Dark Dragons (24 page)

FLASH!

‘What . . . ?’ Darren turned to see a supernova appear above
Io and the entire solar system seemed to react.  The battle being waged
above the volcanic moon had froze.  The Vorvon fighters slowed to a
crawl.  Even the enemy Dragonstar heading for him suddenly veered to port
and away.  Then there came a moment of panic that seemed to galvanize the
flesh of both human and alien.  Fighters were suddenly scrambling for
cover.

Darren and Jorge went quickly to starboard and down toward
Io in hopes of using the moon’s far side as a shield against the explosion’s
blast waves.

Io spun in Darren’s windshield, and the surface came up
fast.  Anti-spacecraft laser fire from the remaining twenty-one assault
cruisers chased them toward the undamaged side of Io’s surface, but several
radar ghosts from Jorge’s ECM suite appeared and drew the Vorvon’s fire away.

Darren felt his Dragonstar shudder unexpectedly.  Part
of the blast waves wrapped around Io’s surface, but by the time they hit Darren
and Jorge, they had diminished rapidly.  Still, it was enough to make his
teeth jitter.

Almost as quickly as it had appeared, the Vorvon
anti-spacecraft fire ceased, every gun silent.  Darren checked his six,
and knew what was coming.

‘Get mean!’ Jorge shouted.  ‘Here they come!’

‘Aw, shit!’ Darren said.  ‘Jorge, keep those fuckers
off me.  I’m going in!’

An alarm sounded in Darren’s helmet when the laser-radar
detected twelve Vorvon fighters coming down off his four o’clock.  The
heavens were full of the trilobite-shaped craft, darting fish hunting prey in a
black ocean.  The enemy Dragonstar was nowhere in sight.

‘Cover me, Jorge!’

‘I got your back, bro!’

At that, Darren went down and to starboard, Jorge riding his
seven o’clock as wingman.  Geysers of molten sulfur, lakes of red fire and
belching volcanoes sped past them.  Darren pulled up to avoid a high
plateau and dove for the deck.  A ball of blue light screamed past his
canopy.  Missile.  He rolled to port a few degrees and leveled out,
searching for his attacker.  Jorge stayed with him, but moved to cover
Darren’s starboard off his rear quarter.

‘There they are!’ Jorge shouted.  ‘Twelve baddies at
five!’

Darren didn’t want to look up to see the aliens baring down
on them.  He swore at himself for getting too close to the deck and
offering the enemy the altitude advantage.  He and Jorge were
exposed.  The aliens opened fire, and fountains of heated rock erupted in
front of his fighter.  He jerked to port, hoping his Dragonstar’s dense
super-carbon skin was indeed strong enough to repel a laser blast.

From the look of the aliens’ wide, blind shots, he could
tell the Vorvons had them targeted visually but were unable to lock the
invisible Dragonstars on their laser-radar, or whatever they used for weapons
tracking.  With so many of them blind-firing, however, it would be just a
matter of seconds before one of them scored a hit.

‘Jorge, split up and take some of them with you!’ he
shouted.

Jorge broke from his wing and accelerated toward the
north.  Five of the Vorvons chased him, but the remaining seven stayed
with Darren.

Strangely, he wasn’t frightened at all, only pumped and
alert.  He felt focused, undaunted, his thoughts mechanical and
instinctive.  Closing his eyes, he could still see the red after-image of
the enemy blips imprinted onto his retinas.  He “reached” out and
activated the AA missile launchers.  His Dragonstar leaned to port and
quickly slowed as a group of mesas appeared over the horizon.  He knew the
aliens were directly behind him and spreading to cover his flanks, zeroing in
for the kill.

On the laser-radar scopes, four of the Vorvon fighters
mysteriously broke away, the remaining three still on Darren.  He guessed
the other four were probably speeding away to establish a trap somewhere up
ahead with these three beating the grass behind him.

As the first mesa appeared——a towering, flat-topped
skyscraper of rock——Darren pulled back on the imaginary throttle, and his
fighter reared up and stopped at the base of the cliff.  The three Vorvons
zipped past him and shot around the left side of the mesa, circling around to
search for him again.  He thought-fired three of his all-purpose missiles
toward the right side of the mesa and felt the fighter vibrate when the
projectiles vaulted out of their launch-carriages from within the wings. 
He accelerated his Dragonstar again, moving up the slope toward the mesa’s
peak, and as he did, the aliens appeared from around the mesa and met his
missiles head on.

