Opening Moves (74 page)

“Uh-oh,” Annie muttered, the simple sound drawing the attention of every member of the crew. The shuttle's cockpit was something of a can of sardines at the moment, with Tarek and Alexej at the flight controls and Annie sitting sideways behind them, monitoring the small craft's rather limited sensors. Llyr and Rául were a few feet even farther back with nothing to really do but twiddle their thumbs.

Tarek licked his lips. “Care to elaborate, Annie?”

“The Dominion main fleet is being preceded by a rather massive screen of fighters, boss, and...,” she drew out the last word as her fingers executed a drum roll on the edge of her console, “they've just broken through the defensive line the Tanithans had, ah,
hoped
to establish. We have a bit of a problem.”

The defenses of the planet and the efficiency of the troops manning them came as quite a shock to Tarek and his crew. After the detailed, in-depth orbital strongholds of the Érenni and the fearless conduct of the mostly female aliens who had manned them, the disorder and barely noticeable impact of the trade junction's defenses was more than disappointing.

“Annie?” Tarek prompted her again, this time a lot more impatiently.

“
I'm trying to sift through these crap sensors' information here,” Annie replied defensively, then swallowed hard. “Did I say we had a problem? Well, make that five problems. Five fighters heading our way!”

Rául cursed and Llyr looked a bit grimmer even than usual.

Tarek instinctively began to look for the enemy ships outside even though he knew that it was nearly impossible to spot with the unaided eyes something moving as fast as a fighter. That the Ashani fighters already had started to attack targets of opportunity also meant that the battle of Tanith's orbitals was over before it had even begun. “Can we reach the atmosphere in time?”

Alexej had Annie relay him the incoming fighters' speed and vectors. “No, no way, boss,” he grunted. “I do have another plan, but you're not going to like it.”

“They're closing in fast!” Annie warned, her face a mask of worry.

“
If it keeps us alive just do it!” Tarek shouted back, and a second later he felt himself being pushed back into his seat as the shuttle turned.

“
Damn it, Duchess! What the hell are you doing!?” Rául's squeaked.

“
We can't outrun them or out fight them,” the tall Eurasian pilot said through gritted teeth as the shuttle's full acceleration kicked in. “We'll have to try and shake them off between the orbitals.”

The young Portuguese navigator's eyes widened until they looked like dishes as the cockpit's view began to fill with the planet's orbital dockyards, warehouses and shipyards, many of them branching out structures that looked like gigantic metal snow crystals. Many of the smaller ones were even linked by cables and access tubes, and between them all civilian ships and Ashani fighters and what remained of the Tanithan defenders tried to maneuver. “Alexej, you do remember this is a shuttle built by the lowest bidder and not a fighter?”

“Trust me,” he smiled wickedly, then fully opened up the throttle.

The shuttle dropped down and barreled straight for a huge liner that tried to detach itself from a nearby docking point, tearing the hairline structure out of its bearing in the process. Frantic comm chatter filled all the frequencies, maydays and pleas of mercy and all too many messages that cut off right in the middle of a word or sentence. The crew of the MAIDEN had come to know these only too well.

Alexej edged the shuttle across the liner's bow, his huge and yet so delicately manicured paws deftly commanding the small craft. They came dangerously close to a collision before he pulled her around and raced along the passenger liner's belly.

Unfortunately, Ashani fighter pilots were no different from any other fighter jocks across known space and history: they loved a good challenge. Two of the fighters gave chase while the three others dug their teeth into easier prey.

“There's a ship ahead,” Annie called out from her station.

Tarek guessed she meant the mile long cargo container hauler filling his field of view which their pilot was going head to head with. He raised his eyebrows. “Yeah, Alexej, ship ahead.”

The pilot didn't respond, he just kept driving headlong towards the freighter which fruitlessly continued its far too late efforts to push itself out of Tanith's gravity well and into open space.

“
Alexej? It's not going to give you the damn right of way!”

