Dark Dragons (50 page)

Darren still had Scorch on his AMDS scopes——momentarily——but
the alien quickly dove for the surface where he concealed his Dragonstar’s mass
displacement with the earth’s much larger signature.  Darren imitated
Scorch’s clever evasion, rapidly dropping his Dragonstar to two thousand feet
altitude. . . .

. . . directly above New York City.

Scorch couldn’t stay invisible for long, Darren knew. 
Not during these energy-draining operations.  Not in the middle of a
sun-drenched afternoon.  Darren ascended a little higher to sweep his
forward hemisphere around and give his targeting telescope a clearer 360-degree
search, ready to jam the trigger down. 
Don’t be a wuss . . . come out
and fight.
  He kept one eye on his AMDS scope——if Scorch got too close
to him, the alien’s mass displacement signature would get hot, and Darren would
have him.

He knew the duration of a one-on-one engagement between two
Dragonstars would either be very short
or
a drawn out, error-free
slugfest blazing across an airspace thousands of cubic miles wide.  It
would not be the interstellar equivalent of the Marianas Turkey Shoot either,
like furballing with lightly armed, easily overpowered Vorvon trilobite
fighters.  The rules of engagement differed greatly when two opposing
Dragonstars came together——deployment of air-to-air missiles would be nearly
impractical in all but the most exceptional circumstances because of the
fighters’ superior anti-missile systems.

Instead, it would be a close-range, optically-guided gun
battle . . . a futuristic World War II-style dogfight engaged not with
.50-caliber bullets but five hundred megawatt laser blasts and
electromagnetically-propelled gauss slugs piercing the air at twenty thousand
feet per second.  Velocities would exceed speeds faster than it took for
an eyeball or head to move, limiting the probability of a successful kill to
just a raking “snapshot” with some luck mixed in.  Attacking and defending
would alternate relentlessly at unbelievable time frames, perhaps one or two
seconds apart, and Darren predicted a lot of praying and spraying between the
both of them.

“Snap-and-burn” would be the most widely executed maneuver
for attack and defense but unfortunately would also stress the anti-graviton
emitter not designed for such non-ballistic rough handling.  Whereas a
“snap-yaw” was a hard, 0
̊
-turn
“rudder” that pointed the nose to the rear envelope while maintaining forward
flight and velocity, a snap-and-burn was simply a snap-yaw followed by a
massive blast of acceleration against the fighter’s forward momentum——a
breakneck change in direction designed to escape from an attacker’s forward
weapons hemisphere before optical-gun lock up.  The escaping pilot had to
predict and execute the snap-and-burn
before
the attacker put him in the
forward guns envelope.

Welcome to the suck, Darren, he thought.

The skies over New York City were clear except for a single
cumulus cloud, about a mile above Staten Island. 
You wouldn’t be that
stupid.
  Darren narrowed the detection field of the aerial mass
displacement sensor down to a tight beam and probed the cloud.  Hidden
within the earth’s own mass signature, came a fuzzy blur almost nonexistent on
Darren’s visor, so obscure the AMDS passive sensors told him
POSSIBLE RETURN.
  The absence of civilian
aircraft told him that the FAA had grounded all flights across North
America.  A military aircraft then?

Darren began his stalk.  He dropped the Dragonstar down
to the Hudson River fifty feet above the water’s surface, his active stealth
still running, and propelled his fighter south.  People on the ferries
were pointing up at him, some aiming cell phone cameras.  He dared not use
his invisibility, which would blind him and hinder his attack.  Stay cool.

He passed the Statue of Liberty to his starboard and entered
the Upper Bay.  Still, his weapons system failed to register a
target.  He was growing impatient, but that would get him killed. 
Maintain the stalk, he told himself.  The cloud, slowly moving east, began
to break up as he neared Staten Island.

Darren arrived at a crawl over the St. George Terminal, the
cloud now above him.  He pitched the Dragonstar’s nose up sixty-degrees,
the trigger finger in his mind ready to jam home.  The fuzzy signature on
the AMDS grew sharper. 
AERIAL MASS
DETECTED
.  His weapons computer issued a howling demand to engage,
and Darren obliged.  He fired a ten-round blast from the gauss cannon.

The object exploded.  A Vorvon trilobite——offering
itself as bait!  Darren didn’t have time to scream.  In anger or
terror.  He kicked the spurs to the anti-graviton emitter, just as
Scorch’s Incoming Fire Sensor found the point of Darren’s gauss cannon
fire.  Four laser strikes raked across the top of the rear fuselage,
blowing the port dorsal off the main wing.  Bright flash.  A violent
shudder and an ear-splitting bang.

