Into the Black: Odyssey One (31 page)

Stephanus wheeled his fighter around in a hundred and eighty degree spin without killing his forward momentum, loosed a missile and two bursts from his cannon and spun back. Behind him, the pursuing Drasin fighter stumbled directly into the hell storm barrage thirty-three seconds later, erupting into a ball of flame and expanding debris.

“Yeehaw!” Brute yelled over the tactical network, “Lovely shooting, Boss-man!”

Stephanus suppressed a smile, instead snapping an order into his mic. “Can the chitchat, Brute. And watch your six!”

Brute laughed over the net as he flipped his fighter in a graceful pirouette, his cannon blazing as he did. “No problemo, Boss Man! These jokers react like computer drones!”

Stephanus had to admit that Brute had a point, the enemy fighters flew well, but predictably. Do this and they do that. They were either relying heavily on computer interfaces, or discipline was extremely rigid among the enemy flyers. Either way, the Archangels had a marked advantage over their flying foes in this fight.

Chapter 20

“No!” Milla declared firmly. “I will NOT!”

Major Brinks grinned nastily, exchanging looks with Lt Savoy, “You’re the one who wanted to come along planet side. This is the only way that’s going to happen.”

“This is insane!” She tried reasoning with him.

Savoy shrugged, “welcome to the military. You think any organization with a quarter ounce of sanity would use the motto, ‘It’s not a job! It’s an adventure!”

“But… But…” Milla stammered.

“Look,” Brinks began as reassuringly as possible, “I’ll be with you all the way down. You’re going to be perfectly safe… at least until we hit dirt.”

Milla’s armored form shifted back from Savoy, and Brinks could read shock in her stance. “Until?”

He shrugged again, an awkward motion in armor. “War is a funny thing. It doesn’t allow any guarantees.”

Milla shuddered, but finally acquiesced. “Very well… What do I have to do?”

“Whatever you’re going to do, you’d better do it quick!” Samuels snarled over the intercom. “We’ve got three more bogeys joining this here party, and they look a might pissed!”

Savoy pulled Milla around, standing her in front of Brinks so he could clip her armor to the Major’s with the built in security clips. Then he floated the two of them toward the back of the shuttle, actually bouncing off the wall, as Jennifer Samuels slammed the stick hard over to avoid a burst of fire.

“Green light!” Samuels shouted over the intercom, “We’re lined up! You’ve got a thirty second window! Go, Go, Go!”

“I am not certain of this!” Milla screamed as she was roughly manhandled to the open air lock.

“Too late,” Savoy grinned and threw them both out of the orbiting shuttle craft.

He watched for ten seconds, as the boss and the space lady floated clear, then grinned privately. How many troops could say that they had just tossed their commanding officer out an airlock and expect to get away with it?

Some days, I love my job.
Savoy grinned, checking the shuttles approach velocity and the tell-tale green light. All the numbers checked, and he had another five seconds on his window, so he grabbed the bulkhead and threw himself after his boss.

*****

Jumping from orbit bears few similarities to skydiving in the classic sense. The first few moments are more akin to swimming or the types of dreams where you try and try to move, but can never seem to budge. After that, however, the sudden acceleration as your orbit decays is, without doubt, frightening. Your stomach feels like it’s being driven into your spine, and pity the poor person who made the mistake of eating before his or her first jump.

Milla, fortunately, hadn’t been hungry during the preparations for entry into the system, and only had to worry about the spinning planet that loomed ever closer beneath her. Tossing her cookies into a sealed helmet was asking for trouble, particularly when the next time you’d be able to remove said helmet was sixty vertical miles straight down.

Brinks’ tight grip kept her from struggling much, as the planet’s gravity pulled them down, but it left him little time to properly guide their descent.

“Miss Chans!” Major Brinks yelled over the tactical sub channel, “Please stop trying to struggle! I have to give this my entire attention.”

Her struggles instantly died down, the young woman going limp in her suit as the fear of what might happen overrode the fear of what was happening.

