Footprints In Ash Read online

  The evasive maneuvers, however, were more than necessary as the rest of the gunship wing turned and began firing. The interference from the ship’s shields grew so great so quickly that I had to rely on the ship’s window and line of sight to fly, which was always harrowing.

  3

  “McCollack wing 53 to Vermillion. Commence after burn with spiral evasive pattern, we’ll clear your line to space.” The first of the fighters appeared in my peripheral and I sent two more rounds into the oncoming hoard of ‘Tal before following their orders. The assistance hadn’t come a moment too soon either. After only seconds under the gunships’ attack several emitters had already turned to slag under the incredible strain of many hundreds of energy cannons.

  “See.” I told Suzie as we emerged from the cloud of fire and ash. “We only killed a few of them, but we provided an opportunity for someone else to wipe them out.” The girl nodded and shot a missile out of the sky as it screamed toward our ship.

  “Do we have another target?”

  “Lets find out.” I said as the blue line of atmosphere began dropping below us, leaving us to the black of space.

  “Multiple units inbound on three vectors?” Giles said as his fingers flew over several sensor displays.

  “Ships or units?” I asked.

  “Units.” Giles grunted.

  Finally my piloting array cleared and confirmed the man’s dire prophesy. “Fire chaff.” I said, slamming the ship’s accelerators into full. “Concentrate all fire on defensive bursts. Don’t let anything through.”

  “Most of their weapons are energy and I still can’t hit all the incoming missiles.” Suzie squeaked.

  “Chaff away!” Giles said.

  The three groups of ships were closing on us from the high three O’clock, low nine O’clock, and direct twelve O’clock positions. The communications panel popped and buzzed. There was so much chatter, jamming signals, and general background noise that there was no way to know if the garbled sounds were from a ship trying to reach us or the dying squeals of some unfortunate vessel’s broadcasting equipment.

  “All weapons forward fire!” I pushed the engines again, trying to squeeze every last ounce of speed from them. The McCollack cruiser was just to the other side of the oncoming unit and if we could survive the passage we’d be able to take refuge in their shield grid. There was nothing left to do but hold on and pray. The ship was hit repeatedly and I felt the reverberating ping of ‘Tal energy weapons puncturing the shields and blistering open holes in the cargo bay. “For some reason all I could think of was how much it would cost to fix the holes I saw in my minds eye. There we were, about to get shredded by a thousand beams of superheated energy and I was balancing the checkbook.

  “We’re through!” Giles shouted in astonishment. Finding myself back in reality and at the pilot’s station I took advantage of the situation and headed strait for the Relentless and her oh-so-welcoming shield grid, which was glowing brightly against the oncoming weapons like a beacon of salvation.

  “Repeat – Relentless to vermillion; get to our shield grid! We are about to fire our primary cannon.” Three things happened after that message forced its way out of the communications panel. The first was that the glowing and vary charged antimatter cannon on the nose of the Relentless vanished as the vessel fired. The second was the bizarre tingling sensation that snapped over my body as we passed through the Relentless’ shields, and finally the hundred ships or so that had been trying so vary diligently to kill us, disappeared from existence.

  “Vermillion, please escort assault squadron Delta 7 and coordinate your assault on the following Juggernaut. We are transmitting telemetry.”

  I was in shock. The Vermillion could barely maintain static shield strength, let alone make an assault of any reasonable effect. “This is the Vermillion, we can’t sustain attack shield strength and we are venting atmosphere in our main cargo hold.”

  “I’m sorry Vermillion but those are your orders. Comply or yield your Capital status.”

  “Understood, moving to rally with the squadron.”

  “Seriously?” Giles croaked. “Were seriously going to attack without shields.”

  “I’m moving extra power to the emitters that are still working. We should be able to last for at least one pass. We just have to hope that’s enough.”

  “Wait.” The word came out of Giles’ mouth without any real intonation. The man had a distant look, like his mind was completely and entirely elsewhere and his body had become nothing more than a communications circuit. “Where is your main emitter pod?”

  I pulled up the ship’s hollo display and showed him on a transparent diagram. Giles didn’t say anything after that, he simply got up and ran down the narrow ramp to the rest of the ship.

  “Maybe he can fix a few of them.” Suzie said.

  Shaking my head I turned back to the nav systems. “I certainly hope so, because if he simply chose now as a great time for a mental breakdown we just lost a third of our guns.”

  I purposefully made my way around the exterior of the Relentless at half speed. I neither wanted to give the impression that we were too eager to fight nor had power to spare. “Come in Delta 7 command this is the Vermillion. Please transmit your battle telemetry.”

  “Confirmed Vermillion, transmitting encrypted ops for decoding on your end. Welcome to the strike group.”

  “Here goes nothing.” I said.

