Dark Dragons (49 page)

Darren slowed to five thousand knots and mentally pictured a
singularity missile screaming out of the small rotary carriage underneath the
cockpit.  A satisfying little shudder went through the Dragonstar when the
missile leaped ahead a nanosecond later.  He booted into higher velocity
to ride the missile home.  He wanted to watch the troop carrier die.

The missile activated its optional guidance——AMDS/radar,
infrared, optical viewing ——immediately found the alien ship, and locked
on.  The missile disappeared into the thunderstorm, and for a split second
nothing happened.  Darren thought at first the missile had been destroyed
or self-destructed and prepared to fire another when the towering, dark-gray thunderstorm
exploded.  The first retina-burning glare was the twin black hole warhead
detonating against the ship’s hull followed by the brighter, secondary flash of
the ship itself as it succumbed to the gravity-shearing forces unleashed upon
it.  The cloud evaporated when pulsating bubbles of glowing, universal
properties spread across the sky.

Darren fired four more of his singularity missiles, and they
raced ahead, searching for bad guys.  One of the missiles turned north——it
had found a target.  Two others turned northeast when they found
targets.  The last missile kept heading east, and seconds later it, too,
turned northeast.  The Vorvon troop carriers over the Middle East quickly
descended toward the surface to evade the incoming missiles.  Blue pulses
of energy flashed out in a futile attempt to bring them down, but Darren’s
weapons were jinking too quickly for them to score a hit.

Darren thought-throttled his Dragonstar to maximum velocity,
and the fighter pulsed over the landscape at MACH sixteen.  He caught the
image of the Pyramids, the Nile River, and Cairo zipping past him before a
miniature sun flared ahead over the Suez Canal, so bright the early evening
side of the planet lit up in false daylight.  Another explosion tore open
the sky, followed by another, and another.  Darren banked to starboard to
avoid the deadly fireworks and turned a few degrees back to port, descending
toward the Mediterranean, slowing his descent to five thousand knots.

Checking the AMDS, he did not see any more troop carriers or
assault cruisers in his immediate area but for an intimidating formation of
seven Vorvon pods——sixty-three fighters ——pulsing west over Russia between
35,200 and 42,400 feet.  The incredible number of bandits would have given
another pilot pause and trepidation, perhaps, but not to Darren’s brainwashed
death-defiance.  Sixty-three fighters were too juicy a target to
ignore.  He turned in their direction and accelerated.

Six equally brave Su-27 Flanker air superiority fighters
rose from the vicinity of Moscow to meet the invaders, too.  A single
Vorvon trilobite peeled off from the formation and dove to contend with
them.  Four hundred miles away, Darren put the Dragonstar’s targeting
telescope on the enemy fighter, a rotating reticle forming on the vehicle, and
fired an optically-guided laser blast.  At this distance, atmospheric
diffraction degraded the punch of long-range laser pulses, and Earth’s pea soup
atmosphere had abated the laser strike down to half its kill strength. 
Still, Darren managed to knock the Vorvon out of the sky, the vehicle spinning
and smoking to the ground.

Four invading fighters broke formation to deal with the
pesky Russians below them.  Darren smiled and repeated the same attack
times four.  This time, two pods of Vorvons fanned out into a pair of
flat, offensive-formed wedges and dove for the vexing humans who they believed
had killed five of their brethren.

Darren switched on the Feint Mode and transmitted a single
false echo quickly rising up from the surface to meet the Vorvons at MACH
seven.  Darren blew away three fighters closest to the radar echo with the
laser cannons, and the entire formation of fifty-five alien invaders reacted
accordingly, broke ranks and pounced on his darting, zigzagging ghost like an
army of dimwitted cats chasing an imaginary mouse.

Darren directed the false signal away to starboard and
toward the surface, adding two more echoes to the deception and inciting
further erratic, reactionary maneuvers among the enemy.  In the confusion,
one of the Su-27 Flanker’s had managed to smoke a Vorvon fighter with an
air-to-air missile. 
Nice one, Ivan.

About fifteen cubic miles of Russian airspace had become the
semblance of a swarm of insects buzzing around a street lamp.  Darren’s
eyes flittered across his visor as he picked off Vorvon after Vorvon with his
rotating laser cannons from three hundred miles out.  Programming twenty
all-purpose, fire-and-forget missiles for air-intercept, he triggered the
mental
FIRE
button in his mind.  The
weapons spewed forth out of the Dragonstar’s wing ports like Chinese
rockets.  The missiles communicated with one another, locking up
individual targets, and accelerated after their marks.

