Hammerhead Resurrection (40 page)

He came down low over the city, flying between buildings, and the Sthenos followed him, shooting. When beams came straight down, he realized he’d gotten himself caught with too many bogeys and not enough options. By being this close to the ground, he’d taken away a full dimension of flight. Here their greater numbers could pin him down and grease him. The beams from above rained down as fighters descended and cycled out. He knew he was done, knew one final misstep had caught him up. He now realized that when he’d engaged the horde, he’d bought into it body and soul. There was no way to disengage that many fighters. He could stay in it, could out fly them well enough save accidental shots, to stay alive, but to move away took too much singular linear motion. He was doomed. Still, there would be others to kill those who’d killed him. The Sthenos couldn’t stand against the Hammerheads; he felt sure of that. He wondered if the Sthenos understood that.

He would never know.

…

“They’re leaving,” the Nav-Con operator said.

“What do you mean?” Jeffrey asked.

The Nav-Con operator held up his hand, waving away his previous comment. “I don’t mean leaving… All Sthenos fighters have disengaged ground targets and are space-bound… vectors indicate an intercept point with the final destroyer, sir.”

Jeffrey felt his heart beating in his throat. That was the right tactic… to put all resources into preserving the final destroyer. And it meant even worse odds for the Wraith pilots. He’d hoped the Sthenos would be devastated and not think clearly, but they had. Taking their fighters to orbit, took all his atmosphere-bound Lakota out of the fight.

Jeffrey said, “Inform the Lakota forming up in Denver to hunt for any Sthenos installations or personnel on the ground. Tell them I want prisoners.”

The officer’s fingers flew on the keyboard. “Yes, sir,” he said.

Jeffrey’s attention turned back to the Sthenos destroyer in orbit. The Wraiths were almost on it. The swarming red sparks of Sthenos fighters had moved several miles away from the destroyer, creating a defensive barrier.

“Tell the Wraiths to go straight through the fighters. Tell them to fly like hell.”

“Yes, sir.” He typed for a moment, watched his screen, and said, “Flight commander Springbok’s response is:
Yes sir, like hell sir
.”

Jeffrey smiled as he imagined the young woman, heart on fire, racing toward her own death. Again, he felt the regret of not being able to be with her.

…

Despite knowing he was a dead man, Kodiak still flew hard. He wasn’t going to make it easy on them. He came down as low as he could, snaking down the streets of Tokyo, making sixteen G turns
on the street corners between the towering offices. The IFF showed that the Sthenos stayed high and tried to pot shot at him. Some shots came close. At any one time ten or more beams lanced down. It would only be a matter of time until he ran out of luck.

A beam lanced down a few feet in front of his nosecone, filling the cockpit with green light. As it faded, the sky, which had been lit with the beams, went dark. He looked to his IFF display and, in shock, almost hit a building. He
arced around it, lifting away from the streets as he did. As he came up out of the city, he saw the blue-violet glow of hundreds of thrusters turned on him, all leaving. He wished he had something to throw at them. He had nothing to kill them with, and they were moving up away from him in a straight path. They were going to fight the Wraiths. He had one last chance. He could take one last ship, if that made the difference in orbit, it would mean something. He shoved his throttle forward, and the power of the Lakota slammed him into his seat. But the Sthenos fighters pulled away, moving from supersonic to hypersonic speeds. While they couldn’t outmaneuver the Lakota, they could out accelerate them. As he reached 60,000 feet, their thrusters became small points of light, fading into the now brilliant stars. His fuel warning light came on. Breaking away, he arced upside down and looked up at the ground, at the dark outline of the Sthenos destroyer far below. He wondered how many he’d taken, felt it hadn’t been enough.

He dropped the nose of the Lakota to bear on the city, freefell to 10,000 feet. Gradually he leveled off at 1,000 feet and turned around the ruined destroyer, the smoke from the fires rushing over his cockpit glass. With nothing left to do and his fuel indicator pulsing red, he touched down on a tall building’s landing pad. The Lakota’s engines spooled down. Releasing the cockpit, he climbed down, removed his helmet, and walked to the edge of the building. Fires around the hulk of the destroyer filled the air with the smell of burning wood and metal. The great swath of Tokyo lay in perfect silence.

