Dark Dragons (25 page)

Jupiter lay 390,000 kilometers ahead.  The gas giant
filled Darren’s entire windshield.  At max sub-light velocity, it would
take him three and a half minutes to reach Jupiter’s upper atmosphere where he
hoped to loose himself in the turbulent clouds and magnetic storms.  The
darting trilobites, however, would be on him in just forty seconds, the enemy
Dragonstar bringing up the rear.  He wouldn’t make it.

‘Death blessed, human.  Do not be fright.’

Darren cocked his head slightly, at first not sure what he
just heard in his head-set, but quickly realized it was Scorch.  The
Vorvon’s processed voice sounded gender-less and void of age.  ‘Soon
glorious kill.  Succumb to honor.’  Scorch had an ego.

‘Screw you!’ Darren shot back.

Either the curse didn’t translate from human-English to
alien-Vorvon or Scorch didn’t understand the reply because there came no
further taunts.

*

Sryik-of-the-Three-Suns switched its comm channel to communicate
with the rest of the deathfish squadron. 
Put this old arthritic dragon
in the bubble on the leading quarter and contain its escape.  I will
finish the human.

*

Darren pivoted his Dragonstar on its center axis and sprayed
his six o’clock with laser fire.  He iced one of the trilobites square
before it could evade, but the remaining three darted out and away before he
drew beads on them.  Extremely nimble and unpredictable, the trilobites
were good at dodging his fire as long as they maintained a relative
distance.  It was a hopeless action, Darren knew, keeping them off guard
and on the defensive, but it only took one of the Vorvon fighters to slide into
a position where it returned a blind, aimless fire.  The trick
worked.  Darren had to react and pull up, throwing his kill zones out of
range to avoid being struck.

He was back on the defensive as the three trilobites
regrouped behind him.  This time, however, they began spewing a continuous
stream of laser fire, not directly at him, but immediately off his nose, rear
quarter, port and starboard.  They had contained him within a shrinking
kill box.

In a few seconds, he wouldn’t be able to even pitch or yaw
away or pivot around on the center axis again to sweep his six.  He
wouldn’t be able to accelerate either without being struck by a laser
blast.  The only movement the trilobites allowed him was straight forward,
and even one of the laser streams ahead of his nose began to close in, forcing
him to decelerate.  Scorch would be coming in for his “glorious
kill.”  Darren checked his scope and saw the Vorvon Dragonstar zeroing in
up high on an oblique angle where he would intercept Darren in just a matter of
seconds.

‘Human with stout heart,’ Scorch said. ‘But little
evolution.’

Darren screamed shamelessly.  With terror.  With
rage.  He was about to die and could do absolutely nothing about it. 
His stomach knotted into a tight fist.

‘A gentle dragon slayer, Sryik-of-the-Three-Suns.  No
pain.’

Darren’s lungs extinguished the last of his breath, and the hot
scream died in his throat.  Scorch was almost on him, twelve thousand
miles out . . . six seconds until death.  The scream continued in his
mind, and his Dragonstar seemed to scream with him.  He felt the ghost of
the machine stir deep within the guts of circuits and processors . . . and from
out of the chaotic babble in Darren’s head came a lone thought-command——the
Dragonstar’s rear anti-missile pod suddenly fired!

The angry weapon shot away and searched for an incoming
missile but one did not exist.  What the anti-missile orb did lock onto,
however, was the nearest trilobite just three kilometers off his rear port
quarter.  The Vorvon reacted and went to starboard to evade.  Darren
watched the alien’s crossfire stream go wide, and he shoved his Dragonstar
through the opening in the kill box.  He was free.

The anti-missile orb found its mark, lit the proximity fuse
and detonated above the Vorvon, showering the alien fighter with blazing
shrapnel.  It didn’t have enough punch to destroy an entire fighter, but
the anti-missile orb did heavy damage and knocked the trilobite out of the
fight.  Darren Snap-Yawed to sweep his six once more, ignoring the wounded
trilobite, and put a murderous blast of laser fire with generous helpings of
hate and revenge mixed in on the two remaining Vorvons.  In forming the
kill box, the trilobites had moved in too close, and Darren made them pay for
their temerity.  Each received a single laser pulse square into the
fuselage, their unlucky pilots gone to the ether whence they came.