“
How close are we?” Annie looked up from her station and gasped at the sight.

With impact a second away Alexej rolled the shuttle and grazed past a bleached red container twenty times the size of the shuttle, a huge grin plastered across his face. Behind them the Ashani fighters kept a steady distance and maneuvered into position for a clean shot.

“Effin' hell, Duchess!
I
paid for this shuttle, remember? Never do that again!” Tarek shouted through clenched teeth, his almost shoulder length black and gray streaked hair pressed out of his face by the g-forces the small ship's compensators couldn't handle. After all, the shuttle had been meant to transfer cargo and people. Becoming the next Spitfire hadn't been high on the engineers' list of priorities.

“
Aw, hell, boss! Come on, don't say that wasn't cool!” Alexej flung the shuttle past another freighter within centimeters of disaster, the little ship's engines howling as if they were on their last leg. “You know this is cool! Did you see that?!”

“
Right now I'm not sure what I
don't
want to see more: your flying or the insides of my stomach finding their way back out,” Tarek swallowed. “You still sure you know what you're doing?”

“
Sometimes,” he grinned, but this time his voice sounded stressed, too. “Hang on, people.” He pulled another tight turn, this time brushing through the opening between a set of cables and passageways.

Their pursuers however had little trouble matching their pace, although Alexej's mad piloting still prevented them from the clean shot they needed.

“Although this
could
be a small miscalculation,” he called out in alarm, and a yelp from Annie's position joined the fray.

Tarek opened his eyes and saw the bow of an Ashani destroyer interposed on the shuttle's HUD. The warship was barely a thousand kilometers away and was picking off targets around it with contemptuous ease. On the display, he saw the destroyer turn in their direction.

He was about to utter a curse that would've solidified an old-school reputation as a sailor when Alexej threw the shuttle around in a radical move. Tarek's breath was punched from his lungs and he had trouble keeping his eyes open. The shuttle dodged past a freighter the size of the IRON MAIDEN which almost instantly exploded as the Ashani warship – the destroyer and the pursuing fighters – began firing. The plasma lasers cleaved through the engine section and destabilized the fusion containment, the freighter vanishing in a small, localized nuclear explosion.

“
Ship on our port side, collision in five seconds!” Annie shouted. “Watch it, Alexej. This ship's not made for these kinds of games!”

The pilot flipped the shuttle into a roll and ended flying upside down to his original orientation. He whizzed past the long cylindrical form of a merchant guild's warehouse, barely clearing it. The station rushed by only a few meters from the cockpit.

A large mega-freighter a few kilometers ahead was struck by laser fire. A quartet of beams which would have scratched the point on a human warship, sliced clean through the unarmored civilian vessel, slicing fuel lines and igniting the hydrogen-based reaction mass. Burning fuel flashed into space and the shuttle's path, covering its outer hull in liquid fire.

Alexej fought with the controls, the sinews on his arms plainly visible through the stress of piloting the craft under these hellish conditions. He kept them on course, dodging the twisted remains of the dying ship's bow section as it passed them, its exposed girders reaching out like skeletal fingers to stab them.

“I'd really like to be someplace else, Duchess!” Tarek in a bout of frustration and impatience scolded his pilot. “Get us on the planet. Please!?”

“
We're almost there.” The pilot's answer came as a hiss through clenched teeth. “Just a little bit more.”

He dove past more twisted metal, deeper into the expanding clouds of debris that had begun to litter the planet's orbit. The fighters were still on his tail. He carefully lined up on the burning wreck of a couple million ton freighter as it slowly tumbled towards the planet below.

“Alexej! Sensors show another ship's coming in from behind. It's an Ashani frigate!” Annie warned.

“
I know, I've got it on scope.”

Frigates were ineffective in fighting real warships unless they managed to sneak in under their defenses and launch a shipkiller nuke at point blank range. But they were ideal commerce raiders and picket ships, and even a glancing blow from their guns would obliterate the shuttle.

