Koban 6: Conflict and Empire (34 page)

The humans liked multi-height tall buildings, with varied colors and textures, differently shaped decorative details, and were set much wider apart than the Ragnar preferred to build. It was easier to navigate along their wider boulevards, but it was alien, exotically attractive, and a distracting place to fly. Despite seeming to like spacious wide gaps between their structures, humans appeared to shun the longer narrow walkways placed up high between the buildings, which the Ragnar found so exhilarating when they looked down. At least the Hoth pilots didn’t have to worry about as many unexpected obstructions in their paths, particularly above the fifth level of human buildings, as they turned at the wider and easier to make corners. They habitually kept their speed the same as in their training at home, close to three hundred miles per hour this low (in equivalent human units), so formation holding could stay tight.

The speeding flight was now four blocks beyond the cross street where the ladybug had turned the first corner. If that crew followed the newly learned attack and retreat patterns seen today, they would soon turn right, directly away from their last target, staying between Pillager columns. That helped them avoid possible bunker buster rounds, which could pass through the flimsy civilian construction.

The flight leader gave curt instructions as they approached the street where he expected to see their target headed towards them after their left turn. “Next left, accelerate and use down-step. Fire on acquisition. They shoot back fast.”

The down-step formation was merely a matter of wing one descending below the flight leader, and wing two lower than wing one and fly closer to the surface, providing all three Hoths with simultaneous clear firing lanes straight ahead. Presumably, the much slower ladybug would be continuing up the first block after its right turn, visible in all of their gun sights, caught between the tall buildings and in the open.

It made for another good kill zone, but they’d used all of their missiles on five other attempts on gun carts, killing four before one escaped. However, the enemy tri-barrel would be firing medium power plasma bolts back at them, and those gunners could quickly shift targets. From group experience gained today, they knew the driver also could fire a plasma rifle through a small forward port, less accurate and a slower firing rate but apparently visor aided, so that a bolt was automatically released precisely when a target was in-line after the trigger pull.

Like every weapon except the rail gun projectiles, the time of travel for energy weapons was speed of light for laser, and microscopically slower for a plasma bolt. Even a rail gun slug, fired from a half-mile distance, arrived faster than most organisms could react.

The Hoth, like most space planes that were also designed for atmospheric combat, had stubby sweptback wings, an armored and reflective slender nose, which was as much for deflecting energy beams as for aerodynamics. The Ragnar used a triple Tachyon Trap system, because they always launched from space, outside of a deep gravity well, and carried three tachyons with them for redundancy, providing energy to their reactionless Normal Space Drive, weapons, and system and sensor power. They had no reaction mass or thrusters at all, and if low on energy, they had to climb out of the gravity well to use their traps to snare new tachyons, or land and be humiliated when a support tug recovered them.

Flight Leader Captain Jastal sharply snapped his left wing down for aerodynamic assistance on the final left turn, but the Normal Space Drive did most of the work, his flight suit helping keep him conscious and mentally sharp as the g forces pressed him into his seat, greatful he didn’t need to use his limbs for this computer controlled maneuver. He instantly sighted his prey, moving up the roadway three blocks ahead. His below the nose plasma cannon had very limited movement for aiming capability, in order to maintain a smooth slipstream, and relied on a flight control system to align the nose for most of the targeting, which is why we was in a shallow and accelerating descent towards the target. He knew his trailing wing mates would be nearly in-line with him, but lower as they rolled out of their turns.

He visually shifted his airframe to place the targeting pip over the enemy gun cart, and authorized automatic firing when that happened. The gun cart’s tri-barrel was already firing as he rolled out to wings level, as if the gunner had expected this attack. The enemy cart was swerving hard to its left, skidding on its tracks, away from the flight’s turns, forcing the Flight Leader to compensate back to his right. Actinic blue bolts were streaming towards him, but they shifted lower as they fired at one or both of his wing mates below and behind him. A smaller dimmer bolt unexpectedly glanced off the Hoth’s nose, apparently from the cart driver’s lower powered plasma rifle. The brilliant spray of sparks as the bolt fragmented across his canopy startled him, and he was slow to complete his shift right to realign his pip. Wing one’s computer aimed laser found the target first, but wing two’s slugs, their rear infrared tracer lights showing their path to his visor, were off to the side of the gun cart, aimed nearly down the center of the street where the cart had just been. Jastal could tell the first rounds would miss. A sloppy beginning, for him and his rookie.