The Major thanked whatever God watched over lunatics, as he examined the HUD system overlaid over his visor. He could see the LZ lit up in green, with colored concentric circles surrounding it. Yellow for a close drop, orange for a long walk. Red indicated a distance that would prevent him from being a factor in the coming battle and was a position to be avoided, since his team would be relying on every combat hand they could get.

He was fairly confident that he could hit the inner green dot.

The gravity of the planet had quickly caught them in an irrevocable tug as Brinks adjusted his trajectory with slight puffs from the MMU system he had attached to his backpack.

*****

An observer on the planets’ surface would have had a very interesting sight on that chilly pre-dawn morning. Earlier great glowing orbs had sliced through the cold atmosphere, heating up the earth where they passed close on their approach to the great city. An attentive observer would have been able to hear the explosions and screams that marked the passage of those first orbs of blazing light.

But now there were new players in the pre-dawn sky. Twenty-one separate points of light appeared, moving against the dimming starscape, organized into seven groups, of three. Lights that quickly brightened to a nova-like intensity as they plummeted to earth, friction and heat build-up bleeding off of them, in a trail of flame that stretched to the heavens.

The ablative coating that made up the outer three layers of their armored suits bled off first, leaving fiery trails of light behind each of the soldiers, as they drifted together.

When that was gone, the inner armor began to heat up and glow, as the heat friction continued to build, but the material held and the heat merely fed the thermocouples that shunted the extra juice to the suit’s capacitors.

As the old Earth saying, and new Earth motto, went…

Waste not, want not.

*****

In the Command and Control Center, the local activity had jumped up a hundredfold as men and women rushed around, tracking the incoming objects and tried to rally support to their landing zones.

“There’s a Drasin lander coming in over the City Center!”

“Satellite defences ineffective!”

“Admiral! The unidentified ship has launched a shuttle…”

Tanner spun in his chair, glaring at the last speaker. “Where?”

“Entering polar orbit now, Sir…” The bewildered tech said, looking up. “Four of the Landers have been destroyed, along with their fighter compliments…”

“Congratulate the gunners…”

“It wasn’t us.” The Tech said, shaking his head.

Tanner growled, but nodded as he turned back to the threat board.

Who ARE these people!?

*****

At twenty thousand feet, Brink’s visor finally lightened as the unearthly glow of superheated metal and composite material faded to a tolerable dull orange. He could see the spinning horizon and began shifting his weight and Milla’s, to guide the airflow around them and shift their fall slightly in the desired direction.

When he hit five thousand feet, he triggered his ‘chute’.

The ‘chute’ wasn’t a haphazard masse of rope and silk, nor even a carefully designed airfoil. It was a small block of metal that drew on the suit’s internal power and energized its core with the same anti-mass technology that gave the Archangel fighter-craft their VTOL capabilities.

This small pack separated from the armored suit, connected by two super strong wire cables, leaving Brinks and Milla dangling under the floating pack.

*****

The other soldiers were in an OILO, Orbital Insertion Low Opening, operational stance and waited until they slipped under five hundred feet to trigger their own ‘chutes’. In teams of three, their aborted falls became great, sweeping glides that brought them in, low over the population center and the alien orbital pods.

“Teams, this is one. Call by the numbers.” Brinks ordered as he observed from his altitude.

“One, Two. No contact.”

“One, Three. No Contact.”

“One, Four. Have a visual. Sector G10, firefight in a populated area. Civilians… Hostiles… No local soldiers yet… look like a couple cops, though.”

“Four, One.” Brinks interrupted the soldiers, “Cops?”

“Affirm. Two uniforms, cops or local militia. Resistance ineffective.”

“Four, One. Render assistance. Three, provide backup for Four.”

“Affirm.”

“Affirm.”

“Five through Seven, continue reporting.”

“One, Five. Minor contact. Looks like a pod had a rough landing. No motion.”

“One, Six. No contact.”

“One, Seven. Contact. Major battle at I9 and J1, require assistance.”

“Teams Two and Six, render assistance to Seven. Five approaches with caution remain in contact.”

A echoing of ‘affirm’ came back over the net as the soldiers moved to their tasks.