Springbok led the charge. She clicked her radio twice to signal the all-ready and the channel lit with the clatter of mic clicks. No words, just quick confirmations, they were all ready.

She was familiar with the ship but not herself. A peregrine strength coursed through her. She’d flown Wraiths before. They scared the hell out of her because she could barely keep up with them. Now she felt stronger and faster than the Wraith, as if a flowing river of energy ran from her mind down her limbs, connecting her to the twitchy beast, reining it in.

The message passed across her screen,
Admiral Holt says to fly like hell
.

She confirmed,
Yes sir, like hell, sir
.

“A-1 check in,” she said into her mic.

“A-1 here,” Repo Man, the marine whose father had been Great White, confirmed. Springbok felt strange to be calling the shots over someone like Master Sergeant Mikelson. When Jeffrey assigned them their commands, she’d argued that Mikelson should lead. Holt insisted she’d do fine. He needed someone who knew the pilots well. That was her.

Her IFF showed the nineteen Wraiths with singularity bombs as bright yellow flecks among the three flights of green markers.

You have the last destroyer
, came the message on her screen.

She responded with a dry
acknowledged
, but a thrill ran through her. They’d succeeded. The surface-bound destroyers were gone.

Now it was up to them. As the destroyer came into visual range, hanging among the stars beyond the curved earth, she and the
rest slowed. The destroyer showed on her IFF as a broad red blade. Hundreds of smaller, red markers poured from the prow, moving outward in a barrier between the Wraiths and their target.

“Everyone spread out. Keep the warhead Wraiths at least a quarter mile apart.”

Now swarms of red markers on her IFF began rising from the planet. The Sthenos were boxing them in.

Looking back to the wall of Sthenos, she decided there were far too many. They’d never break through.

“Delay, delay,” she called out and turned hard. The Hammerheads followed her, arcing around to fly across the face of the wall. The swarm from the planet raced up behind them.

They had nineteen singularity bombs. Her mind raced. With each she could take out a half mile sphere of Sthenos fighters. With twelve she could clear a hole in that wall of fighters nearly four square miles wide. Then she could take the last seven bombs right up the middle.

“What are we up to?” Repo Man asked over the comm.

Springbok keyed her mic. “I want twelve singularity-carriers to create a lotus formation. Create a combat spread of one-half mile. She called out six pilots with singularities to stay out of the formation. The others formed up quickly. “The remaining fourteen without singularities, follow the leads in. The last six and myself will pretend
to play support roles, come through last looking unimportant. When leads are within range, trigger your warheads. The rest will come through the gap they create in the barrier.”

The radio went live with either a simple click-click or brief confirmations.

The lotus formation of Wraiths turned and accelerated at the wall of Sthenos. The second group of fourteen folded in behind it, their titanium skins glinting in the unshielded sunlight. She, as part of the final seven, layered in last. As she shoved her throttle forward, the nuclear-plate thrust ruthlessly crushed her into her seat.

As the first Wraiths reached the Sthenos, green beams lanced at them. Springbok wondered what sort of particle/wave technology
could create visible beams in the vacuum of space. She felt as though the tech she and her fellow Hammerheads were bringing to the fight was like rocks swung on leather thongs in comparison.

On the IFF, as the Wraiths joined with the wall of Sthenos fighters, twelve circles of Sthenos fighters were sucked into nothingness, ripping a hole in the defensive wall nearly two miles across. Only then did she register that she’d given an order that twelve men and women, twelve friends, had without question followed to their deaths. The second flight came through the hole, and as she and the other six, the last seven singularities in the game, passed, it closed behind them. They’d made it through. The destroyer was only six miles away, ten seconds time at her current speed.

She jinked left a moment before a beam lanced by to her right. A millisecond slower and she’d be gone now. A few Sthenos had remained near the destroyer. As they closed on her, she picked a line through them, hoping the other Wraiths were able to do the same. She ripped around a Sthenos ship, pulling more G’s than she ever had in her life. She saw no tunnel.

“Amazing,” she said to herself.

It’s so sad to be this good for only a moment.

Wraiths began winking off her IFF. They were now down to seven non-singularity Wraiths. Three of her final flight were gone as well.