Then, as wing one’s mirror directed laser locked on and followed the gun cart’s movements, the situation became confusing, and suddenly turned bad.

From a point at the center of the street, well behind the enemy gun cart, which was now careening towards a plazsteel multi-door entry into the building on its left, appeared a fuzzy swirl of motion in the air, close to the ground. It was a pair of tight vortices, with parallel horizontal axes that extended well behind the leading swirls, which was approaching rapidly.

That momentary distraction ended when Jastal saw the flash of fresh bolts from the gun cart, but they weren’t directed at his flight. The enemy gunner had blasted apart the ground floor entrance doors to the skyscraper, to create an escape route from the open street. Not about to let this target evade destruction, the flight leader shifted slightly right to place his targeting pip where wing one’s laser was burning and heating the side of the lightly armored gun cart. The energy beam’s target point created an easy lock-on for the infrared flight control targeting system, quickly swinging the airframe slightly for an optimum plasma cannon shot. Unlike the laser, he’d only need one hit for his powerful bolt to penetrate the armor.

Just as the pip was swinging onto the hot spot, with an automatic fire command previously enabled, Jastal felt a violent shudder and a saw a flash to his left, and his Hoth slewed sharply right as the stubby left wing ceased its aerodynamic drag on that side. His bolt still fired, but it struck the building in front of the gun cart as the Hoth pivoted right, even as the automatic flight system used the Normal Space drive to turn away from a collision against the same building.

Jastal glanced to the side to see that his entire left wing was gone. He thus never saw the following depleted uranium, tungsten tipped rail gun projectiles coming, which punched through his narrow tapered windscreen, tearing through his chest. That contact started a tumbling action of the projectiles that shredded his Normal Space drive and ripped off part of his tail assembly from the inside. His Hoth became a deadly airborne collection of metal and ceramic, still headed towards the gun cart, which escaped through the blasted entryway just before the space plane ruined some of the display windows of the ground floor department store.

Wing two, his target lost for the automatic tracker system as the cart vanished, was dazzled by the disintegration of the Flight Leader’s Hoth ahead and above him, and barely avoided the debris as he dipped under the separating tail assembly. Eyes directed upward, he didn’t notice the swift passage of the twin vortices just below his own Hoth. Wing 2, flying below and behind him, was only twenty feet above the street, his attention still focused on correcting aim with his railgun. The building walls would easily yield to his heavy high velocity projectiles, and he could yet kill the target that his more experienced flight mates had missed. Wing two, above him, initially blocked his view of the fate of the Flight Leader, and the nearly head on vortices were less apparent to him, without the advantage of height to see their motion along the street. They were relatively level points of translucent air turbulence from his vantage point, and he wasn’t looking that direction anyway.

The swirls in the air became instantly more apparent to him when they suddenly rose sharply in front of his Hoth, passing very closely over top of him, between him and wing one. The severe turbulence pushed his craft downwards the fifteen feet that separated him from the street. His Normal Space drive reacted quickly, at least enough to prevent a nose down impact with the road, but it couldn’t stop the bone jarring impact of the Hoth’s belly with the pavement, and the drive was stressed to the maximum to slow his three hundred mile per hour sparking skid along the street. He was painfully thrown into his seat restraints by the bruising deceleration and impact with the street.

Dazed, and not sure what had happened, he called to the Flight Leader, just as the debris from that higher flying Hoth smashed into the building to his right. Lacking any flammable fuel onboard, there were sparks, and sprays of debris, but no explosion. The craft’s fusion bottle core wasn’t ruptured, and that dense item ripped free of the wreckage and spun down the pedestrian walkway at the base of the building. He saw colorfully dressed humans, standing oddly still, looking out of the building’s wide windows at the violence and destruction outside, apparently unconcerned for their safety. The
mannequins were completely indifferent to the events outside.