Remembering Scorch, Darren banked hard to starboard toward
Jupiter.  A long volley of laser fire suddenly surrounded him from the
alien’s direction, one beam so close to his windshield that Darren actually saw
sparks of ambient hydrogen atoms ionized by the blasts light up and flare away
like dying embers.  Scorch had fired on him from a distance outside the
Dragonstar’s weapons tracking range, but that had not stopped the Vorvon from
throwing a few blind shots at him anyway.

‘Poor Vorvons with stout heart!’ Darren shouted. ‘No
evolution.  Too close to the dragon!’

Scorch did not reply, but Darren knew the alien certainly
understood him this time because more inaccurate laser fire came at him along
with a pair of intercept missiles now tracking Darren with the alien’s mass
displacement sensors.  Darren told himself to cut the chatter and knew
that being a wise ass wasn’t going to get his wise ass out of this
situation.  The fact the alien had fired intercept missiles from so far
out, allowing Darren more than enough time to swat them with the anti-missile
pod, told him something about his adversary.  Scorch could be easily
upset, allowing emotions to cloud judgment.  Funny.  Darren thought
it interesting aliens had emotional quirks just like humans which belittled
their god-like status somehow.

Scorch activated his stealth field and disappeared from
Darren’s scopes. 
Shit!
  Darren kept going straight.  As
long as was eight thousand miles ahead of Scorch, he wouldn’t fall within
weapons range, but he knew the alien had given up the direct chase, now likely
maneuvering to another position where he could catch Darren from another angle
and snare him in range.

On his AMD scopes, three signals appeared from metaspace
near Thebe.  Tony, Nate and Jorge had come back from Europa to find him.

‘Darren, are you out there, buddy?’ Tony asked.

‘You guys turn on your stealth!  He can see you! 
Do
it now!’

‘What?  Darren where are—?’

‘Jupiter!
   There’s another Dragonstar out
here, and he’s not one of us!  I’m heading for the clouds!  Help me
tag this one, he’s close on me!  Activate your stealth! 
Now!’

‘Do it!’ Tony ordered Nate and Jorge.

‘He’s a surgical bastard . . . likes to mess with you before
he finishes you.  My stealth, cloak, and warp generator are gone!’

‘Did you say, ‘warp generator’?’

Darren closed his eyes, feeling colder.  ‘Yes.’ 
With the sub-light engines as the only mode of interplanetary travel left to
him and Earth currently 900,000,000 miles away, it would take him almost six
days to get home.  How long can a person go without water? he
wondered.  A lot could happen in five days.  The Vorvons could
unleash whatever they had planned for Earth during Darren’s crawl home.

He kept the sub-light engines on, overriding the AG emitter
trigger, and decelerated to the slowest possible velocity to 110 miles per
second and nose-dived deep into Jupiter’s turbulent clouds.  The force
field projectors eliminating air compression around the Dragonstar suddenly
howled in protest.  Jupiter’s violent winds were battering the fighter
relentlessly, and the computer signaled to Darren that he had to decrease speed
or the projectors would shut down to avoid a power overload.  Darren
turned off the sub-lights and heard the AG emitter activate.  He reduced
speed to ten thousand knots, now able to take in his surroundings.

He was currently thirty miles below the upper most cloud
tops, and from his vantage point, the scene around him invoked awe. 
Jupiter’s 340 mph jet streams were confined in high-altitude, eastward-flowing
“zones” which blew adjacent to darker, low-altitude, westward-flowing “belts,”
mammoth vortices and eddies sandwiched between them.  Convection heat
boiling up from the planet’s liquid metallic hydrogen core stirred everything
to life.  Darren rode one of these belts now, soaring west with the wind,
the sun high off his nine.  The pink and orange clouds in these bands were
stretched hard like taffy, resembling the high-altitude cirrus clouds on Earth.

‘I think we lost him,’ Darren said.  ‘I’m going to
shoot for space now and fix my dragon.  You guys follow me up.’

*

A pounding knock at the door jarred Towsley awake.

He opened his eyes, trying to remember his location in his
state of semi-consciousness.  He had been taking a quick nap in the VIP quarters
at the Southern California Logistics Airport at George AFB.  He flipped on
the light and opened the door to see a young kid with staff sergeant stripes
holding a sat-radio.