Darren finally arrived on battle and waded into the
furball.  He brought down ten Vorvons in a flash with the laser cannons,
and accelerated out of the cloud of Vorvon fighters before one of the pilots
could spot him.  They were still chasing his bogus sensor echoes, firing
lasers and missiles at imaginary enemies.  Four Russian pilots, however,
had died valiantly, the last two Su-27s holding their own for the moment but it
would not be long. . . .

Darren stood his Dragonstar on its tail, on its back, and
then rolled it right-side up.  The Earth’s surface completely filled his
windshield as he dove for the confused fighters again, pressed into his seat
before the centrifugal counter compensated.  He primed fifteen missiles
for air-to-air mode and let them fly; fireworks lit the skies above Moscow as
fifteen bad guys died.

Surface-to-air missiles, slow, clumsy and useless, rose from
the ring of air-defense batteries surrounding the Russian capital.  Darren
inadvertently flew into the path of one and had to swat it out of the sky with
the forward anti-missile pod.

A diamond-shaped trilobite shot across his windshield, and
he inhaled sharply, turning his fighter to starboard.  A laser shot from
an oblique angle struck the starboard wing underneath, issuing a loud BANG and
a momentary shudder through the fighter, but the Dragonstar’s ablative armor
absorbed the brunt.  Darren’s breath exploded from his lungs.

Rushing toward the ground, he promptly leveled out, booted
east and back up again.  The remaining fighters, twenty-seven of them,
dove for him just as he climbed to meet them.  The Feint Mode clearly had lost
its effectiveness because they now had a visual lock on him.

He dove for the surface again, leveled out at 200 feet and
dropped the throttle.  His Dragonstar went to full speed, and the
terrain-following laser-radar automatically snapped on.  Approaching
Moscow, he stood the fighter on its port wing, split the spaces between the
skyscrapers, and right-sided his bird again as the city fell behind him.

The aliens were still on him and descending.  A
narrowing cloud of missiles materialized on the sensor scope at his six. 
The EKG line on his visor bounced faster, and panic tried to overtake
him.  The anti-missile pod at the rear of the fuselage was about to get
busy.  The defensive launcher went active and fired a fusillade of red
stars to the rear.  Suddenly chilled with dread, he went to port to dodge
the incoming weapons.

*

A man standing next to his car on the M-9 east of Zubstov
caught a split-second image of a black
something
zip overhead.  A
sparkling crescendo of light erupted above his head, and thunder pealed back
the earth.  He hit the deck just when the windows in his car
exploded.  All along the highway, people were locking up their brakes.

*

Darren looked at his scope, saw he had killed two-thirds of
the missiles, but the rest were still on him.  The anti-missile pod spewed
its fire again, but the alien projectiles were too close.  He reared his
Dragonstar to a halt, praying his impromptu maneuver would work.  The
missiles sped past him, lost their lock-on, and detonated.  Light blazed
into the cockpit, and missile fragments rattled off his fighter.  The
enemy fighters were still behind him, searching.

He dropped his Dragonstar to the surface, rounded a clump of
forest trees and descended a few feet above a cobbled street which ran through
a pleasant little farming village straight out of a Renaissance painting. 
He didn’t see anyone in their yards or in the streets this time of night. 
Everyone had probably locked themselves in their basements.

The aliens appeared above him, and Darren hovered his
fighter up into someone’s front yard next to a large birch tree for extra
cover.  A pair of horses in a pen next to the stone farm house were
jumping and bucking wildly to his alien presence.

The fireflies high overhead were continuing southwest. 
It looked like they had slowed down.  They were definitely looking for
him.

A minute or so later, the Vorvon fighters disappeared over
the horizon, and Darren relaxed his ridged posture in the seat.  He looked
to the house next to him and saw an old man recording him with a cell phone
from the living room window.  When he realized Darren had spotted him, the
man quickly closed the curtains.

He looked up and searched for bad guys, but the dimming
early evening skies over western Russia were finally clear.  As he eased
the Dragonstar out from under the birch tree, his comm began to buzz.