“Sit tight!” The pilot grinned madly. “This will be something to tell your kids about.”

He accelerated, rushing towards the tumbling wreck. The shuttle passed beneath the vessel and shot out of the far side, right in front of the frigate which was busily cutting up the far side of the defenseless ship. They passed within spitting distance – relatively speaking – of the frigate's bow, taking the Dominion's gunnery officer so by surprise that by the time he even registered what had happened, Alexej had already brought them outside their gun arcs again.

If the Ashani gunnery officer had been surprised to see Alexej, the fighter pilots were even more surprised to round the freighter in pursuit and come face to face with the warship on a collision course. Instinctive reactions taking over the lead fighter pulled his craft harshly up the zed and straight into a floating piece of the freighter's hull the size of a house in suburbia. But the second craft was quick enough to turn and avoid the obstacles, forcing the pilot to black out with the force of the turn.

“
Sneaky son of a bitch,” Tarek laugh was forced due to the g-forces, but it was heartfelt. “We're free to land now, right?!”

“
I hate to be the killjoy, but not quite,” Annie's voice was surprisingly clear given the multiple gravities they were all suffering under. “That other fighter's still moving!”

The surviving Ashani pilot had recovered quickly from his blackout and was now gaining ground again.

“Will we reach the atmosphere before he does?” the MAIDEN's captain asked, pushing out each word.

“
We should, but you do realize their fighters are atmosphere capable?” Annie informed him soberly.

Tarek's curse came out as an undecipherable growl, indicating he had in fact not known that particular piece of information.

“Ever seen a military combat drop?” Alexej's grin was grim now as he posed the question.

“
Yes, I have,” Tarek answered truthfully, then paused and his eyes widened. “Oh, sweet merciful Allah, no effin' way…”

“
I don't see you offering any better options, boss, do I? We need to get down fast, and that's the quickest way.” Alexej commented nonchalantly.

“
Yeah, in a dropship that isn't held together by two decades worth of rust and grease!”

“
It'll be fine. Just hold on, people,” the pilot enthused, then added almost as an afterthought, “Oh, and the g-forces are quite bad.”

Tarek looked like he wanted to say something but before the MAIDEN's captain got out a word of protest, Alexej dropped the shuttle's nose and accelerated once more towards the planet. Its front immediately began to glow and within seconds had turned white hot, completely obscuring their field of vision. As soon as they hit thicker layers of the atmosphere the shuttle bucked cruelly, throwing the crew back and forth against their restraints. Tarek tried to yell at Alexej but couldn't speak under the intense conditions. The stress was a lot less severe than that of a true military drop, but the assault landers were equipped with the necessary compensators. The MAIDEN's shuttle wasn't. They didn't get the full speed advantage of the maneuver Alexej had intended. A greenish beam shooting right across the shuttle's bow drove that point home all too clearly.

“That fighter still with us?” Tarek coughed.

“
Yep.” Annie confirmed tersely, the shuttle rocking even more now that they had entered real air currents. “And he's way too close for comfort.”

The jolting re-entry had been even more straining for the small fighter, but as they slowed to hypersonic speeds he was getting more accurate.

“Can we do anything about that?” Rául shouted from his chair.

“
We throw you out the back and you nag him to death!” Alexej snapped in an atypical bout of anger.

The shuttle suddenly jerked forward and entered a twisting spin. Alerts blared and warning lights filled the flickering displays.

“We're hit!” Annie yelled.

The IRON MAIDEN's shuttle twisted through the sky, trailing flames and thick black smoke. Another shot hit it and cleanly cut off one of the delta wings. To the Dominion pilot's eternal – and ultimately rather short – shock the twisted piece of debris ripped away from the wounded vessel and, with a cruel twist of irony, slammed right into the fighter, tearing it apart in a quickly dispersing cloud of splinters and debris.