Darren did not have time to enjoy his success.  The
other four fighters appeared again, this time off a high angle, their trap now
spoiled.

Darren executed a quick Snap-Yaw, rotating his fighter to
face the rear while still flying forward, and pressed the mental trigger that
fired the kinetic gauss cannon on the Dragonstar’s nose.  The gun pivoted
in its cradle, and a surgical stream of high-velocity, armor-piercing pellets
sheared off the wings of the two nearest trilobites.  The remaining two
did crazy aerial cartwheels to evade, but Darren found one with his
cannon.  The last Vorvon fighter went out of sight, disappearing behind a
spewing volcano.  Darren spun his beast around and gunned the AG emitter
to full speed.  The single Vorvon appeared once more and sped up as well
to catch him, now on his six.

The alien fired a bright blue star, and Darren saw the
missile on his visor approach with horrifying speed.  He banked to
starboard and thought-triggered the aft anti-missile pod.  A golfball-size
orb fired to six o’clock and intercepted the enemy missile with a flash of
explosive shrapnel just forty feet off his tail.

The iciness of space seemed to be seeping into the cockpit,
chilling Darren to the core.  He felt rivulets of sweat under his helmet
run through his hair and soak his neck, making the shivering worst.  He
“told” the sub-suit under his armor to increase temperature.

Another alien fighter appeared from above and joined its
wingman in pursuit, arcing inside Darren to the right, closing range and
spewing wide volleys of laser fire.  Darren rolled his beast to the left,
as if to bank to port, then suddenly sped off to the right, but both Vorvons
stayed with him.

He jerked the Dragonstar up with a suddenness that caused
him to bang his helmet on the thought-computer terminal behind his head. 
Jorge’s fighter suddenly went across Darren’s windshield, and one of the
Vorvons died, victim of a well-aimed blast into the cockpit.  He heard
Jorge scream something triumphant in Spanish as Jorge swung around wide to
catch up, but Darren and his remaining adversary were already over the horizon.

This last alien did not want to give up on his human
opponent.  Darren could only roll back and forth to stall the alien’s best
firing position that it would achieve in just a few more seconds.  C’mon,
Darren, he thought to himself, put this fucker in your pocket!  
Three volleys of laser fire went wide to his starboard.  With a last hope
in mind, he accelerated to full velocity to gain some distance and spun his
fighter around in another Snap-Yaw.  The alien saw what Darren had done
and shoved itself to port to escape, but a pair of laser blasts caught it square. 
The vehicle flared into a comet and sailed into Io’s molten surface.

*

Sryik-of-the-Three-Suns did not react to his close comrade’s
death but only watched closely.  It was right on the human’s tail, but it
did not fire. 
Not yet.  Wait
.  It even suppressed the
urge to open the comm and taunt the human in its own tongue with the
translator.

But not yet.

Sryik-of-the-Three-Suns checked the power level to its
Dragonstar’s invisibility cloak and saw that it had sufficient power——and
time——remaining.  It summoned four deathfish to join it for the coming
kill.

*

‘Everyone hit the rally point!’ Darren said.  ‘We got
to get out of this shit and regroup!’

‘I hear that,’ Nate said, his voice distant.  ‘I’m out
of here!’

‘Me too!’ Jorge said.

‘Ditto!’  Tony screamed.  ‘I still got three of
’em on my six!’

Darren thought-triggered Europa’s waypoint on the
positioning map to the warp drives.  He heard the electronic hum begin to
build, but before the warp drives could reach max, something fast came across
his windshield.  Something else entirely flashed off his starboard, and an
alarm began to howl in his helmet.  Darren cried out and shoved the mental
stick forward.  He rattled in his seat, heard his Dragonstar
shudder.  The laser-radar screamed for attention——four Vorvon fighters
were angling in off his starboard quarter, closing the distance fast, two
hundred kilometers out.

Darren realized the enemy Dragonstar had attacked him with a
single shot from its gauss cannon, its invisibility cloak and active-stealth
field running.  He also knew the alien pilot could have easily plugged him
if it had wanted but for whatever reason had delayed the kill. 
Apparently, the bastard wanted to play first.  Darren triggered his own
cloak and active-stealth but quickly discovered that the alarms pinging in his
helmet had been trying to tell him that those two vital features were now
inoperable.  The enemy Dragonstar knew exactly where to hit him.  The
Vorvon pilot had uncanny accuracy.  Even Darren wasn’t sure he could place
a dime-on shot like that.

