Idris Sansin shot out of his chair and dashed to the observation platform. He leaped up the steps onto the platform, which was set atop the bridge and gave a panoramic view of the Atlantia and her surroundings.
Idris turned and saw the Sylph rising up, her bow high and her stern aglow as her engines burst into life. Mikhain joined the captain on the platform and watched as the Sylph climbed to pass overhead the Atlantia.
‘What the hell are they doing?’ Mikhain uttered. ‘We can’t send a shuttle across when they’re moving at attack speed and she’s got no guns anyway!’
Idris shook his head.
‘It’s not an attack run,’ he replied, ‘it’s a suicide mission. They’re going to ram the Veng’en cruiser.’
‘What the hell for?’ Mikhain gasped. ‘They’ll lose us the supplies and their own lives.’
‘Yes,’ Idris replied. ‘But they’ll destroy the Legion aboard her too and give us the chance to escape.’ The captain looked at Mikhain. ‘Order the fighters to land. This is the only chance we’ll get to leave.’
*
‘Maximum power!’
Kordaz clenched his clawed fist as Evelyn grabbed the Sylph’s antiquated throttle banks and threw them forward. The aged ship lurched as she got underway and Evelyn grasped the controls and began guiding her high over the Atlantia.
‘You’re killing your own people,’ Evelyn pointed out.
‘No less so than they have killed so many of their own,’ Kordaz muttered in reply. ‘Ty’ek is a young fool. Ram them!’
The Sylph surged forward and Evelyn saw the squadrons of Raython fighters rushing toward them suddenly veer away and dart toward the Atlantia.
‘The captain’s pulling everybody back,’ she said. ‘They’re going to leave.’
‘You should go,’ Kordaz replied. ‘I can take this from here.’
‘There’s no point,’ Evelyn replied. ‘Besides, I’ve got a better idea.’
Kordaz looked at her. ‘Which is?’
Evelyn looked down at her controls and began inputting commands.
‘We let the ship’s computer do this for us,’ she said. ‘Charge what cannons the ship has, and as soon as they’re ready open fire.’
Kordaz began inputting the commands into his own panel as Evelyn heard Bra’hiv in her earpiece.
‘The Legion is almost at the bridge!’
he shouted above the sound of a shuttle’s engines running up.
‘We’re running up the auxillary power units on the Raythons but there’s not much more we can do.’
‘Sit tight and wait for my mark,’ Evelyn replied. ‘We’re almost done here!’
‘Weapons primed and ready!’ Kordaz informed her.
Evelyn looked up at the screen to see the Veng’en cruiser ahead of them. It was trailing a feint stream of debris and venting gases into space as it turned hard to starboard, her long hull facing side–on to the Sylph and her guns coming to bear.
‘She’s going to open fire!’ Kordaz said. ‘At this range we’ll be pulverised!’
‘The Legion is right outside the bridge Evelyn!’
Bra’hiv shouted.
Evelyn locked the Veng’en cruiser’s hull as a navigation point and set the Sylph’s controls to autopilot.
‘Let’s go, now!’ she shouted at Kordaz. ‘Open fire!’
Kordaz hit the fire button on his console and then struggled upright, wobbling as the entire vessel shifted beneath their feet as the Sylph’s few gun platforms let fly a salvo of plasma shots at the Veng’en cruiser.
Evelyn saw the shots rocket into the cruiser, faint flashes against her giant hull as they impacted ineffectually against armoured plating.
‘The cannons are not powerful enough to harm her,’ Kordaz said.
‘I don’t care if they harm her,’ Evelyn replied. ‘I just want them to fire on us and ignore the Atlantia.’
The bridge hatch suddenly vibrated with a hum that filled the bridge. As Evelyn looked up at it she saw the metal surface ripple like the surface of a lake beneath a brisk wind.
‘They’re coming through,’ Kordaz hissed.
‘This way,’ Evelyn turned him and they limped hurriedly toward the for’ard exit. The hatch opened and Evelyn looked back one last time at the main viewing screen to see the Veng’en cruiser’s hull light up as she returned fire.
Evelyn pulled Kordaz through the hatch and sealed it shut behind her as they scrambled down the stairwell toward the landing bay decks. She heard a crash of metal on the bridge deck as the aft bridge hatch collapsed inward and then the hiss of millions of metal legs as the Legion flooded inside and came up against the for’ward exit hatch.
The hatch rippled as though its thick steel surface had suddenly turned into a grey silk sheet billowing in a breeze and then the hunters blasted through it as their thousands of sharp mandibles and claws scratched through the solid metal and they poured out in a dense black flood.
