Into the Black: Odyssey One (32 page)

She certainly didn’t expect what happened next.

A sudden impact, a few feet to her left jerked her attention to the side, just in time to see a blur of motion, rebound off the ground and fly into her. She cried out in shock and heard the aliens weapons open fire at the same moment, charring the place she had been standing, to a cinder. Then she hit the ground with a heavy weight pressing down on her.

“Stay here, Lady,” the weight ordered as it got off her, slinging an odd looking rifle from its shoulder and aiming it back down the street.

“Who are you?” she asked.
Military… they must have arrived finally…

“No time,” he triggered his weapon, causing her to flinch back in horror, as it let out a whining roar and a flash of firelight.

What kind of weapon is that?
She couldn’t place it. Certainly it wasn’t on the police standard issue books, or even any of the military books that she knew of. Tsari shook her head and tried to make sense of the strange figure in armor that was kneeling over her, firing an imposing weapon, back at the things that had trashed her community.

That last thought was enough for her. If this guy was shooting at those things, he was a friend. “Hey you got a charge pack for a Milosan Laser?”

She saw the figure twist slightly to look at her and swore it looked somehow confused, “sorry Lady, got nothing like that.”

She let out a slight curse under her breath, an atrocious habit, but one she’d picked up a long time ago and had never been able to break away from. To her surprise the armor turned around to look at her again and when it spoke, the voice was laughing.

“Here,” it handed her a small hand weapon that was over four times the weight of her laser. “There’s no safety. Point, and pull the small lever.”

*****

Deacon grinned under his helmet. He’d been hanging around these people for days, on the Odyssey and they never cursed. It irritated him to no end, how reasonable they always seemed to be. Nobody was that calm. Nobody. So when the translator actually whispered a few choice invectives in his ear, he did something that he never thought he’d do…, he handed her his sidearm.

Then he returned his full focus to the things, the Drasin ship had landed in this formerly peaceful suburb. They were ugly, that much was certain. Their armored forms were covered in something slick and slimy that gave the large things a decidedly sinister air. They had a vaguely insectoid appearance, just like the long range scans indicated, but he’d had seen that before. Any exo-skeletal armor tends to take on insect like features, when it’s taken far enough. God simply got things right, when he made those things.

Sam Deacon shrugged internally and levelled the big rifle on the thing again and opened fire. Across the street he could see and hear the rifles of his two comrades joining in.

*****

The Drasin soldier drones were enjoying this run, as much as they enjoyed anything. This group hadn’t had a lot of chance to see the action so far in the war and it was only in the fighting that they found meaning.

The six members of the clutch were pretty much walking through the area like they owned it. Local police were unable to mount an effective defence, and if the military’s ground troops were anything like their Navy, it was going to a pretty easy job.

The leader stopped when he saw a lone female human march out and demand that he leave her community. Laughter was soon bouncing back and forth between his squad, until he finally got himself under control and lifted his weapon toward the brave fool.

As he was about to fire, a blurring motion swept her from his sights, faster than he was able to track effectively, as he fired on reflex. The particle beam erupted from his forward mandible, ripping up the stonework street, but utterly missing its target.

He summoned two others quickly, taking chances wasn’t part of his makeup and the three of them slowly approached the building that the motion had vanished behind. When they were within only a short distance, a mottled black and grey figure appeared from behind the building and hefted a weapon.

Expecting no problems, despite the previous miss, the soldier took his time aiming. To date, the ground weapons, on this world were laughably ineffective.

The roar of sound and light seemed to stagger him and he fell back in surprise and shock, a burning pain erupting through his body. As if from a distance, he could hear the others calling for him, but it was too dark to find them and soon their voices were lost in the blackness as well.

*****

With the immense acceleration that an Archangel was capable of, it took Stephanus only moments to find what he was looking for and to reach it. He was mildly surprised for a moment, when he realized that the Drasin was still on his tail, but mentally berated himself for assuming that he’d lose them that easily. He’d have to do better now that he had located one of the Trojan points of the system, and he’d use the asteroids in the area to make certain of it.