“I’m sorry to wake you, sir, but there’s a secured Priority
Message for you.”

“Thanks, sergeant.”  He took the radio, and the kid
left.  “Tango.”  He heard a beep on the other end——the
voice-recognition computer at the Nest——and a voice say, “Colonel
Towsley?  This is Captain Rye, senior watch officer on duty.”

“Yes, go ahead.”

“Sir, we have a possible situation occurring.  I’ve
already notified Admiral Breuer and the rest of the head staff here.”

His heart began to flip-flop.  “What’s going on,
captain?” 
Not now.  Not ever.

“Two minutes ago, Medusa Stare detected a massive EMP event
from Jupiter.”

Towsley sat down on the bed, his legs suddenly weak. 
“A nuclear explosion?”

“Thermo
, sir.  The Associated Press is reporting
that several telescopes around the world picked up what many think is a
supernova, but our analysis concludes that it came from Jupiter.  The
supercomputers are putting the explosion, whatever it was, at a yield just
under seventeen million megatons.”

“Jesus,” Towsley whispered.

“We’re continuing to focus our surveillance on that sector,
but so far we’ve detected nothing unusual outside naturally-produced
phenomena.  No spacecraft or drive flares, but Io is casting high levels
of radiation, higher than usual.  Looks like it bore the brunt of the
explosion, whatever it was.”

“Good enough, captain.  Notify me of anymore activity.”

“Yes, sir.”  He heard a click, and the transmission
went dead.

Towsley set the radio on the night stand, turned off the
light and climbed back into bed.  Three hours ago, the NESSTC had tracked
four unidentified objects leaving Earth’s atmosphere.

Now what was happening near Jupiter?  Something had
exploded with enough energy to shear an entire continent off the Earth’s
surface.  An attack maybe?

He sat up, suddenly restless with ideas.  Yes. 
That was very possible——an alien base or ship which had been destroyed. 
Caliban had never mentioned an interstellar rival during his many
interrogations.

Four bogeys had left Earth.  Three hours ago.

Towsley smiled. 
The cavalry is here.

*

Darren had touched down on Ganymede to begin repairs. 
He allowed his historical landing to give a slight pump to his ego before
thought-opening the panel at the bottom of the AG emitter dome which hid a
button that opened the fighter’s access doors.  He could see the
softball-size hole where Scorch’s slug had punched through.  Motors inside
the Dragonstar’s fuselage popped open the port and starboard access doors and
angled them back over both wings, exposing the fighter’s guts.

‘The primary sub-router on the third power relay is
severed.’  This one supplied power to the warp generator’s main coil and
the active-stealth and invisibility cloak.’

Darren stepped down and tip-toed across the portside coil,
one of two cylindrical objects running the length of the inside fuselage that
served as force field shock absorbers.  Between the coil and the secondary
AG-emitter transformer laid the primary sub-router and the power relay.

Instead of copper wiring, the Dragonstar’s electrical system
used flexible hollow tubes——sub-routers——filled with thick, super-conductive
gel which changed its molecular structure when applied with a current to relay
electricity.  Like different gauges of copper wiring, the sub-routers also
had dissimilar voltage and amperage ratings.  Darren reached in and yanked
out both damaged ends of the tube.

With no spares to replace the sub-router, he had to use the
only other tube with the same amperage rating:  the sub-router to the
AMDS/laser-radar sensor.  Darren had no choice but to unplug his
Dragonstar’s eyes.  He disconnected both ends of the electrical tube,
plugged one end into the socket on the third power relay and the other into the
vacant spot on the power plant socket board.  He now had active-stealth,
invisibility and warp generation back online.

‘Well, there it is.  I have a blind dragon, but it can
still fly and fight.’  Feelings of indestructibility and god-like swagger
before the moonship battle had died away.  Their Dragonstars were not
invincible.  And neither were they.

‘Are you done, Seymour?’

‘Affirmative.  Running pre-flight now.’

‘How did the Vorvons get a Dragonstar?’ Jorge
wondered.  ‘What’s going on anyway?’

‘The only thing I can think of,’ Darren said, ‘is that they
captured one when they invaded Xrelmara.  War booty.’

‘Yeah, but how many?’ Tony asked.  ‘Hopefully just the
one.  He’s enough to handle.’

‘Scorch is quite the bad ass.  He’s accurate as hell.’