Ep.#6 - "Head of the Dragon" (The Frontiers Saga) (13 page)

His interceptor was a lifting body, but it required a lot of speed in order to experience any significant lift. Josh quickly scanned his options, trying to figure out what to do to avoid falling from the sky like a rock.

“It’s no good!” Loki reported. “They still won’t light!” Loki scanned his instrument panel, paying particular attention to the readouts coming from the jet-turbines. The ship was still bouncing around violently, forcing him to squint in order to keep his eyes on the readouts. “The oxygen sensors are not showing high enough levels to light!”

“We’re at twenty thousand meters!” Josh exclaimed. “There should be plenty of oxygen at this altitude.”

“
Falcon one, Talon two-five. Pitch down and dive!
” the pilot’s voice called over the comms. “
You’ve got too much turbulence around the intakes. You need to dive to increase your airspeed and force air into the turbines so the sensor will read the oxygen levels!
”

Josh didn’t need to be told twice and immediately pitched their nose down. It was easy enough, since the nose already wanted to point downward. He watched as his airspeed indicators began to rise. “Try again!” he started to call to Loki.

“I’m on it!” Loki answered. He was already watching the oxygen level indicators on the jet turbines. He had it figured out now. He had to wait until the air pressure rushing into the turbine intakes was high enough for the sensors to work properly.

Josh looked at his altimeter. They were already passing fifteen thousand meters and falling. “Anytime now, Loki.”

“Just a few seconds more,” he answered. He, too, had glanced at the airspeed indicator as well as their rate of descent. If he didn’t get the turbines to light this time, there might not be enough time to recycle them a fourth time before they slammed into the surface of Corinair.

“Passing ten thousand, Loki!” Josh exclaimed.

“Lighting turbines!” Loki answered. He watched as the system cycled. Despite the turbulence, he could feel the turbines spinning up as the intake vents sprung open and allowed the oxygen rich air to rush in.

“Passing eight thousand!” Josh reported. He was trying to pull his nose up to decrease the angle of their dive, but without the jet turbines to compensate for the poor lifting capabilities of the interceptor, the aircraft’s response was sluggish at best.

“They’re lighting!” Loki exclaimed as the turbines began to whine.

“Passing six thousand meters!” Josh reported.

“Turbine power coming up!” Loki reported. “Stand by to throttle up!”

“Passing four, Loki!” Josh’s left hand had been on the throttles the entire time, but he knew that if he tried to apply power before the jet turbines were up to full power, they might stall the engines out. “Oh shit! Passing two!”

“THROTTLE UP!” Loki hollered. “NOW! NOW! NOW!”

Josh eased the throttles forward a bit. He didn’t want to apply full thrust, as they were already in a steep dive and too much power would make it even harder to level off. As he reached ten percent power on the throttles, he could already feel the interceptor becoming a little more responsive. Her nose started to come up slightly. “Ten percent power. Passing one thousand meters!” Josh reported.

“Pull up, Josh! Pull up!”

Josh continued to slide the throttle forward as his nose came up even more. “Twenty percent. Passing five hundred.”

Loki braced himself, sure that they were not going to make it and at any moment Josh would trigger the abort, causing them both to eject. “Anytime now, Josh,” Loki mumbled.

“I’m not ejecting,” Josh mumbled back. “Fifty percent power. Passing three hundred meters,” he added calmly.

“Then get our fucking nose up!” Loki demanded.

“Passing one fifty.”

Loki peeked out the side of the canopy at the ground. Although it appeared to be rushing under them far faster than it was rushing up toward them, they were obviously still falling.

“You’re finally going to do it,” Loki mumbled. “You’re finally going to get us both killed.”

“Seriously?” Josh asked, a bit shocked by his friend’s lack of confidence. “Eighty percent power. Passing seventy five meters,” Josh added calmly.

Loki suddenly noticed that the ground was not coming toward them as quickly as before. He looked at the flight dynamics displays on his own console. They were coming up on full throttles, their airspeed was nearly maxed out, and everything appeared to be completely normal. That’s when he noticed something else… Josh was now cruising along at nearly full speed, only five meters above the ground, just as they had been practicing earlier on the training runs. “You son-of-a-bitch!” Loki exclaimed. “You meant to come in that hot the whole time!”

