Battlecruiser Alamo: Not One Step Back (27 page)

 Cunningham’s voice was less certain, “Am I the only one who thinks that was too easy?”

 “Crap,” Caine said. “Better look at your scanner.”

 Marshall looked down, and his eyes widened as he saw six more fighters weaving through the sky, flying at full burn from the direction of the aerostat. He’d expected three, maybe six in total, but nine – that meant the aerostat had been more heavily modified than he thought.

 “We’ve only got four missiles left, Danny,” Caine said. “We could try taking down the aerostat with railguns, but I’m the first to admit I got a lucky shot with the dogfight.”
 “I think we should consider an abort,” Cunningham said. “Wear them down with attritional warfare.”

 Shaking his head, Marshall replied, “Negative, John. If we pull out now we’re just giving them a chance to get away. We’ve got to do this now.”

 “How?” Caine said.

 Looking at his scanner again, he said, “Forget about the fighters. We go full-burn for the aerostat, one of us launches our attacks while the other two provide cover with the railguns.”

 “Those railguns can only fire for three seconds until they run out of ammunition!” Cunningham replied.

 “I guess we’ll just have to make each shot tell, then. I’ll go in first, you two cover. Full burn for the aerostat.”

 Pushing down the afterburner, he felt the acceleration pushing him back in his seat, a familiar and comforting feeling, but he had to ride the controls carefully as swirls of wind tossed him aside. Behind, the other two shuttles were following suit, each of them flanking him from a different direction. They smashed through the approaching formation without trading a shot, and Marshall allowed himself a brief smile; they’d take time to recover from that, precious seconds wasted while they made their way back to the target they were meant to be defending.

 The aerostat loomed ahead, appearing on his short-range sensors, and Marshall took a careful look at the design. Two extra gas-bags, racks for fighters, an extra underslung module; it was lying low in the atmosphere, and he suspected that they were pushing the engineering of the design as hard as they could. The trick was the gas bags – hit one of those, and the whole complex could simply crash down to crush depth before they could react.

 “This is Shuttle Flight to Aerostat,” he said, not really expecting an answer. “You have thirty seconds to surrender; we are beginning our attack run.”

 “Is it wise to warn them, Danny?” Caine said. 

 “I doubt they think we’re playing tag,” he replied, as he swooped in towards the aerostat. The pirates were throwing out all sorts of jamming signals, sending his sensors into a crazy, distorted mess, so he flicked over to visual acquisition. For five seconds he held a close course, giving the missile plenty of time, and then fired, swinging around and to the left, punching his afterburner for a second to dive away.

 Watching his scanner, he willed the missile towards its target, watching it fly straight as an arrow, but then two smaller objects raced from the underslung module, homing in on their target, and the explosion was a mile short of the aerostat. Cursing, Marshall pulled his shuttle back around, racing back towards the approaching fighters.

 “Cunningham, you’re next, I’ll cover. Caine, you go last, let them both fly at once. Don’t use any missiles under any circumstances.”

 “Shuttle Two, making attack run.”

 The six fighters were turning back towards the aerostat now, obviously spending fuel at a furious rate, in two clusters of four and two. Without a second thought, Marshall dived towards the larger group, his finger hovering over the railgun trigger. As he approached, stabbing at the heart of their diamond formation, they split into four directions, giving him a millisecond shot; he tried a couple of quick bursts, but they harmlessly slid past.

 Caine was lancing away at her duo, swooping and diving around them, taking advantage of her increased agility as she tied them in knots; Marshall wished he could have watched her, but behind him, Cunningham was settling in for his attack run. The fighters were scrambling across the sky, and he pulled around to fire another quick burst at the nearest, sending him scurrying away.

 “Missile away!” Cunningham yelled, and Marshall glanced at the scanner, shaking his head with frustration as the screen began to fog up again; the pirate’s electronic warfare man was doing his work well today.

 “Negative impact,” Cunningham said, dejectedly. “Deadeye, your turn. Swing back, I’ll cover you.”

 “Wait one,” Marshall said, “I’ve got a better idea. John, hold them off for a few seconds. I’ll ride in with Deadeye and cover the missiles with my e-war screens.”

 “How much fuel have you got left, Danny?” Caine said.