He opened Sub-Space Channel One.  ‘What is it?’

‘Darren, this is Nate!  Our surveillance sat just
detected a gravity flash over Fort Benning in Georgia!  Jesus, there goes
Fort Jackson, Camp Lejeune!  Fort Bragg!  Right in a straight
line!  Rad sensors say they’re singularity missiles!  Eighty
kilotons!”

Scorch.

Darren gunned the throttles, heard the anti-graviton emitter
roar as his Dragonstar screamed over Poland.  He knew what the alien was
thinking——the bastard had given up its search for them and decided to get their
attention instead with a brazen, methodical attack on three defenseless army
bases.  Fort Benning, he remembered from somewhere, had over 100,000
people stationed there.  How many humans had just died because of one
megalomaniacal alien pilot?  Satellite data showed the Norfolk Naval
Shipyard in Virginia currently disappearing under an incinerating mushroom
cloud.  Scorch was going up the east coast, zapping every populated
military station he came upon.  The alien was calling them out.

Forty-three hundred miles away, it would take Darren about
twenty minutes to reach the U.S. at full speed with the atmo drive. 
Looking at his scopes, he saw that he was the closest to intercept, the others
too distant.

‘I’m on him!’ Jorge shouted.  ‘It’ll take me a few
minutes!’

‘Negative!  You guys stay on the troop carriers! 
I know his tricks . . . this bastard’s mine!’  He heard Tony garble what
sounded like a protest, but Darren’s revving sub-light engines momentarily
distorted the comm signals.  He wasn’t going to wait twenty minutes.

Darren ignored the
GRAVITY
PRESENT
warning on his visor and the very possibility of damaging his
Dragonstar with the breakneck sub-lights in the atmosphere.  He sent the
bypass code to the propulsion computers, and the sub-light engines kicked the
fighter ahead on their slowest speed setting of 110 miles per second. 
Darren heard a bang behind him, and a damage window popped up on his visor. 
A tertiary circuit relay had just fried . . . nothing serious.  With the
air-control force fields unable to reduce the air friction at this ungodly
speed, a three thousand-degree fireball flared across the Dragonstar’s forward
surfaces, and another warning appeared——the telescope’s circuits in the nose
were overheating as were the tips to the laser cannons.

It took Darren nearly forty seconds of 110 mps ass-hauling
across the Atlantic to arrive at the east coast, and he would have shot himself
out of the atmosphere in a straight line had he not shut down the sub-lights
and re-lit the anti-graviton drive.

His fighter shuddered as the air-control force fields
reacquired the airflow and let out a loud bang when the starboard shock
absorber took the brunt of the massive deceleration and blew two of its seven
coils out of their emitter cells. 
Towsley’s engineers won’t be able to
duct tape that.
  Fire suppression automatons inside the engine chamber
spewed retardant and quickly killed the flames but not before wisps of orange
radioactive gas released from the emitter cells rolled into the cockpit. 
Darren’s helmet, sensing the deadly toxin, closed off the filtered breather
mask as a precaution and switched on his suit’s air supply.

Darren could feel starboard lateral control had gone
sluggish.  The fighter jolted slightly like a spooked horse whenever he
rolled or yawed hard to starboard, the remaining five shock coils warning him
to ease off or they too would blow.  Damaged, listless, and now about to
tangle with Scorch——Darren did not have time to contemplate his dilemma.

Incredibly, the alien had his active-stealth shut off in a
deliberate effort to reveal his location, like a twitching sea snake faking
injury in order to draw its prey in closer.

Darren would oblige him.  The automatic-search
telescope acquired Scorch five miles below at thirty-eight thousand feet over
New Jersey and computed the targeting data to the weapons system.  Darren
fired a hate-filled, ten-round blast from his gauss cannon.  Unfortunately,
Scorch had been tracking Darren with the alien’s passive AMDS.  He
received four rounds of imprecise return fire just behind the cockpit before
jinking left to avoid the last rounds in the gauss stream.

Scorch appeared to have been hit.  Darren watched the
enemy Dragonstar lurch violently, roll left to right a bit before activating
its invisibility and active-stealth.  He spotted dark smoke, a blood trail
following the wounded beast, and Darren felt a hunter’s relief that all was not
lost.  But slowly, the smoke dissipated and vanished altogether when
Scorch activated its internal fire suppressors.