“Not the whole time,” Josh admitted, “just the last twenty seconds or so.”

“Not funny, Josh. Not funny at all.”

“Oh come, on! That was very funny!” Josh laughed. “‘You’ve finally done it, Josh. You’re finally going to kill us,’” he mocked.

Loki brushed off the antics of his pilot and friend, instead returning to his instruments to perform his duties. After all, they were skimming the surface of the planet at top speed. “Aurora, Falcon one. Jump complete,” Loki reported over the comms.

“
Falcon one, Aurora copies. Congratulations, gentlemen,
” the flight controller on the Aurora answered over the comms. “
Return to Aurora for debrief.
”

“Falcon one copies,” Loki answered. “As soon as all this is over, I’m putting in for a vacation,” he told Josh.

Josh smiled, pulled the nose up, and headed back into orbit to rendezvous with the Aurora. Abby would undoubtedly want to go over all the data from their jump. They would have to make some tweaks to the software so the air-breathing jet turbines would light more quickly, but he knew that all those things would be corrected in short order. Soon, they would be back out, jumping down into the atmosphere, and arriving progressively lower with each subsequent jump as they perfected the process. Soon after that, the jump shuttles would begin practicing the same maneuver, and that would give them all a huge tactical advantage against the Ta’Akar forces, not only on Ancot, but on Takara as well. Josh was no military strategist, but even he knew the importance of what they had just accomplished. Now they had a real chance.

Chapter Four

Lieutenant Waddell watched as the men disembarked from the most recent shuttle to roll into the main hangar bay. In order to ensure victory on Ancot, he would need a force of no less than five hundred highly trained Corinari troops. At last report, there were several thousand Corinari that had been accounted for. However, it was taking more time to gather them and get them organized than they had expected. Resources on the surface of Corinair continued to be taxed as the people struggled to cope with the most recent bombardment. Despite the fact that the battleship had only been able to make a single orbit around the planet, she had unleashed considerable punishment on the Corinairans, leveling key military installations, communications and transportation infrastructure, power generation, major industrial plants, and most of the central seats of government. Had it not been for the assistance being flown in from the lesser inhabited worlds of the Darvano system, the chaos below would still be much worse.

Lieutenant Waddell watched as his sergeants barked out instructions to the newly arriving Corinair troops, dividing them into four separate groups as they came off the shuttles. In order to speed things up, the shuttles were not even coming into the main hangar bay to unload. Instead, they would unload while still in the transfer airlock, their passengers entering through the smaller personnel hatchway built into the massive transfer airlock door. He could not imagine how much more difficult this would have been had the captain agreed to continue running with an open deck.

“Lieutenant!” a voice called from behind. Waddell spun around to see Lieutenant Commander Toral coming toward him, Toral having just stepped off the shuttle.

“Sir,” Lieutenant Waddell responded, snapping a salute in perfect Corinari fashion.

“How many men do we have so far?” the lieutenant commander asked.

“Just under two hundred, sir.”

“That’s barely a single company,” the lieutenant commander commented gruffly.

“Yes, sir.”

“This is going to take longer than we thought,” the lieutenant commander observed.

“There just aren’t enough shuttles available, sir. Most of them are still evacuating the wounded civilians to hospitals outside of the primary impact areas.”

“What about the jump shuttles that we will be using during the assault on Ancot?”

“They’re practicing low altitude jump-ins, sir. The entire plan depends on it.”

“Yes, it does,” the lieutenant commander frowned. “A hell of a plan. Never in a million years would I have thought we would be doing this, and on Ancot of all places.” Lieutenant Commander Toral looked around the hangar bay. The forward end of the hangar was packed with the remaining interceptors that had been gathered and flown up from Corinair. In the middle of the hangar, the men were assembling into platoons as they disembarked from shuttles entering the rear of the hangar. “Listen, Waddell,” he began as he turned to face him, “you and I are going to be company commanders.”

“Sir, shouldn’t the company commander be…”

“A major?” Lieutenant Commander Toral interrupted. “You see any of them standing around?”