‘Grab hold of something!’ Evelyn shouted.
Kordaz staggered through a pressure hatch as Evelyn aimed her pistol at the onrushing swarm of hunters racing toward her and fired four shots in quick succession. The blazing bolts of plasma smashed into the hordes, melting them in their hundreds, but the immense force of the hunters behind was too great and they rolled over the blasts and closed in on Evelyn with frightening speed.
‘It’s too late!’ Kordaz yelled.
Evelyn holstered her pistol and jumped through the hatch just as the first plasma round from the Veng’en cruiser ploughed into the Sylph and blasted her bridge into oblivion. She heard a scream of tortured metal and atmosphere being vacuumed from the ship in a howling gale as the blasts smashed into the upper hull.
The atmosphere around her was dragged past in a screaming torrent that tore at their uniforms and Evelyn’s hair. She gripped the side of the bulkhead as the writhing mass of hunters reached the very edge of the hatch. For a moment she stared directly into hundreds of tiny glossy black eyes, round and without souls, above sharp mandibles as long as her fingernails and dense metallic black bodies. The writhing mass of hunters stretched out toward where she crouched, buffeted by the gale like a windsock in a hurricane, and she saw a single hunter land on her boot.
Then the escaping atmosphere and plunging temperature dragged the hunters en masse away from them, sucking them toward the freezing oblivion of space.
‘The hatch!’ Kordaz growled.
Evelyn dragged herself backward against the force of the wind and hooked her foot behind the hatch door as with the other she kicked the latch off. The heavy hatch door slammed shut in a flash, sealing the landing bay deck off from the damage.
Evelyn gasped in relief as she slumped on the deck, and she felt the ship trembling beneath the blows as the Veng’en cruiser hammered her with salvo after salvo.
‘We’ve got to move,’ Kordaz rasped.
Evelyn got to her feet, and as she looked down she saw the tiny lone hunter still clinging to her boot. On an impulse she reached down and grabbed the tiny machine. The hunter did not respond, suddenly dormant as it recalibrated to the absence of its fellow machines.
‘You should destroy it,’ Kordaz said.
‘No, we can study it, it might be useful.’
The Sylph shuddered violently and the lights flickered as the hull was hit by another salvo of blasts. Evelyn held the hunter in one hand between her finger and thumb as with the other she propelled Kordaz toward the landing bay.
The Sylph heeled violently over as a distant, deep groan of rending metal echoed through the ship. Evelyn staggered sideways and slammed into the wall of the corridor as she made her way through the landing bay hatch. A series of ceiling tiles smashed down toward the deck and a spray of sparks floated in glowing globules as they were blasted from fuse boxes as excess power surged through the ship’s systems.
‘Move!’
Evelyn saw Bra’hiv and Djimon standing guard outside the shuttle’s rear ramp as she hurried across the landing bay with Kordaz limping in pursuit.
‘The ship’s going to collide with the Veng’en cruiser!’ Bra’hiv shouted. ‘Get aboard now and get the hell out of here!’
The general and Djimon turned and dashed aboard the shuttle as its engines whined into life, and Evelyn sprinted the last few paces to their Raython fighters. Her eyes took in the open cockpits, the detatched ground power lines and the flashing beacon high on the fuselage that indicated the ion engines were spun up ready for starting.
‘You take this one!’ she yelled to Kordaz above the crash of explosions ripping through the Sylph.
Evelyn dashed past Andaim’s fighter and clambered up into her own, feeling suddenly at home as she slid into the seat and hurriedly buckled herself in. She reached down to a small storage compartment and dropped the dormant hunter into it, then locked it shut. She looked across and saw Kordaz slump into Andaim’s Raython and yank his harnesses into place.
Evelyn pulled on her helmet and closed her canopy, watching as Kordaz struggled to get his head into Andaim’s helmet. The Veng’en scowled and tossed it out of the cockpit as he closed the canopy.
‘Scorcher Flight, do you copy?!’
‘Scorcher Two,’ Evelyn replied to the shuttle, ‘we’re aboard and right behind you. Go, now!’
The shuttle’s two ion engines flared with a white glare and the craft lifted off the deck and soared toward the landing bay doors. Flashing red lights illuminated the rim of the doors and they opened slowly, revealing the deep blackness of space as the atmosphere within the landing bay was sucked out in whorls of ghostly white vapour.