*****

Stephanus cursed into his mouthpiece, as he jinked his fighter hard about, barely avoiding some type of compressed energy burst, fired from the Drasin fighter that was dogging him.

“This bastard is better than the rest! Brute, give me a hand over here!”

Brute’s voice came back over the tacnet, almost instantly, “Righty-oh, Boss-man. Inbound on your Nine, high.”

Stephanus looked sharply to his left and spotted the twin burn of Brute’s fighter, as it angled around toward him. “Roger, Brute. Rope-a-dope?”

“You got it, Boss-man,” Brute’s grinned voice came back.

As the Drasin moved in for another burst at Stephanus, Brute blasted in from above with his guns blazing. The Drasin was fast, and skipped to the left to avoid the shells. While his attention was diverted by Brute’s attack, Stephanus flipped his plane around, killed his momentum with a long burn, and rocketed down the enemy fighter’s throat.

The Drasin, though taken by surprise, angled his own thrust and skipped just above the barrage of rounds, that Stephanus had sent his way. A second later, he was rocketing off at an angle from the fight and circling for another move.

“Damn!” Stephanus cursed, “is it just me or does anyone else notice something different about that bastard?”

“Other than the fact that he’s a competent pilot?” Brute asked with a wry grin.

“Yeah. Other than that.”

“Nope.”

Stephanus shook his head, “Something about this one is familiar…”

“Worry about it later, Boss-man! He’s coming around for another pass.”

Stephanus checked and sure enough the fighter was coming in for another try. “Peel out, Brute. I’m gonna bird-dog him.”

“Got it.”

As Brute’s fighter peeled out of the area on full burn, Stephanus checked his displays and found what he was looking for. The Drasin was coming in tight, on his six, as he let out the throttle and showed the enemy a taste of what an Archangel was really capable of.

*****

Tsari Reme depleted her small laser’s charge into the creature that had just finished murdering no less than three of the people in her community. It wasn’t a big community actually, just a close knit sub-section of the capital. She had grown up here. Tsari knew everyone here by their first name and they all knew her.

As the laser whined dry, she tried to swallow, but her mouth was too dry. Her throat worked continuously, without any real function as the thing turned its gaze on her. Some movement to the rear of it shook her attention and her heart dropped.

Oh God,
she thought in shock.
There are more of them.

Five more of them to be precise. And they all turned on Tsari and her junior partner, a young man named Nethan.

“Do you have a charge?”

He shook his head wordlessly, his worthless laser held limply in his hand.

She growled, though not really at him. It wasn’t his fault, the local constabulary wasn’t supposed to be faced with this sort of thing. Hell, most of the time, they gave directions to lost people from Central Systema and the rest was spent on domestic calls. A ship crashing into their little community and disgorging six lumbering beasts with a taste for carnage wasn’t in the handbook.

The things were huge, almost a dozen feet high at the shoulders and they moved with a purpose. Their purpose was destruction and they were good at it. Tsari winced as another store front was trashed by a casual backhanded swing from an armored fist. She wasn’t sure what to do
… but… By God! this is my community and I’m going to do something.

Nethan stared, goggle-eyed, as his normally sane and well adjusted, superior strode out into the middle of the street and pointed her empty weapon at the creatures.

“I don’t know who you are, or what you are, but I want you out of my neighborhood!”

*****

Corporal Sam Deacon shook his head, as the computer relayed the translation to his ear, “brave Lady, that one. Stupid as all hell, but brave.”

Beside him, his two squad mates nodded their heads, “you got that right, Sam.”

They watched as the creatures actually paused in mid-destruction, and stared at the Constable with a degree of confusion that was actually laughable. Unfortunately it didn’t last long, and the team could see them aiming their weapons at the lady cop.

“Move!” Deacon ordered as he kicked off the ground and launched himself into the fray.

Behind him, the two men didn’t bother to reply they just followed his example and jumped from their perch, into the middle of the battle, on the street below.

*****

Tsari entertained a brief fantasy that they were actually listening, when the things paused in their actions and looked at her, then each other. When they lifted their weapons toward her, she again tried in vain to swallow and consigned her soul to the after-life.