It was difficult to remember that the technological edge he was used having in previous conflicts, wasn’t certain out here. The fact that the technologies they had encountered were so wildly different than Earth’s made it even harder to understand, or even make an accurate guess.

He jinked the fighter under a tumbling mountain, firing his retro-thrusters as he passed it, cutting forward motion to almost a standstill in an instant and climbing ‘vertical’ in relation to his fighter to hide behind the asteroid.

The Cee-Emm field that surrounded his fighter allowed for such insane maneuvers, and it was one advantage that he seemed to hold over the enemy pilot. The Drasin fighter ripped past, decelerating wildly as it spun around to aim at him, but Steph had precious seconds in which he could react first.

He loosed three rockets, haloing the target in his Helmet HUD long enough for each of the ‘fire and forget’ munitions to accelerate away from his plane, then he keyed the vertical thrusters again and dropped under the mountain, rotating back the way he’d come, and fired his main reactors.

*****

Behind the human fighter, an alien craft shook slightly under its own heavy power, as it decelerated toward the retreating target. Its sensors reached out ahead and detected the munitions that were hurtling through space towards it, and it briefly contemplated its options.

After a split second, it locked the rockets up and opened fire.

*****

The Archangel standard munitions were powered by the same technology as the fighters themselves and were, in many ways, even more effective, since the mass involved was considerably less.

As the rocket left the Counter-Mass field that surrounded the fighter, it lurched briefly into what could be described as ‘real space’, its acceleration limited enormously by the laws of physics, as they applied to normal dimensional space.

It took only a matter of tenths of a second for the rocket’s own CM fields to power up, reducing the appreciable mass of the munitions, to a number that infinitely approached zero. When that happened, it accelerated on its pre-determined course, like a laser beam.

In those tenths of a second, however, the alien fighter had already fired its lasers and destroyed the three weapons, leaving nothing but a cone of rapidly dispersing fragments in their place.

*****

“Damn!” Stephanus swore as his munitions blinked off the HUD, well short of their target. “This guy is no joke…”

He risked an instinctive glance over his shoulder, but there was nothing to see, of course. The black of space prevented him from seeing much of anything at any reasonable range, and the fighter he was tangling with wasn’t at what he would call a ‘reasonable’ range.

Turning his focus back to the hub, Steph checked the range and noted that the Drasin was once more closing the gap and coming up on his six, hard. Steph growled hitting his retro rockets and flipping the Archangel, end for end.

Two missiles left,
he thought, checking the munitions stores from the corner of his eye, as he armed the remaining Havoc missiles and haloed the incoming fighter.

Whatever else this guy was, Stephanus had to grant him a certain grudging respect. The enemy flyer was a real pilot, unlike most of the drones they were dealing with…

Stephanus blinked, a thought coming up to him from the past.

It clicked in, and the light came on.

“Drones,” he said suddenly into an open comm channel.

“Pardon me, Boss?” Racer asked a moment later as the time lag kicked in.

“They’re drones! Just freaking drones!” He snapped, “There’s only
one
real pilot out here! He’s directing the rest!”

Another pause as the time lag filtered though. Steph didn’t wait; he armed his seeker countermeasures as the countdown clock ticked down on his meeting with the only Drasin flyer he’d yet seen that was worth his time as a pilot.

“Are you sure, Boss man?”

This time it was Brute, sounding genuinely disbelieving.

Steph didn’t blame him.

No one, NO ONE, used drones for combat duty.

It was stupid, it was wasteful, and it gave the enemy a decided advantage.

The United States Airforce, back when it still existed as a discrete military organization, had a plan, once upon a time. They used some old airframes from the venerable F16 platform, rebuilt them with the latest in technology, gave them combat programs, and placed a wing of them under the command of a single pilot.