Only eleven ships left.

“When we get within 100 meters of the destroyer, I want all non-singularity Wraiths to break away.”

As the Sthenos destroyer filled her forward cockpit glass, A Wraith exploded above her.

“Keep your movement up folks,” she said. Another of the yellow-marked singularity-carrying Wraiths winked out.

Three warheads left.

They came in close, and as was expected, a huge, blurred beam from the destroyer turned the two lead Wraiths into clouds of gas and metal. Another behind her vanished. Now just two
warheads remained… two miles away. One and a half. The other yellow marker vanished. She was it. Everything she had ever dreamed to be now balanced on this moment. As the proximity marker came to one mile, one half, 300 feet, she thought of her great-grandmother and how much she’d loved the old woman. When Springbok flipped open the singularity’s trigger cover, she heard the wavering yet sure voice in her memory, “Lila, you can have what you earn. If you want the name of a shark, you go and take it.”

She pressed the switch.

…

Jeffrey stared at the Nav-Con, watching the sparks of light twirling around each other. At first, when Springbok had them pull off he’d yelled out, “What the hell is she doing?” He thought she’d lost her nerve, but as he saw the lotus of ships form up, he whispered to himself, “That’s genius, Lila.”

When the lotus cut a hole through the wall and the remaining Wraiths moved in on the destroyer, Jeffrey watched with breath held. A fan like energy weapon took a third of the remaining Hammerheads out in one sweep. In a few seconds Lila was left as the only singularity.

“She’s ordered them to break away from her,” The Nav-Con operator said, “but they aren’t.”

A Sthenos fighter bore down on her as she reached 100 meters. Her wingman took that Sthenos fighter out and was drawn into the singularity. In his rebellion against her final order, staying with his lead instead of abandoning her, he’d saved them all.

The center section of the destroyer collapsed in on itself, more and more of it being consumed by the singularity as the two massive ends of the Sthenos destroyer were pulled toward each other. The singularity shut off before the entire ship could be consumed, leaving only small portions front and back to collide with each other.

“Three Hammerheads remain sir,” the Nav-Con operator said. “Shall I have them engage the Sthenos?”

“No. Get them in
atmo,” Jeffrey said. “Send them to Denver to connect with the Lakotas moving there. Feed the Sthenos fighters to the buzz saw.”

“Yes sir,” The communications officer said and gave the commands.

The Wraiths arced away from the remains of the destroyer and began racing Earthward, jinking and dodging as they flew. The Sthenos took one more, leaving only two to trace a line of smoke across the sky as they entered the atmosphere.

Looking up, Jeffrey saw the thin trail heading north followed by the streaks from the Sthenos. “Who’s that final Hammerhead?”

“Repo Man is one sir.”

Mikelson… the old man lives while the young pay with everything.

“The other?”

“Lieutenant Commander Fields sir.”

Marco
.

Mikelson and Fields dropped down into the waiting Lakota, which rose up with a fiery plague of fifty caliber hell-fire, ripping the Sthenos fighters apart.

Jeffrey looked at his clock. 5:46 GMT. In the span of forty-five minutes, David had risen up and ripped out Goliath’s heart with a black hole.

“How many are left?”

“I have seventy-eight Lakota in the Denver formation, sir. …and the two Wraiths.”

“Sthenos?”

“I have… the number detected is dropping too quickly.”

“Locate me some ground based Sthenos.”

“We’ve been tracking several ground transportation vehicles on the surface.”

“Are there some near Denver?”

“Yes sir.”

“When the Lakota are done with the fighters, get them on those ground transports. I want them alive.”

Finally, Jeffrey was going to get to look one of these bastards in the eye.

He fell quiet for a moment, feeling empty. Everything he’d built himself up for had played through. He’d assumed they’d lose, that they’d give their all because that’s how it was done and fail …but they’d won. After the rush he was left, as he always had been, empty
. A thought the emptiness aside.

“Has there been any report from the New York Special Warfare Operator?”

“None sir. I’ve received confirmations from all operatives aside from Tokyo and New York.”

“Do we still have a Lakota here?”

“One, sir.”

“Is it functional?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good, get it prepped for flight. I’m going to New York myself.”