As his grip began to fail, and he realized he would in fact fall to his death, he felt a hand take hold of his own. A
strong
hand that nearly crushed his own in its vice-like grip. Jarred looked up into Tarik’s brutish face as the Toguai, his self appointed guardian, pulled him aboard the free falling vessel, his razor sharp claws keeping him in place on the ship’s ramp. Jarred fell in an exhausted heap on the deck of the hold, hearing indistinguishable voices calling out to him, his ears ringing from the whirlwind he had been pulled from.
“. . . got him! he heard a woman’s voice call out, the words fading in and out. “Get . . . out . . . here!”
Jarred rolled over in time to see the boarding ramp seal shut and Sierra starting off toward the flight deck, the ship screaming as it righted itself and powered into hard acceleration. His vision was then filled by a pair of faces, Elora and Ethan’s, as they threw themselves down in front of him, wrapping him in a combined embrace.
“Are you alright?” Elora asked.
“I’ve been . . . better,” he answered her, honestly, still trying to catch his breath. He looked back and forth between them, their faces wearing warm smiles he was more than glad to see. “You came after me.”
“Of course,” Ethan said, his eyes bright with excitement. “You came for
me
.” He appeared to have aged ten years since the last time Jarred saw him, though his boyish grin was still just that. Jarred patted the kid on the shoulder, gripping it so that he and Elora could help him to his feet.
“We weren’t going to leave you behind,” Elora said, her eyes conveying a myriad of emotions Jarred could feel building within himself. He wanted to give in to them. To take her in his arms. Feel her lips on his again. But he resisted the powerful urge. Now wasn’t the time. They weren’t out of trouble yet. Instead, he returned her warm smile and glanced back over his shoulder at Tarik.
“Thank you,” he said to the stalky creature, who simply grunted in return. His eyes then caught sight of someone else and he shifted his gaze over to where Orna stood in the rear passageway. She wore her usual unreadable expression, but Jarred detected something almost knowing from her. Perhaps she knew what he had seen in the audience chamber. Knew that
he
knew what she was. The moment of silent pondering passed in an instant and Orna nodded to him.
“Welcome back, Jarred Archer.”
He returned the gesture. “You should go and strap yourself in. It’s about to get a whole lot bumpier in here.”
There would be time for questions later. Maybe.
* * *
“We’ve got multiple bogeys,” Kern reported, as Sierra reentered the flight deck, “coming in hot.” A fraction of a second later the ship was rocked by a laser volley, sending her stumbling, accentuating his statement.
“Shields?” she asked, obviously concerned.
“Raised,” he assured her.
“Go evasive,” she ordered, her voice moving across the deck behind him to the nearest control seat. “Let’s give them a run for their credits.”
“Way ahead of you,” he replied, already pressing the engines to their maximum. The ship’s speed was a definite advantage, but the superior maneuverability of the smaller patrol vessels in pursuit would be a problem in their current locale. They needed to go for altitude and they needed to do it soon.
“That was some fancy flying,” another familiar voice put in, though weaker and more hoarse than Kern recognized. He didn’t need to turn, and wouldn’t have under the circumstances, to know it was Jarred.
“Thanks,” he replied. “Glad to have you back.”
“Glad to
be
back.”
The ship was rocked by another hit, Kern descending sharply to take them down between a pair of mid sized towers, banking and climbing hard once he had cleared them, hoping to shake or at least put some distance between them and their pursuers. “Looks like you made it just in time to be vaporized with the rest of us,” he quipped.
“I don’t think so,” Jarred said, sounding sure of the statement. “Not with Orna onboard.”
“But they don’t
know
she’s onboard,” Kern argued.
“They don’t know she’s
not
,” Jarred rebutted. “And they won’t take the chance. They’re trying to disable us, just like before.”
“Well, they’re not going to do it without a fight,” Sierra put in, determinedly. “Weapons systems are primed. Selecting targets. Let’s see if we can’t shake a few of these pests loose.”
On his own display, Kern saw as Sierra began painting targets, which had grown to nearly double his original count, with the ship’s rear defenses. Selecting the torpedo tubes, she fired off a pair of the projectiles which fragmented, almost immediately into dozens of smaller segments, four of the closely following patrol craft disappearing from his grid as they were torn apart by the hail of explosive shards.
“Nice shot,” Kern commented, noting that the remaining patrol craft had increased their distance from them, while intensifying their fire rate. He banked the ship again, a storm of laser fire missing them to tear into a complex of buildings, and again dove for the cover of some tightly packed towers. “But I can’t keep this up all day. Shields are down to fifty percent.”
“Can’t we just activate the cloak and disappear?” It was Ethan’s voice that asked the question. “Then we could just fly out of here.”
“That’s the plan, kid,” Kern answered. “But not with these patrol craft all over us. We’d have to drop the shields to bring it up and if we do that-”
They took another hit and Kern had to cut his explanation short, putting them into another series of evasive maneuvers.
“We’ll get vaped,” Ethan finished for him, not sounding thrilled about the conclusion.
“Or disabled,” Kern said, based on Jarred’s theory.
“Then how do we get out of here?” Elora asked.
Apart from the sounds of the roaring thrusters and the screams of near miss laser blasts, the flight deck fell silent. They stood no chance of losing all of the patrol craft already on them, not to mention the endless squadrons that would be sent out to join the pursuit. Dropping their shields to engage the cloak would end their escape real quick. They needed a window. Enough time to get clear, and that was something they weren’t likely to get.
Jarred was the one who finally answered the question, his voice carrying a tone of finality that caught Kern, and everyone else, he guessed, off guard. “We don’t. We can’t outrun them. And we can’t fight them all off. We’re just delaying the inevitable.”