Darren cursed, rotated his wounded Dragonstar 180-degrees
and swept his rear envelope with a wide volley of every weapon he had.  He
hit nothing.  He spun back to twelve o’clock and accelerated to maximum,
putting Io off him, but the four Vorvon’s, their trilobites more quicker off
the stick than his heavier Dragonstar, would be on him in just seconds. 
He heard the AG emitter shut down and the sub-light drives kick in as the
computer sensed the gravity drop from Io, and he accelerated harder.

He looked to his IFF scope and saw that Tony, Nate and Jorge
must have already jumped for Europa, their transponder signals nowhere to be
found.

There also appeared to be considerably more damage to his
Dragonstar than he previously noticed.  In addition to the cloak and
active-stealth, the warp generator no longer responded to check-up
inquiries. 
He was now stranded in the Jovian system.
 
Darren’s mind reached into the Dragonstar’s electronics, and he “felt” the
wound’s location: one of the sub-routers on the third power relay had been
severed by the gauss strike.  This particular sub-router supplied
electrical power to the systems he now lacked.

Teeth clenched, Darren banked to starboard and sucked every
drop of acceleration he could out of his Dragonstar.  He quickly closed
the distance between himself and the moonship, mindful that the four trilobites
were still on him off his rear quarter.

Darren came up to the mammoth vessel, and the rising gravity
from the ship triggered the AG emitters.  The Dragonstar’s sub-light
velocity evaporated which caused the faster trilobites behind it to overshoot
the kill zone they had established.  Darren watched them peel off his tail
as he raced over the moonship’s rocky surface.

Suddenly the great chasm appeared ahead of him, a five
hundred-mile wide canyon with the heart of the Vorvon ship below.  He
rolled left and bore down on the massive structure, aghast at its size. 
Darren could see the trilobites on his sensor scopes scrambling along their
vectors to reacquire him, and they would very soon.

The Vorvon Dragonstar suddenly appeared from its cloak of
active-stealth directly above him.  Darren reacted and shoved his
fighter’s nose down but the Vorvon kept with him.  In fact, it had not
budged, and Darren noticed that he was unable to accelerate.  It felt like
his Dragonstar was carrying the weight of the other Dragonstar, or rather, the
other fighter had intertwined its force field projections with his own.

Both fighters were locked in a spinning embrace, and the
Vorvon pilot had done it on purpose . . . behind them the four trilobite
fighters were bearing down on their position.  Darren looked up to see the
Dragonstar was actually upside down.  They were cockpit-to-cockpit, and
Darren saw that this fighter, like the moonship, was incredibly damaged, its
surface covered with scars like smallpox, gouges and laser scorches——proud
scars of previous battles which needed no repair.  The Dragonstar’s head
had a particularly nasty scorch across the top ablative plating where an adversary’s
weapon had nearly pierced the cockpit.  Yet the damn thing was still
operational.

Scorch was looking down at him.  Darren saw that the
Vorvon did not have an armored combat suit like his but a gray jumpsuit with
some kind of centrifugal-absorbing pads across the body.  The helmet,
however, looked similar.  Scorch turned its helmet toward him, tapped its
head twice with a finger, pointed at him . . .
and then shook its head.

An obvious taunt of some kind, but Darren didn’t know what
it meant, and he was suddenly even more frightened and angry than before the
gesture. 
I’m not gonna let this fucker toy with me.
  Darren
sent a thought-command to the main computer and primed the sub-lights for
immediate fire.  A warning flashed on his visor,
GRAVITY PRESENT
, but Darren sent the bypass code and lit the
rockets.  The sub-light engines kicked hard, and his Dragonstar tore
itself away from the other’s force field lock and roared ahead past the
moonship’s metal core, coming within three hair-raising kilometers of a large
bulbous structure.  Darren headed straight for Jupiter.

Behind him, Scorch’s Dragonstar pitched about wildly from
the shock of Darren’s sudden escape, but quickly compensated.  Seconds
later, Scorch and the other Vorvons were back on the pursuit, the four
trilobites quickly gaining on his tail.