Evelyn flicked switches on her instrument console, engaging the Raython’s ion drives as she opened a channel to Kordaz’s Raython. Despite his lack of head gear, the signal would still reach him, broadcast instead through speakers in his cockpit.
‘Switch over and go easy on the throttle, these things are pretty damned quick when…’
Andaim’s Raython lifted up off the Sylph’s deck and turned, its ion engines flaring brightly as it blasted its way past and rocketed out of the bay.
‘… they get going.’
Evelyn blinked and disengaged her magnetic landing claws, the Raython drifting free of the deck as she retracted the undercarriage and shoved the throttles forward. Her fighter surged forward as the landing bay flashed past in a blur of flickering lights and she burst out into space.
Behind her, she saw the vast hull of the Sylph glowing with multiple fires and just beyond it the huge Veng’en cruiser and its swarm of attending fighters.
***
‘She’s going to impact the Veng’en cruiser, captain!’
Mikhain’s voice was tense with excitement, the sight of an unexpected victory within their grasp as the Sylph pursued the cruiser.
‘If she holds together,’ Idris replied. ‘Prepare to make the leap!’
Lael’s hands flashed across her console and she looked up.
‘New contacts, bearing two–two–four, elevation zero. Two fighters and a shuttle away from the Sylph, sir!’
Idris snapped his gaze to the Sylph’s ravaged hull and saw three tiny specks rocketing away from her.
‘Range?’
‘Six thousand cubits!’ Mikhain replied.
Even as Idris watched, he could see the Veng’en fighters wheeling away from their parent cruiser to pursue the three craft.
‘They won’t get here in time,’ Mikhain added. ‘The range is too great.’
Idris whirled and pointed at the helmsman. ‘Bring her about, full to port!’
The helmsman responded instantly, the Atlantia beginning to heel over and turn back toward the Sylph as the captain turned to Mikhain.
‘Fire in support of them and launch the alert fighters!’
The Executive Officer relayed the orders, his eyes fixed on the Atlantia’s main viewing panel where three small blue boxes tracked the positions of the allied craft, and sixteen red ones the Veng’en fighters pursuing them.
‘Ty’ek’s hands are tied,’ Mikhain said, ‘he can’t engage us until he’s destroyed or disabled the Sylph. It’s genius.’
‘It won’t take him long,’ Idris said as he watched the Veng’en cruiser accelerate away from the battered Sylph. ‘He’s faster than the merchant ship. He’ll swing out wide and come back to destroy her and then he’ll come for us.’
Two bright points of light rocketed away from the Atlantia’s bow.
‘Reapers Five and Six clear,’ Mikhain reported. ‘We should launch more.’
‘No,’ the captain said. ‘Whatever happens now, we have to leap before the Sylph is destroyed.’
*
‘Ranger One, I’ve got multiple contacts astern and closing fast.’
‘I see them,’ Evelyn replied as she glanced at her holographic SAD and saw the red specks of the pursuing Veng’en fighters.
‘They’ll catch up with us in no time,’ Kordaz replied. ‘The shuttle is too slow.’
Evelyn scanned her own display and for a moment realized how much she missed having Andaim on her wing or in the back seat of the T2 training Raython.
‘Any contact with the Atlantia?’ Evelyn asked.
‘Nothing, they’re still being jammed. No, wait. Two fighters in–bound.’
Evelyn spotted the two Raythons on her display but she shook her head.
‘They’re not going to reach us before the Scythes,’ she replied as she looked over at Kordaz’s fighter. ‘We’re going to have to do this on our own for a while, Kordaz.’
In the faint starlight she saw the Veng’en turn to glance at her from within his cockpit.
‘They will kill us all,’
he replied.
‘Then let’s do something about it,’ she replied. ‘Ranger One, keep going at full throttle, we’ll stay back here and try to cover your tail.’
‘Roger that.’
‘Kordaz, don’t try to engage the Veng’en directly,’ Evelyn advised. ‘If one slips past us it can attack the shuttle and this will all be for nothing. Stay close to Ranger One and pick them off as best you can. I’ll run interference.’
‘I understand.’
Evelyn pulled up, the starfield wheeling past as she looked out of the top of her canopy and saw the flotilla of Scythe fighters streaking toward them. She rolled out, heading back toward them, and wasted no time in opening fire on the densely packed fighters.
Her pulse cannons were blinded out by a salvo of massive plasma blasts that rocketed overhead as the Atlantia’s cannons fired in support. The huge shots flashed toward the Veng’en fighters as they scattered in disarray, three of them blasted into oblivion as they were smashed aside by the salvo.