  “Who’s nothing? And which ship is he on?” At first I looked at Suzie with pure shock. The sly ‘fooled you’ look on her face, however, informed me that she had developed a sense of battle humor. Not unusual in and of itself, but almost absurd in a little girl… then again I found myself having a hard time thinking of anything in which Suzie was not unusual.

  4

  “All groups fall in.” The squadron’ leader’s voice came over the com. “Prepare for assault, we’re hunting bear today. The Juggernaut’s gunships have been eradicated by several point defense sweeps by the Ishikawans and its up to us to take her down. Concentrate all firepower on their shield emitters first; after that, follow your designated attack patterns.”

  “Can our shells puncture deep enough?” Suzie asked while pointing to the power relay module we’d been assigned as our target.

  “We’ve got penetration rounds so I’d assume so. Our armament was on file, which is probably why they assigned this section to us.”

  Two frigates were flanking us and a flight of peregrines dropped below our port side, making an initial probing salvo along a section of shield that had only a single emitter. The defense field fluctuated slightly before the Juggernaut’s own weapons came to life as its crew finally identified our taskforce as a threat in addition to the Cursor they had been firing upon.

  In a split second reaction I recognized the signs of a Kinetic weapon firing directly below us and threw the ship into a spiral up and around one of the flanking frigates to avoid the devastating hit. These weren’t gunship rounds we were dodging anymore, they were full ship to ship assault weapons, even a single direct hit from a capital cannon had the capability to tear the Vermillion apart. “Hit that cannon.” I told Suzie as we passed through the ship’s outer shield grid. Some of their emitters could protect the ship directly against the whole, but we had closed below the protective capital shields and our weapons could now make headway against the larger ships defenses.

  I heard footsteps running up the deck behind the cockpit and shouted over my shoulder. “If that’s Giles get back to your station. If its not… what are you doing on my ship?”

  “Sorry.” Giles stammered. “Check the shield readouts.” I pulled the readouts to the for-front of my display and was amazed to find that half the disabled systems had come back online.

  “What did you do?” I asked.

  “On our way in I noticed the shields were a C-49 civilian mod system. They’ve got a failsafe where they blow their main power nodes into space if they experience catastrophic failure. Its
not a perfect system but if you switch the unit out you can save about half the emitters in a few minutes if you’ve got a recall bay; which I noticed you have.”

  “Giles.”

  “What?” He asked as he sat down and started squeezing triggers.

  “If we survive this I just might have a job for you.”

  “Noted Sir.” I could hear the smile on his face.

  The ship was rocked by an external explosion as one of the alien ship’s shield emitters failed. “That’s it!” The Delta 7 leader’s voice came thought the com. again. “All craft move to your strike targets. Bring it down!” The squadron broke apart and small firefights and strafing runs began.

  “Focus on the locked target.” I told Giles and Suzie. “We don’t have too many passes left in us.” I used the zero friction of space to fix the front of the ship on the small piece of the ‘Tal vessel and fired the main cannons continuously as we passed. The smaller weapons manned by Giles and Suzie kept the fire and explosions coming from the fresh hole between blasts.

  “Did we get it?” Suzie asked as we finished out pass and slammed on the accelerators. The move had left us facing in the opposite direction and ready for another strike.

  “Not quite.” Giles said. “We still need to blow through a deck and two bulkheads.

  “Hah.” I laughed. “Piece of cake.” As we approached for our final strike I could see one of the aliens manning the ship sucked out the fiery hole we had created, the invading monster was left to freeze in the vacuum of space. We began the arch for a repeat of our previous attack but there were a series of explosion along our side shield as a large gunship closed on us.

  “She’s positioning to ram.” Giles said stoically. “I recommend redirecting our fire.”

  “Do it” I said, swinging the thrusters in a pivot motion that refocused our aim on the attacker but left us sliding through space in an uncontrolled direction. All three of us squeezed our triggers and the gunship lurched at the first few impacts, and crashed into the Juggernaut itself after another. “Fire three missiles.” I told Suzie. We don’t have time for another pass. More of those will be by before we get close enough.”

  “Aye.” She shouted. The naval term sounding odd coming from her tiny mouth.

  We turned to head back to the Relentless and I saw the rest of the squadron was doing the same. The Juggernaut was crippled. Reorienting one of its fearsome side cannons the Relentless unleashed a single capital round, the result wasn’t spectacular at first. Only a spurt of fire emanated from the round’s impact point. The secondary explosions, however, were a sight to behold. The ship seemed to crumble inward as it lost pressure across all its decks and its energy systems lost containment, and in one catastrophic moment it buckled completely, exploding like a cosmic firecracker.

  “Relentless to all squadrons, regroup along the primary bays. The enemy forces are moving off. Congratulations boys, the day is ours.” I flipped my com. to the open Imperial frequency and heard a thousands soldiers on the ground shouting “Victory, honor, victory!”

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