Darren went invisible, the windshield turning black and
every sensor going blind.  He snap-and-burned to his four o’clock that was
now his twelve o’clock, the atmo drive grunting.  The 110 anti-personnel
rockets and their two launchers inside the port dorsal wing were gone as well
as three plates of ablative laser armor.  One more strike there, and he
would die.

The IFS told him Scorch had fired from a spot twenty miles
away over Long Island.  Darren executed one more snap-and-burn to three
o’clock, hoping that the move would put him toward Long Island and not into the
ground.  He exited invisibility.

Darren swore and gunned to starboard before he could mop the
top three floors off the Chrysler Building.  There!  Black speck to
one o’clock. 
FIRE
!  The first
two slugs from his ten-round gauss stream found the alien before it could
evade.  A bright flash, heat generated from the kinetic blast, blazed in
the sky, followed by a trail of smoke.  Scorch immediately vaulted into
high speed, a straight southwest burst across the surface away from the city.

Darren stood his Dragonstar on its starboard wing, pitched
up and gunned after him, slamming the pedal to the floor.  The targeting
telescope found the alien and zeroed in.  Scorch was still visible. 
In fact Darren spotted red glitters sparkling around the enemy fighter. 
With a satisfying surge of exhilaration Darren realized he had——finally——hurt
the fucker.  The crimson sparks were from the damaged assimilation field
generator.  The image of Scorch’s Dragonstar flickered as the alien
desperately tried to cloak itself.  No good.  Darren activated his
synthetic-aperture laser radar for a just a quick scan and saw that the alien’s
active-stealth was gone, too.  The entire assimilation field generator was
toast.  He turned the sensor back off before the alien could track him.

The alien was jinking his bird hard to port and starboard,
wide maneuvers several miles across in order to throw Darren’s targeting
telescope off.  The enemy was also climbing higher into the
atmosphere.  Darren followed him, and the optical tracker in the nose was
indeed having difficulty acquiring a direct lock on.  Darren had to get in
closer for a successful shot, and he had the AG emitter floored to maximum
speed.  With Scorch zigzagging back and forth, and Darren on a straight
beeline, he would close the distance soon and give his telescope a better lock
for Darren’s eyes.  Scorch would know that, too, of course, and Darren
expected the alien to pull a snap-and-burn any moment.

Instead, the enemy executed a simple snap-yaw to the
rear.  Darren spotted the move and jammed to starboard and the alien’s long-range
laser stream fell off his tail.  Scorch’s attack had foiled Darren’s
pursuit and put the alien rapidly back on the offensive.  Darren inhaled
sharply when he realized the bad guy had tricked him to a higher altitude away
from the earth’s mass shadow.  He dug himself into invisibility, dropped
the nose and dove for the ground, knowing he had to be glowing hot on Scorch’s
AMDS scopes.

*

The human went invisible and executed a snap-and-burn out of
the forward envelope, directly underneath Sryik-of-the-Three-Suns less than
five points away, but it had the human sharp on the AMDS.  It slaved a
single air-to-air missile to the AMDS and fired.  The weapon locked onto
the invisible Dragonstar, and Sryik-of-the-Three-Suns followed the missile, knowing
the human would not see them coming.

*

He went cold in the chest.  Ringing in his ears. 
The same biological warning that pumped through him the night the Vorvon
assassin attacked.  Hot sour saliva rushed into his mouth, and he knew
something bad was—
—Missile!

He realized what was coming, knowing he too would have used
AA missiles tied into the AMDS if the roles had been reversed.  Darren
stayed invisible, knowing Scorch was following its missile and expecting him to
come out, so that the alien could line Darren up for a close-in kill
shot.  Instead, he sent a manual fire command to the rear anti-missile pod
to fire ten intercepting orbs, unsure how many missiles were coming.  Free
from the Dragonstar’s invisibility field, the anti-missile orbs found a single
incoming missile.  Too close!  Fifty feet off the tail, all ten
defensive weapons intercepted Scorch’s missile.  A thick cloud of shrapnel
pulsed out, showering the rear fuselage of Darren’s Dragonstar.