 Marshall glanced at his indicators, his gauge running down close to the red line, and with a smile, replied, “Plenty.”

 “Six boys for me, then,” Cunningham said, arcing around in a tight curve and swooping around to fly past Marshall, dipping his wings as he dove for the pack. Caine closed in underneath him, barely a few meters away; this was formation flying at its finest, and a stray gust of wind could lead to disaster. Marshall’s hands rested on the controls, maintaining the level flight path as best he could, trying to anticipate the air movements and the eddies.

 The aerostat was getting closer again, and he readied his railgun for a last-ditch shot. In this environment, the missiles were going to outpace him considerably, and he was going to have to ride the afterburner hard to keep up. Caine, beneath, got caught by a stray wind, almost tossed into his fiery wake, but compensated just in time.

 “Hurry up, guys!” Cunningham said, “I’ve got two on me!”

 “It’s dangerous around here,” Caine replied, “Stand by, getting visual lock.”

 Marshall took a deep breath, “I’m ready on your mark. When you fire, go back into the pack, then burn out of here.”

 “You’re assuming we hit it, then.” She paused for a second, “Missiles away!”

 Twin plumes of flame raced out from her shuttle, and Marshall slammed onto the afterburner, staying as close to them as he dared, recklessly spending his fuel. Slowly they pulled ahead of him despite all his efforts, and he flicked on his e-war package; as expected, they were doing their best to swat the missiles out of the sky.

 Then the expected – at the fifteen-mile mark, almost the wink of an eye from the target, a pair of anti-missiles raced out. This time Marshall was ready, and the railgun burst into life, an arc of death racing ahead of the shuttle. It didn’t stop the missiles, but it did confuse them, and Caine’s missiles slammed home into the gas bags as he scraped over them by a matter of a few feet.

 Turning back, he saw a huge flash. The explosion must have caught a pocket of hydrogen gas, and combustion was instant; all that remained of the pirate base on Kumar was a sprinkling of debris being tossed in the wind. His celebration was short-lived; the two anti-missiles were still out there, and had locked onto him. He tapped his anti-missile switch, but instead of an explosion to his rear, his heads-up display started to spew out text, headed with the words ‘Critical Malfunction’.

 Frantically, he threw switches, diving back and forth, slamming on his afterburner, sending his fuel gauge dipping underneath the red line. One of them veered away, diving out of control into the distance, but the other stayed on him, locked in to their mutual destruction.

 “Danny, what’s going on,” Caine’s voice said.

 “Got one locked on. Get out of here, you two, back to Alamo. I’ve got this.” 

 He started to dive, desperately trying to gain speed, and alarms started to sound in the cockpit as he tried to pull up. Finally, his defenses did their job, but only a split second before they hit the hull, and he heard a loud bang in the rear compartment as alarms started to go off; he had a hull breach, and the now-empty fuel tanks were filling with the toxic gases from outside.

 Tapping his communicator, all he got was a red light. The system had been knocked out by the near-collision, both aerials ripped away, and signal strength was lousy down here as well. Pulling up, he tried to gain altitude, but his status board was reading angry red, only a few amber warnings to break the pattern, and his afterburners had also failed. The altitude reading continued to fall, and sirens sounded as his ship passed the crush depth, the hull starting to creak and groan.

 Calmly tapping a button, he turned all the warning indicators off, and all was silence, interrupted only by the creaking of the hull. He settled back in his couch, still burning his crippled engines at their maximum, trying to maintain height, but there was no way he could pull back up, not even onto a suborbital trajectory.

 The battle was over; no-one was going to trouble him down here, and at least he could have the satisfaction that he had accomplished his mission, that the pirate threat was gone. Cunningham would be more than capable of finishing the work he had begun.

 He began to enjoy the amazing view, purples, oranges and greens swirling around each other in a whirlpool of beauty, the occasional flash of lightning illuminating the sky. No human had ever been here before, never dared to go this deep into Kumar. A few adventurous souls had risked their lives to go deep into the atmosphere of Jupiter and Saturn, and some of them had even returned to tell the tale, but this was new.