Lieutenant Kranfa, the pilot of wing two answered his radio call. “Derkat, get out and run towards the Pillagers. Jastal is dead, and the enemy gun cart survived. It will be hunting for you. Move fast, and I’ll cover you if they expose themselves. I’m looping back towards you, over the top of the buildings.” He knew his wing mate’s visor could see his craft’s silhouette, even with its stealth activated. “I’ll come back down the street from the same direction, slow and quiet from behind you, and wait for them.”

Blowing his canopy free, and bashing the central release disk on his chest, his multi-point seat restraints retracted, and Derkat leaped from the cockpit, only a body length above the pavement. The higher than typical gravity hurt his feet when his boots smacked harder than expected on the pavement.

Using his visor’s com system, as he drew a laser side arm and started running towards their advancing line of Pillagers, he asked, “What happened to Captain Jastal? What was that swirl of air that forced me down?”

“His Hoth disintegrated. I don't know what happened to him since the gun cart wasn’t firing at us anymore. What swirl of air do you mean?”

Looking over his shoulder, back where he could hear scraping and clattering sounds, well behind where his crashed Hoth had slid to a halt, he saw motion as the human gun cart appeared and paused, just inside the shelter of the smashed entry way. If he could see them, the gunner could see him. He quickly angled to his left to put his wrecked Hoth between him and the gun cart. Not that this solved his long-term problem. He couldn’t keep moving down the street and keep his Hoth between them, and they could easily blast away the cover his wrecked Hoth offered anyway. He explained his predicament to wing one.

“I’m slowing to a hover behind and above them. Link your visor to mine, so I’ll be able to triangulate and site them through the building and fire my laser at them. I can burn through the walls and levels above them if they don’t back away.”

“Understood. But watch out for that same turbulence. I see it above and well behind you, coming our way.” As he watched it move in the empty sky, he zoomed his visor’s view towards the disturbance. His experience in watching Hoth flight training suddenly told him what it was, and what he wasn’t seeing.

“Kranfa, that’s a pair of atmospheric wing tip vorticities, they have better stealth than we do. Climb and get out of here.” What was missing was the stealthed enemy aircraft that was making the twin horizontal vortices.

It was almost in time. Rather than try to flee, accelerating from a near motionless hover with an enemy already on his tail, the Hoth spun in place, and fired his laser wildly, as he strove to see what the linked visor image of his wing mate saw. The incoming plasma bolts, originating just in front of and below the twin tornadoes, blew the tail off the hovering Hoth as it pivoted in place. The craft started to drop tail first from less than fifty feet, and luck accomplished what skill had failed to do. The laser beam cut along the bottom of the fuselage of the incoming Shadow, hitting one of the Trap emitters, opening its single Trap and freeing the tachyon back into Tachyon Space, killing the power source for the gravitational Normal Space Drive.

The Shadow suddenly popped into view, since its stealth also relied on that power source, and revealed itself as a silvery reflective and aerodynamic dart of a space plane. Its large fusion bottle, which provided power to weapons and electrical systems, instantly switched to supply a short burst of energy to the Normal Space Drive. It wasn’t enough to fly the plane, but the craft slowed almost impossibly fast to a crawl and settled roughly to the pavement. It came to rest less than fifty feet behind where wing two fell, which had stuck the roadway rear end first, which absorbed some of the impact as it crumpled, and then flopping flat as the nose came down hard. A series of less than graceful landings for such agile birds.

Derkat, torn between his survival urge, and a desire to try to pull his comrade from the cockpit, compromised and ran back towards his own plane, using it as a shield from the gun cart. All he had was his laser pistol, but he’d do his best to cover his wing mate if he was able to exit his wrecked craft. “Kranfa, are you able to get out?” A helmet icon showed he was alive.