slowed to match Vell’s Danrik fighter, swiftly pulling up beside it. "If you’re doing what I think you’re doing, I’m flying your wing."
"I’m heading for a direct assault on the Steltek mothership’s core."
Blair smiled. Two minds think alike. "I’m flying your wing. Lead the way."
He followed in close formation as Vell and the Tiger Shark-class cruiser on the pilot’s opposite side afterburned toward their destination. He had to slow his ship’s speed down considerably to stay with them, as, by default, Confederation fighters were designed to surpass all civilian craft on the market. Unsurpassed speed, weapons, and armor. The cloaking devices the Confederation had begun utilizing towards the end of the First Kilrathi War weren’t even allowed into the public enterprise. The Confed Space Force was always top of the line—that much had not changed in the past century. Nevertheless, Blair was a man well out of his own era, and couldn’t help but feel as the Red Baron might were he to take the cockpit of a late twentieth century F-22. The ship’s controls were familiar, but not without their subtle differences.
"You set on full-guns?" Vell asked.
"Never go into a battle like this any other way, kid. In this mess, no matter where you shoot you’re going to hit something."
"Okay, target the pyramid and fire in thirty seconds. Full spread, nice damage dispersal."
"Gotcha."
"Twenty-five... twenty-three... twenty... ni—shit!!"
A duo of Steltek drones swooped out of nowhere and struck Vell’s ship at nearly point blank before veering off. They’d been relatively lucky so far with the drones—looked like it was running out.
The Danrik fighter broke and spun off course, unable to maintain its speed. Checking his rearview, Blair could see fingers of green electricity wisping off the craft’s hull, Vell’s generators and shield emitters fighting over what to regenerate first.
Before Blair could turn to intercept the attacking drones, the Tiger Shark cruiser on Vell’s other side had already launched an array of what looked like Proximity missiles backed by rapid bursts of Ion charges into the escaping ships’ turbines. Twin explosions lit Blair’s cockpit.
"I don’t believe this!" Vell shouted. His transmission was coming in pretty garbled, but there was no mistaking the frustration in his voice. "Great! I’m fucking dead in space!"
"How bad?" Blair quickly asked. He slowed down a couple notches and brought his fighter into a defensive circle around Vell’s.
"Engines are grinding at 12%, afterburners are shot, weapons systems off-line. I’m no good to you guys anymore."
A single stray drone was all that was necessary to make Vell’s ship an expanding gas cloud now. "You’ll never make it back to a carrier in time. Eject—I’ll tractor you in."
"No time! Move on!"
"I’m not leaving you here to die, Vell! We can do this, and you can help me!"
"Damn it, no! You’ve got to complete the mission!" The young man’s earnest tone of voice gripped Blair. "The entire goddamn galaxy is depending on us, don’t you realize that?"
"But you—"
"Will do the right thing!" Vell sighed, disgustedly. He added, barely audibly, "Because I can’t. I... never could."
"Go ahead, pilot," a woman’s voice spoke over his comm. A glance at his radar revealed it to be the captain of the Tiger Shark cruiser. "I’ll bring him in."
Blair shook his head. There was no other way. Not if the trillions of lives on the line if that Steltek behemoth slipped by meant anything to him. "Understood, ma’am."
"Just give’em hell for me, big guy!" Vell cackled over the comm one last time.
"You got it."
Blair broke off his circle, pulling back into his course toward the topside of the mothership. A second later he was already passing over the humongous ship’s starboard "boomerang" edge, blazing a trail to the pyramid protruding from the center.
Ten more seconds. Blair double-checked his lasers and missile reserves, preparing to take his fighter in.
The moment of truth.
Blair yanked down, diving and keeping the approaching pyramid structure in his sights. He held the fire button of his flightstick, hurling red, yellow, and purple bolts of firepower into the structure’s side—he couldn’t care less what the guns that fired them actually were. Sensors weren’t registering any damage on the thing, but there was no way of knowing.
There was no turning back now. If he looked at his "HUD" (an enhanced version of the HUDs he was used to) now he was sure he would be seeing all the Steltek drones that had been skirmishing with the Confed fighter squadrons now directing their attention to Blair. Even the vaunted Heart of the Tiger couldn’t stand up to a legion of those death machines.