“So what do we do,” Sierra demanded, her outrage obvious. “Surrender? There’s no way. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather die fighting.”
“My thought exactly,” Jarred returned. “And if we’re dead, there’s no need for them to be chasing us.”
“So what,” Sierra scoffed, “you’re suggesting we go down in a blaze of glory?”
“I am,” he answered her. “For anyone who’s looking.”
“You’re crazy,” she remarked, dismissively. “I think you knocked something loose back there.”
“No, he’s right,” Kern said, realizing what Jarred was saying was true. Dying
was
there only way out of this. And in spectacular fashion at that. Tapping the armaments actuator on the grip of his control yoke, he quickly cycled through the ship’s available ordinance, while at the same time altering their course and ramming the throttle again, taking them down into the rows of tightly clustered skyscrapers.
“You can’t be serious?” Sierra exclaimed. “You’re actually agreeing with him? To just let ourselves be killed. You agree with that?”
Kern understood her bewilderment over the suggestion. He had felt the same way up until the moment it clicked. “No,” he admitted. “We’re not going to let them kill us. We’re going to blow
ourselves
up.”
“More accurately,” Jarred added, “we’re going to make it
look
like we’ve blown ourselves up.”
Sierra was silent for a long moment before replying. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of that.”
“It’s been a long day,” Kern assured her. “Don’t beat yourself up.” He launched them into another set of gut wrenching evasive maneuvers, taking them deeper into the heavily packed tower structures while doing his best to avoid the bustling traffic lanes. He wanted to escape this mess, but he didn’t want kill a whole lot of innocent people in the process. That wouldn’t be any easy task, considering the city’s dense population. A quick glance at his nav display, and the local city layout, presented the solution he was looking for. Altering their vector, he started on a weaving course that lead to his target area.
“What are you doing?” Sierra questioned him.
“Saving our lives, I hope,” he answered. “Arm another pair of those fragmentation torpedoes.”
“What are we targeting?” she asked.
It was a good question. Unfortunately, Kern didn’t have the answer. Not yet. “I’ll tell you when I see it.”
After another half minute of high speed maneuvers and a half dozen strikes to their ever weakening shields, Kern began to see a reduction in the number of high reaching towers, indicating he was nearing his target area. It resembled a graveyard of sorts, partial skeletons of buildings erected into the sky, but it was just the opposite. Giant cranes and high yield scaffolding rose up along the girders of hundreds of half built skyscrapers.
“Good thinking,” Jarred said. “Construction district. That should present some good opportunities for a show.”
“And reduce any civilian casualties,” Kern added, diving beneath a sky crane to thread the narrow path between a pair of half erected towers. Laser fire tore into the structures all around them as the growing numbers of assault craft intensified their barrages. Apparently they had been holding back as well in the more heavily populated governing district, most likely in an attempt to avoid any bureaucratic casualties, than civilian. Either way, the heavy construction area appeared to have left them clear and open to less loose with all of their firepower. That was just fine by him. It would help with the big finale. Another round struck their aft, a shield failure alarm blaring in his ear and banked hard again. If they made it to their big finale.
“We can’t take much more of this,” Sierra commented, almost sounding worried.
“You’re right about that,” Kern returned, his eyes catching sight of one of the opportunities Jarred had preluded to, and he adjusted their course, pressing the throttle for a dead run. “You got those torpedoes ready?”
“Armed and loaded,” she answered. “You have a target yet?”
“A big one, dead ahead,” he said, his eyes locked steadily on the half constructed super skyscraper growing steadily closer in the viewport. The area was riddled with skycranes and scaffolding so condensed he almost doubted he could navigate it. Almost. “I'm going to punch us a hole right up the middle of it.”
“That’ll give them a show,” she commented. “Let’s just hope we survive it.”
“Just get ready to frag our friends back there,” he replied. Almost in range of the super structure, Kern waiting for another laser score, which didn’t take long, and immediately reversed their throttle, engaging the repulsers on one side of the ship only, the technique causing the vessel to buckle and dip down on one side dramatically. The result was they would appear to have taken a much harder hit than they had, and their pursuers would believe they were about to lose control completely. A little bit of showmanship that would set the table for the fireworks that were to come.
“On my ready,” he said. They passed the range marker he had set by eye, nearly passing through the heavy scaffolding network, and he punched the throttles hard again. “Now!” He heard the familiar sound of the rear tubes firing their ordinance and waited the three count for the frag detonations to occur. Not bothering to check the display for any destroyed bogeys behind them, he righted the control yoke to send them straight for the center mass of the super skyscraper and triggered his own ordinance, a pair of xion penetrating missiles, one a fraction of a second after the other. The warheads rocketed away, striking the structure in two spectacular explosions, the second drilling deeper into the skyscraper than the first and the outline of a hole began to form, as pieces of flaming wreckage blew out of the structure.
“Hold on!” he shouted. “This is going to be tight!” Switching armaments, he sent a barrage of crimson cannon fire into the maelstrom of explosions still occurring with the building, to clear the path, and followed it into the super structure. Flaming debris fell to all sides of the them and pelted the hull as they shot through the wreckage, the turbulence becoming so severe he actually began to fear his timing had been off and they would not make it clear of the destruction. But a fraction of a second later he was looking at more in progress skyscrapers and open sky, the debris turbulence passing.
“Raise the cloak!” he shouted, almost having forgotten the most crucial part of their plan.
“Engaged!” Sierra returned, the flight deck falling into a dead silence, apart from the droning engines, as they all waited for the assault craft to have seen their ruse and strike, or any other sign that their bluff had failed. But after a long, tension filled moment, when no further attacks had come, Kern allowed himself to exhale the breath he felt like he had been holding since first dropping the cloak back at the temple.