Dark Dragons (23 page)

Darren checked his weapons.  Laser cannons, gauss gun,
missile launchers, anti-missile pods, ECM measures——the telemetry reported
everything functioning properly.  He glanced at the moonship and wondered
what kind of weaponry it possessed, if it was armed at all.  ‘We have the
element of surprise.  They don’t know we’re here, and we can sneak in and
do work on these fuckers.  Maybe even stop the invasion all together.’

‘You’re kidding, right?’ Nate said.

‘No, I’m not kidding.  Look around.  We have major
TRE . . . Target Rich Environment.  The assault cruisers will have to
refuel eventually, and when they do, we’ll attack.’

*

Almost two hours later, a sudden change in the Vorvons’
activity roused Darren’s attention away from the Dragonstar’s flight simulator
where he had been studying a series of possible attack profiles proposed by the
VI computer.  The troop carriers hovering above Io began returning to their
appropriate docking berths on the assault cruisers.

‘Maybe they’re going to refuel now,’ he said.

With all of its troop carriers finally moored, one cruiser
pulled out of orbit and slowly inserted itself into a higher trajectory,
parallel with the giant tanker ship.

‘Yeah, here we go,’ Darren said.

Another joined its companion.  Then another. 
Almost three minutes later, seven assault cruisers had left low orbit, leaving
the other twenty-one behind, to form a column behind the bulbous tanker
ship.  It took another three minutes for all seven ships to completely
encircle the tanker with their bows pointed away.  The assault cruisers
carefully began to back into the tanker’s many refueling berths.

‘Okay, here’s the game plan,’ Darren began.  ‘Jorge and
I will go after the moonship.  Tony and Nate, you guys take the tanker and
the assault cruisers docked to it.  Obviously, we use the proton
destroyers.’

‘Wrath of the gods coming right up,’ Tony said.

‘We don’t know too much about the effects of these weapons
so make damn sure you’re clear of the blast fields.  If the radiation gets
close to supernova range or something, we light the hell outta here quick
like.’  Darren glanced at the navigation box.  ‘We’ll establish an
emergency escape point at Europa.  That’ll be our rally point.’

The AMDS sensor signaled for attention.  A tight
formation of unknown mass shadows were approaching their position, and the
computer indicated
PROBABLE HOSTILE SPACECRAFT.
 
No kidding——those diamond-shaped, trilobite-looking fighters again.  In
fact, there were clouds upon clouds of Vorvon fighters suddenly buzzing about,
apparently protecting the assault cruisers during the vulnerable refueling
procedure.

‘Now what?’ Tony said.

Darren closed his eyes and tried to calm himself.  ‘We
stick to the plan.  With our active-stealth fields, they won’t see us
coming.’

‘So we’re not going to do anything about the fighters? 
And what about the refinery on the surface?’

‘Those are smaller targets that can be dealt with
later.  Right now, the moonship and the assault cruisers represent the
biggest threat.  The invasion comes from them.’

The seven Vorvon cruisers had finally docked to the tanker,
and Darren hoped that highly volatile fuel was being pumped by the millions of
tons into the ships’ tanks.  More to fuel the bang.  The time to
execute with extreme prejudice had come.

As soon as a squadron of seventy trilobite fighters came
within nine thousand miles, the Dragonstars burst from their cover, fanned out
and booted up to full interceptor speed, 1,800 miles per second.  Darren
felt himself pressed into the seat as his fighter screamed with ungodly
acceleration.  Rotating cross-hairs appeared on his visor display, and he
selected his laser cannons for
READY
, the
weapons system immediately locking on to fifteen targets.

His mind said,
Fire.

The two laser cannons on the wing tips opened up, and Darren
felt a blood rush when he saw for the first time the frightening power he
possessed.  From eight thousand miles out, the maximum range his weapons tracking
could acquire, he iced all fifteen aliens in an eye blink——so sudden that a
moment of disbelief crept through him. 
Was that it?
 The AMDS
indeed read fifteen less bogeys.  It was so easy.

His friends opened fire, and the last of the alien fighters
disappeared from his scope.  No reaction from the moonship or the other
Vorvon cruisers and fighters.  Yet.

‘Feint Mode?’ Tony asked.