Thirty meters now. The crisscrossing firepower of the assembled Confed-allied fleet of capital ships streaming over his fighter to add to the punishment being dealt to the structure in his reticule, Blair released every missile he had stored in his hardpoints in instantaneous succession. One after the other they impacted, bits and pieces of black shrapnel flying out from beneath the resulting explosions. Apparently being unshielded—at least by conventional standards—for reasons he could only guess at, the size and awesome weaponry the Steltek mothership had in such abundance hid its Achilles’ heel. Or perhaps Commander Hassan’s code-cracking had unknowingly brought down its shields... it didn’t matter.
But it wasn’t destroyed. Not yet.
He pulled up just short of the chipped pyramid’s side, preparing to make another run. He had time to put twenty yards between him and the mothership’s surface before his craft jolted and the cockpit became bathed in green light.
The pyramid had fired on him, though it must have been a significantly weakened shot, considering Blair had just blasted the holy hell out of it a moment ago. It was easily strong enough still, however, to cripple his ship.
"YOUR ROAD ENDS HERE, HEATHEN," the throbbing, mechanical voice of the Steltek commander echoed over the comm on his headset. The static-ridden image of a green, membranous, amoeba-like alien’s visage appeared in his VDU. "YOU WILL FEEL THE RIGHTEOUS VINDICATION OF THE STELTEK. NO ONE CAN STAND AGAINST US. THE PURPOSE SHALL BE UPHELD."
They were wrong. Blair had one last chance. One last hope for humanity.
In this century, every heavy Confed fighter was equipped with one standard-issue thermonuclear explosive, a warhead that had been affectionately labeled by vets as "Nuke’ems," each one hardwired into a shielded auxiliary power cell. A pilot that detonates the warhead emits a blast wave theoretically strong enough to annihilate everything within a five square mile radius. The pilot is then supposed to activate his or her Synchronic Temporal Warp generator, phasing their fighter out of normal time and space for the duration of the blast to protect them from its awesome damage.
There was just one problem. Like just about everything else on his fighter now, Blair’s Synchronic Temporal Warp generator was shorted out.
A man out of time, a hero that didn’t belong. Under different circumstances he could have lived out his days in this bright new century, revered as the figurehead of the Confederation that history had made him out to be. But he’d be alone, a man without a home, a wanderer from a distant past he could never return to.
In retrospect, could Blair have asked for a more noble end?
He couldn’t afford to wait much longer. Blair flipped open the Nuke’em’s trigger mechanism and hovered his finger over the red detonator button. Sirens blared in his ear, telling him the incoming drone ships were now locking their weapons.
One last chance...
As he felt the button click beneath his finger, Blair was blessed with a final rush of resurfacing memories. Images of a month-long vacation spent in the Canadian Rockies of Earth with his wife and two children, a picturesque nighttime scene. He saw his son and daughter curled up in their sleeping bags, his wife leaning against him as he regaled them all with a helping of his lighter war stories over the warmth of a campfire. He closed his eyes and clung to that comforting image while he awaited the inevitable.
It came. There was a nauseating tingle, then a blindingly hot flash.
Valhalla.
TCS Blair; Bridge
0427 Hours (CST)
Captain Kincaid held up a hand to shield her eyes.
The sudden explosion atop the Steltek mothership flashed and violently tore outward, almost instantly vaporizing the pyramid at the ship’s center. A chain reaction of explosive ripples initiated, each of the thousands of green orbs scattered over the mothership’s mass erupting and enveloping the entire boomerang superstructure in a magnificent explosion that would likely rock every ship within a parsec. The clusters of Steltek drones that had changed course a few minutes ago to intercept the pilot on his final run were quickly caught and atomized in the all-encompassing shockwave that followed.
When the brilliant display of ultimate destruction died down and the debris began clearing, the Steltek invasion fleet was no more. The mothership itself—now a skeletal ruin of broken struts and shattered alloy.
"He did it," Captain Kincaid said. She was the first to utter a word on the bridge. "Blair saved us all."
Lieutenant Pter meekly stood from his crewpit. "The Steltek destroyed fifty-nine capital ships—we’re down to less than half of our armada."
Kincaid choked down her feelings, doing her best to maintain her military composure. "I’m aware of our casualties."
"H-he sacrificed himself... so that we’d survive..."
"That he did, Lieutenant." Kincaid let herself fall into her chair. She lowered her head. "That he did."