Several pieces of missile fragmentation found their way into
the fighter’s guts.  A warning blared.  Darren ignored it, knew
Scorch’s IFS had spotted his anti-missile launch point, and pulled his dragon
to the left to escape the alien’s attack.  He heard something strike,
another loud bang, another warning, and he snap-and-burned to port, leveling up
and departing invisibility.  The world returned to his windshield. 
The Great Smoky Mountains——western North Carolina according to the positioning
system.  The targeting telescope swept around, automatically searching for
the enemy.  Nothing.  Darren stayed low five hundred feet off the
deck and slowed to three hundred knots.

A coil from the port shock absorber had took a shrapnel hit
and so had the AG emitter——Darren was down to eighty-eight percent of maximum
thrust.  He was losing this battle.  In his withering heart he knew
it.  Darren wanted to call his bros for help but realized they had to stay
on the remaining troop carriers.  He would have to face Scorch
alone.  And possibly die alone. 
Still one more chance to level
things
. 
Something unpredictable.
  Being unpredictable had
saved him from the assassin’s gun Tuesday morning.

With no other course open to him, Darren booted into high
velocity, activated his synthetic-aperture laser-radar and sent out a single pulse
of energy.   The laser-radar, a much sharper and smarter sensor than
the AMDS, found Scorch and fed location data to the targeting telescope. 
Darren put a reticule on the alien, but before he could press the mental fire
button, Scorch dove for cover behind a spruce-covered mountain twenty miles to
the west of him.  Darren could have lobbed several fire-and-forgets at the
alien, but its anti-missile pods would have made short work of them.

He could still see the alien on the laser-radar
scopes.  It was stationary, hovering twenty feet above the treetops in a
thickly forested and secluded valley behind a misty six thousand foot
peak.  Darren’s ECM sensors signaled a warning . . . Scorch had just
activated his own laser-radar, trying to pin point Darren’s position, but his
active-stealth negated that shit.

A game of chicken.  Who would make the first move from
cover?  Darren waited, thinking of what to do next.  But he couldn’t
wait, because a
singularity missile
suddenly spat into the sky and
skimmed the mountaintops toward him, followed by another . . . and
another!  Pissed that he didn’t think of that, Darren reared up and shoved
his Dragonstar in reverse.  The incoming weapons were too far out of
anti-missile range, but they were not intending to strike his position anyway.

The first eighty-kiloton missile struck the surface fourteen
miles in front of him, the second eight miles, and the last, three
miles.   Billions of metric tons of sandstone, granite, timber and
unlucky hillbilly moonshiners were thrust into the atmosphere, an Appalachian
Krakatoa unleashed upon the earth.  Intense heat from the gravity-shearing
forces of kinetic energy incinerated hundreds of square miles of pristine
forest that had not been flattened by the shockwaves.  From out of the
dark mushroom clouds of rising dust, fire, trees and bedrock, Scorch attacked
with guns blazing.

Anticipating this impudent tactic, Darren pounced on him
with guns hot from a lead pursuit angle.  Scorch identified his intercept
and turned inside him.  Darren knew he could no longer match speeds
because of the damaged AG emitter nor could he maneuver hard to starboard
because of the shot absorber coils.

Countering Scorch’s inside turn, Darren rolled and pitched
left into a defensive barrel roll, a coil-shaped maneuver that caused Scorch to
overshoot.  The alien banked to starboard to put Darren back into its
forward envelope, but Darren predicted this and shoved his Dragonstar’s nose up
and inverted into an
offensive
barrel roll, a maneuver used by a slower
fighter to turn with a faster fighter ahead of it.  Darren reached the
apex of his short climb, inverted his dragon, and dove into Scorch’s rear
starboard quarter.  Scorch saw this, decelerated, and jammed the stick to
port.  Before Darren could overshoot the alien, he opened up with a raking
snapshot from the laser cannons just as Scorch’s Dragonstar filled his
windshield, the bastard coming within thirty feet from Darren’s nose. 
Bright secondary flashes filled the sky around him. 
Gotcha, asshole!

Darren snap-yawed to port, spotting a dark trail of smoke
but no Dragonstar.  Scorch, obviously damaged, had dove for the surface to
hide himself among the ground clutter.  Darren maneuvered into a split-S,
rolling his Dragonstar, and pulled into a vertical dive toward the ground,
too.  He right-sided back up and skimmed the houses of a small town and
peeled away.  The laser-radar found the alien ten miles off his
forward-quarter one thousand feet off the deck.  Scorch was turning hard
back toward him.