‘Wait’ll we get closer,’ Darren replied.  ‘Let’s not
spook them to soon.  They don’t know we’re here, yet.’  At least the
aliens hadn’t executed any evasive maneuvers or opened fire with their
anti-spacecraft batteries.  Darren guessed right.  Their
assimilating, active-stealth fields seemed to be effectively absorbing the
enemy’s——

Wrong!
  A green, murderous laser pulse suddenly
exploded in front of him, and every warning sensor screamed in surprise. 
It had grazed the starboard wing, low from a shallow angle.  Guessing the
bad guys had their own blind-proof AMDS sensors, Darren jammed the
mental-throttles to port before another blast shot through the space he had
just occupied and screamed, ‘Feint Mode!’

Everyone activated their electronic countermeasure systems
and triggered the Feint Mode.  Immediately, fifty radar “ghosts” formed
around each Dragonstar and fanned out in evasive maneuver patterns, each on a
separate course.  Confused, the Vorvons began to spew forth wide-field
blasts of defensive laser fire, and not just stray, intermittent volleys but
frightening zones of sweeping crossfire thousands of kilometers deep.  Bright
green pulses of energy flashed across the Jovian system like an alien Fourth of
July.

‘Feign Attack pattern!’ Darren ordered.

The radar ghosts, which had been simulating escape, now
turned on their attackers.  Two hundred false echoes shot silently toward
the Vorvon fleet.  The fervidness of enemy fire intensified. 
Everywhere Darren looked came a flash of green laser fire.  Sooner or
later, one of the Dragonstar’s was going to get hit if they didn’t take
immediate action.

‘Tony!  Nate!  Hit that tanker and the
cruisers.  Jorge you’re my wingman!’

*

It was a fast lock up and shoot.  Darren put the
optical cross-hairs on the moonship and immediately the enemy vessel’s flight
characteristics data appeared next to the rotating aiming ring.  He
thought-activated the missile carriage which immediately retracted from the
fighter’s belly.  A second later, a single proton destroyer missile
screamed off the rack.  As soon as it reached its programmed 5.4 kilometer
distance from Darren’s Dragonstar, the missile essentially destroyed itself by
arming the warhead and unleashing the matter-destroying terror within. 
Now it became what Darren could only describe as a quickly swelling ball of
purple electricity with arcing fingers of lightning probing for matter to destroy. 
It pulsated as if it were breathing like a living monster from another
dimension full of wrath and bent on the destruction of the universe.  A
thousand kilometers ahead of Darren’s Dragonstar, it had bloomed nearly fifteen
miles in diameter and still continued to swell.

The synthetic-aperture laser-radar suddenly caught something
on the long-range grids screaming away from the moonship.  It was heading
directly toward the flaming proton destroyer on an obvious intercept at about
500 miles per second.  From what Darren could tell, it looked like——an
asteroid——and a big one, about four miles in diameter.  He guessed the
Vorvons had used some kind of gauss launcher to hurl the asteroid.  What
could a four-mile rock do to a matter-eating proton destroyer now almost twenty
miles across?  Then the answer suddenly came to him. 
No!

When the asteroid struck the fiery core of the proton
destroyer, a flash of intense light and radiation exploded across the heavens,
bright enough to bathe the entire night side of Jupiter in blue radiance. 
Instead of eating the tiny asteroid like a Tic-Tac and continuing forward, the
proton destroyer’s quantum matrix had been triggered and exhausted its entire
energy in a millionth of a second on a four mile wide rock. With no matter left
to consume, the weapon had burned itself out.  What remained was a
harmless glowing cloud of positrons and pions now blowing away with the solar
wind.

Darren swore at himself.  He had fired his valuable
weapon from too far a distance, allowing the enemy sufficient time to counter
attack.  Using a simple asteroid as an
anti-
proton destroyer weapon
was simple and clever, too.  Darren would have to gun the engines to full
speed and close the distance quickly in order to get off a successful kill.

Before he could dial up a second shot, however, thick clouds
of Vorvon fighter interceptors began spewing from several craters across the
moonship’s surface.  They were heading straight for him and Jorge.