The result was a cluster-fuck of near epic proportions.

While marginally successful in simulations, the real world effect of the birds was decidedly poor. In spite of having higher acceleration rates and tighter maneuvering than any manned vehicle, the drone birds were consistently shot out of the sky, by vastly inferior planes.

Simply put, they were predictable in a way that humans never were.

Just like the fighters, Stephanus was looking at now.

All except one of them, that was.

“Yeah,” Steph said dryly as he keyed up all his countermeasures and programmed a macro with a few flicks of his eyelids and motions of his fingers. “I’m sure…”

“Angel Lead…” He almost whispered as the Drasin fighter closed to within extreme targeting range. “Fox two.”

Stephanus’ finger snapped the firing stud shut, and the recessed missile rack dropped its final two birds from the limited space within the Archangel Fighter, and his last two Havoc Missiles screamed silently away.

*****

The Soldier drone went down, its leg shattered in a dozen places by the burst from the squad’s MX-112 rifles. They didn’t pause to evaluate it, Deacon merely took a step forward and put another burst into the drone, center mass, while the other two fired as they moved, targeting the other enemy units.

Deacon held the rifle high as he stepped in, eyeing the downed target briefly, then hit it again when it twitched.

“Stop moving and die, you dumb bastard,” he muttered darkly, glancing over for the others in his squad.

A short distance away, the two troopers that he had with him caught one of the other drones in a blistering crossfire, the MX-112 auto-rifles spitting fire as they dropped the drone hard.

At close range the MX-112 rifle wasn’t at its most effective, but he was glad to see that it was enough.

He froze when his armor’s HUD threw up a warning light from his eight o’clock and he instantly threw himself hard to his left, as a sizzling stream of energy fried the rubble behind him to a crackling sludge.

Deacon hit the ground rolling, noting somewhere in his peripheral mind, that the local cop had thrown herself to one side as well and came up firing.

This time the target was about fifty meters away, just outside the point-blank range for the MX-112.

The magnetic accelerator spit out the first of a ten round burst, its muzzle velocity over three thousand meters per second. The round cracked the sound barrier instantly, punctuating the whine of the rifle with the snap of a sonic boom, and crossed the fifty-meter gap on momentum alone.

Then, just before slamming into its target, the round ignited a second stage booster and began to accelerate again.

The overall effect, at fifty meters wasn’t much more effective than a ballistic round, but the ignited mini-rocket slammed into the Drone with enough force to shatter its armor and penetrate through to its interior before the onboard explosives detonated.

The remaining ten rounds struck less than a second later.

As the drone dropped, a hissing and smoking fluid pouring out of its cracked shell, Deacon straightened up, slowly turning with his rifle ready, as he surveyed the immediate area.

“Area clear.”

*****

“We lost track of the groups when they slipped into the city proper, Sir…”

Admiral Tanner turned on his heel, “trajectories?”

“Analysed,” the technician handed him a crystal data plaque.

The Admiral glowered down at the information, noting that the landing locations for the Drasin matched up with the projected approach of the group that had fallen from the unidentified ship’s shuttle.

“Fine. Get me an observer on the ground in each of the reported hotspots,” Tanner growled, slapping the plaque back into the techs chest. “I want a pair of eyes on the enemy, and
five
pairs on the objects that dropped from the unidentified shuttle.”

“Yes Sir.”

*****

Teams Two, Six, and Seven stood perched on the top of one of the Scrapers that made up the immense population center, they had landed in and looked down at the scene below them.

It was awesome, in a bizarre sort of way.

The Drasin Drones had landed on the rooftops, and found that they had more than enough space to set up operations where they were.

This made sense given that each rooftop was larger than a football field.

So they’d actually appropriated three of the huge sprawling buildings and, much to the annoyance, or downright fear, of the local military, they’d apparently decided to get ready and work their way down through the buildings.