“But I’m only a lieutenant, sir.”

“And I’m only a lieutenant commander. Hell, I was only promoted a few weeks ago at that. Neither one of us is qualified to command a company. But what the hell? We’ve got a flyboy major as our commander-in-chief.”

“Yes, sir.”

“We’ll break into two companies, alpha and bravo. We’ll keep it simple for now. I’ll command alpha, and you command bravo. Since we’ll be attacking separate targets, we can probably do without a brigade commander, unless another lieutenant shows up before we jump off, in which case I’ll put him in charge of alpha, and I’ll take battalion command.” The lieutenant commander checked the time on the data image being displayed on the inside of the eye-shield hanging off the front of his battle helmet. “How long until we get under way?”

“Captain Scott promised to wait until we had sufficient resources.”

“He did? Well, I like him already,” Toral joked. “What’s your take on the mighty Na-Tan?”

“Hard to say, sir. I’ve only met him once, at the briefing today. He’s young; that’s for sure—younger than either of us. I get the feeling he wasn’t expecting any of this anymore than the rest of us. Doesn’t really seem like a captain, at least not like one you would expect.”

“Well, he’s taken out three heavily armed, imperial warships and saved our world twice over, so he’s doing all right in my book.”

“Yes, sir,” Lieutenant Waddell agreed as he followed the lieutenant commander toward the assembled men.

“I know that garrison,” he told the lieutenant as they walked. “I was stationed there during my time in the imperial forces. If they are unsuccessful in taking out all their power, we will be cut to pieces by their turrets long before we are close enough to set our shield disruptors.

“They plan to take out both the primary and secondary power sources,” Lieutenant Waddell reminded him.

“That’s all well and good assuming they have no backup reactors within the garrison itself.”

“Did they?”

“No, not when I was stationed there. But that was a decade ago.”

“A reactor powerful enough to run their perimeter shield would have shown up on scans,” Lieutenant Waddell pointed out, “even if it were powered down. Anything too small to be detected would barely be able to run a turret gun.”

“Even if they don’t have backup reactors, we still have to get inside their walls, and that’s not going to be easy, even without perimeter shields and turrets.” Lieutenant Commander Toral stopped a moment, turning back to Waddell. “We’re going to have to drop men inside the walls,” he told him.

Lieutenant Waddell saw the concerned look in Lieutenant Commander Toral’s eyes. “They’ll pick us off before we get down the ropes.”

“Maybe, maybe not. We’ll jump the first group in front, draw their attention to one side. They’ll believe we intend to breach the front gates. It is the weakest point in their walls.”

“And therefore the most heavily defended.”

“We give them just enough time to move most of their men toward the front, then we jump in above the back half of the garrison and drop the men in the rear yard. If we jump in low enough, only the back two turrets will be able to fire on us. The shuttle can take a few hits.”

“The men cannot,” Lieutenant Waddell said.

“We’ll lose some, I admit, but most will make it down in one piece. It would help if we had some air support to keep those turrets occupied.”

“It would take air cover at least ten minutes to make it down from orbit,” Waddell told him.

“It will be over by then,” the lieutenant commander stated, “one way or another.”

* * *

Nathan was awakened by the door buzzer. For a moment, he wasn’t sure what was going on. He had only leaned back on the couch in his quarters for what seemed like a moment. The buzzer sounded again, and he quickly rose and headed for the door, finding himself somewhat surprised that he had actually been asleep. He had been unable to fall asleep quickly for several weeks now. He opened the door still rubbing his eyes. “Come in, Cam.”

Cameron seemed surprised as well when he opened the door. “How did you know it was me?”

“It had to be either you, Jessica, or Vlad,” he explained, walking back to his couch. “Jessica would’ve rung the buzzer twice, and Vlad would have just walked in.”

“Then I’m the only one of us with any manners.”

“Pretty much,” he answered as he plopped back down on the couch. “What time is it?”

“Twenty-one thirty hours, ship time.”

“Holy crap. You mean I’ve been asleep for…”

“About seven hours, sir,” she finished for him, “assuming you went to sleep as soon as you sat down.”