Reminding himself that the Vorvon fighters were faster than
his heavily armored Dragonstar, Darren activated the ECM suite and selected the
Feint Mode once more but all of the aliens——124 of them——ignored the buzz of
false radar echoes on their sensors.  They had already zeroed him in, and
it was too late to take a shot at the moonship, the trilobites nearly on
him.  He broke from his ingress run, and jinked upward to port, hoping to
loose himself within the intermittent swarm of his radar ghosts.  Jorge
had done the same, but Darren could see that his friend had fallen off his four
o’clock wingman position.  ‘Stay with me, Jorge!’

‘You’re jinking around!  I can’t tell where you’re
going!’

Darren suppressed the urge to fire his weapons and give
himself away.  For the moment, his evasive move appeared to be working. 
The alien fighters had broken formation and begun to chase false sensor echoes.

All except one. . . .

*

Nate provided wingman coverage with Tony as the trigger
man.  Tony had watched Darren on his long-range radar fire his weapon from
too far away and was not about to allow the aliens enough time to shoot some
goddamn rock at his proton destroyer.  He and Nate were at full sub-light
speed, closing the distance quickly on the tanker and the seven assault
cruisers moored to it.

Some of the cruisers had begun to slowly disengage from the
tanker.  The “Terminate-Refueling-Immediately” order had apparently been
sent, an impetuous maneuver to save the thousands of Vorvon invasion troops
aboard the carriers.  In a panic attempt to escape, one of the assault cruisers
had prematurely fired its engines before it could complete its separation and
had subsequently tore the massive refueling boom from its foundation. 
Several apertures each the size of the Hoover Dam were blowing lethal
hurricanes of sparkling pink fuel into space.

Tony couldn’t believe the incredulous sight.  At that
moment, he selected the proton destroyer missile launcher for
STAND DOWN
.  He would not waste those
valuable weapons on such an easy kill as this.

Instead, Tony aimed with the optical tracker and fired a
single twin-blast from his laser cannons.  Like flaming arrows on a keg of
gunpowder, the laser pulses crossed the distance at the speed of light and
ignited the volatile fountain.  A white, mischievous fire erupted and
slowly made its way down the stream of gas and disappeared into the tanker.

One heartbeat later, the solar system had a second
sun.  The explosion not only vaporized the entire fifty-mile wide tanker
and the seven assault cruisers trying to flee but swatted every squadron of
Vorvon fighters providing defensive cover.  The moon of Io, just a few
hundred miles below, took the brunt of the gargantuan blast.  The entire
volcanic surface facing the detonation, already tortured by Jupiter’s colossal
gravitation, was blasted clean——whole mountains ranges and smoldering craters,
lakes of molten sulfur and the Vorvon refinery thoroughly erased from the
surface.

A glassy splotch of black char had appeared hundreds of
miles across.  Dazzling auroras suddenly flared from Io’s poles, scattering
across the atmosphere toward the equator as the moon reacted violently. 
Sparkling, yellow streamers zipped across the sky from clouds of sulfur ionized
by the blast.  Chambers of pressurized magma just below the surface were
suddenly released, and new volcanoes erupted like a spreading pox.  Io,
which Mother Nature had selected for perpetual torment from Jupiter’s flexing
gravity and magnetic fields 4.5 billion years ago, screamed with an agony it
had never known before.

Tony and Nate were screaming, too.  Screaming the hell
away from the blast.  The proton destroyer would have produced a more
“cleaner and contained” kill.  Tony, the Sultan of Chaos, predicted that
the dirty, thermonuclear effect would be catastrophic, but he had not counted
on the utter destructiveness of it.  Now he and Nate were racing away from
the shock front for their very lives.

*

. . . all except one.

Darren didn’t understand what he saw.  At first he
thought the IFF sensor to his laser-radar was malfunctioning.  The sole Vorvon
fighter heading straight for him was not . . .
Vorvon.
  Darren
checked Tony’s and Nate’s current position and confirmed their location——they
were on the ingress run and about to pop the fuel tanker and the assault
cruisers docked to it.  Then he searched for Jorge, who had finally formed
up on Darren’s seven o’clock, three hundred feet off his tail.

The fighter heading straight for him and Jorge was
another
Dragonstar.

Both Darren and Jorge immediately knew what they were
dealing with, and their instincts told them that the most lethal position to be
in was in front of a Dragonstar and within prime optical-tracking range of its
laser cannons.