 His communicator was still working, at least after a fashion, and the roaring of the storms outside filled the cabin as he turned the volume up, waves of sound washing over him. Inexorably, the shuttle began to fall, the thrust failing to match the pull of gravity dragging him down towards the core. The designers of the craft had evidently done their work well, it was surviving miles deeper than their estimates, and Marshall idly wondered what it would be like at the end, whether he would have any time to know what happened to him.

 There was a slam on the hull, and he braced himself for the end. No time to put on a spacesuit, not that it would have done him any good anyway. Then a series of loud bangs, and the topside hatch began to open. Scrambling out of his couch, he saw Caine’s head bobbing through the docking port.

 “Come on, for God’s sake,” she said. “Hurry, my afterburner won’t hold much longer.”

 In four strides, he reached the hatch and jumped up into it, swinging himself through the narrow port and into the other shuttle. Caine was already closing up behind him as he raced for the co-pilot’s seat, and she slammed on the afterburners to maximum, sending the shuttle roaring up through the atmosphere, leaving his craft behind; he looked at it for a second before it descended out of view.

 “Damn it, Deadeye, what are you doing?”

 “Rescuing you.”

 He tapped the panel, “You don’t have enough fuel to get out from this far down. Now we’re both dead.” 

 “Not yet, we’re not,” she replied, tapping her communicator. “John, you ready?”

 “All set, Deadeye.”

 Up ahead, the other shuttle was waiting, and on a single pass, Caine tapped her control thrusters and brought them in for a hard dock. She turned to him and smiled, then threw a switch to enable remote control of thruster and guidance control while the rear hatch once again swung open.

 “We’ve turned the shuttles into a two-stage rocket.” Glancing down at the fuel gauge, she continued, “Come on, hurry up. We need to move!”

 “You first, Deadeye,” Marshall said, lingering by the controls. With a curt nod, she raced to the hatch, and Cunningham snatched her up into his shuttle.

 “Come on, Danny!” he said, and with a last, quick look at the doomed craft, he followed her into the last of their three shuttles. Caine had already settled into the co-pilot’s seat, and he looked around, cursing that all of the passenger seats had been stripped out to save weight. With nowhere better to sit, he crouched down by a bare patch of wall.

 “Riding the two ships up,” muttered Cunningham as he struggled with the controls, and the heads-up display showed the course he was attempting to chart, the curve gently rising, finally poking up out of the atmosphere. He glanced down at his fuel display, then nodded.

 “We’ve got it. Enough fuel to circularize the orbit when we get back out into space.”

 “What about the rest of the fighters?”

 “They headed off into orbit themselves; they’ve got nowhere else to go. Alamo can mop them up later, though I doubt they’ll give us any trouble. What exactly can they do?”

 The atmosphere thinned out as they continued to climb, and Cunningham started his final burn to free them from Kumar’s gravity, swinging them up into a stable orbit.

 “Just enough, but we’ll have fumes in the tanks at the end of this.” He glanced at his passengers, “Didn’t count on your weight.”

 Caine frowned, “Shouldn’t we have heard from Alamo by now?”

 Marshall walked up to the console and tapped a button, “Marshall to Alamo, come in please.” He paused, then repeated, “Shuttle Two calling Alamo, come in.”

 Looking down at the sensor, Caine shook her head, “All I see in orbit is a small cluster of fighters up ahead. No Alamo.”

 “Where the hell are they?” Marshall asked, as he continued to search
the sky
for his ship.

Chapter 26

 There were muted cheers across Alamo’s bridge as they saw the single shuttle climb out of the atmosphere of Kumar, though tinged with concern; two of their colleagues and friends had failed to return, it appeared. They were getting deep in the jamming field, the communications systems swamped with data.

 “Try and get a message laser lock, Mr. Weitzman,” Zebrova said, her eyes not wavering from the viewscreen.

 “I am, ma’am, but it’s at extreme range.”

 “I think it’s Shuttle Two, ma’am,” Spinelli said from the sensor station. “Lieutenant Cunningham’s ship.”

 Zebrova nodded, then turned to Orlova, “Ship status, Sub-Lieutenant?”

 “All systems nominal, ma’am. Espatier squads ready for boarding action, shuttles at last-stage preparations for launch. Missile bays ready for firing, laser charged and cleared for action.”