Second Earth (24 page)

  
“Yes.”

  
“With no other
assistance?”

  
“That’s correct.”

  
“Begging the
Captain’s pardon, but are you out of your
damn
mind?” Shawn balked. “That thing could squash us like a bug.”

  
“Then you’d better
make sure you hit the right part of his windshield first, Commander.”

  
“What do you mean
by that?”

  
“I need to find any
weak spot on that ship, anything that our weapons can quickly damage. Once you
do, I will send in the cruiser
Breckenridge
for a close-range attack. I can’t risk committing another capital ship until we
can find a definitive vulnerability on the alien. Until then, you have your
orders, Commander.”

  
“Yes, sir, I got
them,” Kestrel snapped back. “I just don’t believe them.”

  
“Good.
Rhea
out.” Krif signaled Caitlin, who
cut the communications channel. He watched as Ripper-One and -Seven gained a
high angle of attack, then leapt down and engaged two more Beta fighters. When
both targets were destroyed, Ripper-Seven performed an abrupt turn to port and
made a beeline for the
Rhea
. He saw
Bagpipes’ craft quickly pass two friendly fighters that were not otherwise
engaged. “Commander Hayes, get me the pilot of Freelancer-Four. Have him escort
Ripper-Seven back to base ASAP.”

  
“Yes, sir. Right
away,” she said, and then began issuing the orders to Lieutenant Vistani.

* * *

  
Shawn flew into the
fray of enemy fighters, cannons blazing, trying to knock out as many of the
unknown aliens as he could. Although the enemy had vastly different flight
tactics than the Sector Command forces, they were no less effective at
eliminating their foes. As Shawn turned sharply to starboard to avoid an
incoming missile, he saw the Shamrock markings of two Cobra fighters get blown
to pieces by three Alphas that had ganged up on them.

  
Kestrel tried to
punch up their specific communications frequencies on his computer, but by the
time he was able to scream, “Get out of there!” it was already too late. The
first Shamrock was holed through by laser fire. The second Cobra managed to get
out of the sights of the other Alpha, only to collide with an ELINT from the
Discoverers a half-second later, blowing both to pieces instantly. Shawn had to
immediately push his control stick forward, sending his Maelstrom into a steep
dive, to avoid the quickly expanding debris field.

  
Seconds later a
fighter appeared on his port side, and it wore the black and red tail markings
of the Red Skulls. With a band of thick red paint bisecting the fuselage, Shawn
recognized it as Commander Saltori’s fighter. He opened the communications
channel, giving Saltori the new combat order that had been handed down by
Captain Krif. While neither of the pilots was delighted with the prospect of
engaging the enemy capital ship directly, they both resolved to do their duty
the best they could—or die trying.

  
Commander Rylani
Saltori’s Skulls had taken quite a beating. The 535
^th
space
interceptor squadron was down to four fighters from its original seven. One of
the pilots lost was the Skulls’ executive officer—a man of some high
distinction, both in and out of the cockpit. With one of Shawn’s own fighters
down, and two more back at the carrier getting repaired, he was also currently
down to half his starting strength. Eight fighters, no matter how advanced and
maneuverable they were, were no match for a capital ship. During the Galactic
War, when Shawn had decided to take on a Kafaran ship all on his own, he had
gotten lucky. When one of his missiles had inadvertently entered in through a
partially open hangar hatch, the demise of the Kafarans had been assured.

  
Today, however,
would be very different. The two squadrons didn’t even know where to begin
looking for a weak point in the intruders’ hull, let alone how to exploit it
with less-than-adequate weapons. Nonetheless, Shawn had done his best to devise
a plan against the lumbering enemy warship.

  
The two squadrons
formed into a single unit and began attacking the carrier, then were joined a
few minutes later by the Unified Marine pilots of the Devil Dogs, and each
began alternating strafing runs against sections of the intruder’s hull as they
tested for weak spots in the design. All ships—big or small—invariably had some
spot on them that was weaker than the rest, and Shawn hoped to find it quickly
and capitalize on it.

  
Most of their
combined efforts had proven futile until a missile from Red Skull-Three created
a sizeable crater on a flattened part of the enemy’s outer hull. The Marines’
Devastators quickly pounced on the weakened area, sending several bursts from
each of their rapid-fire cannons into it. The area around the initial crater
began to heave and bulge as internal explosions continued to wreak havoc long
after the last of the Rippers had fired their own lasers. Smoke and fire began
to pour out of the affected area, now about a twenty yards in diameter. The
damage wasn’t enough to be fatal, Shawn thought, but it was a start.

  
This thing can be hurt. And if it can be
hurt, it can be killed.

  
The three squadrons
disengaged from the intruder and re-formed near a vacant spot in the combat sphere.
They only had time enough to compare notes before they received an incoming
communications form the
Rhea
. Kestrel
and the rest of the pilots listened intently to the message in horror. Just
when it seemed that the Unified forces were getting the upper hand in the
battle, the intruder had begun launching another wave of fighters.

  
As far as the
numbers went, the odds were again even, but Shawn knew better. The Unified
pilots were beginning to feel the fatigue of combat, and they were now facing
off against a well-rested and rearmed enemy.

  
Shawn pulled his
stick to the right, making a hard turn to starboard as he engaged another
Alpha. He fired his last missile, watching intently as it streaked across the
blackness of space and found its target a few moments later. The Alpha exploded
in a fizzle of sparks as Shawn trained his cannons on another Beta. He watched
out of the corner of his canopy as two fighters from the Hunters were wiped out
in a single pass from a solitary Alpha. It’d come in quickly across their
flanks and raked their cockpits with white-hot bolts of energy, killing both
pilots instantly, and causing the burning fuselages to drift for some time
before careening out of the combat zone.

  
In the intervening
moments, time seemed to slow down for Shawn. As fighters from both sides
maneuvered and died around him, he watched as his sensor display showed the
Sector Command forces beginning to dwindle to dangerous levels. Of the initial
one hundred nine craft that had begun the attack, only fifty-two combatants
were left. The Freelancers were gone, as were the Shockers. The vast majority
of the Rapiers and the Streakers were out of commission, floating helplessly
until someone could rescue them or they were blown away by stray weapons fire.

  
Shawn glanced up
from the screen in time to fire off another burst of laser fire, causing a Beta
to change course and move away from a hammerhead-shaped Devastator it had had
been tailing.

  
“Commander Kestrel,
please respond.” It was the voice of Commander Hayes.

  
Shawn accepted the
transmission while simultaneously looking to see if there were any enemy craft
nearby. “This is Kestrel; go ahead, Commander.”

  
“Commander, we’ve
got even more incoming.”

  
“Specify?” he asked
quickly, firing a missile at a stray Beta, only to have the enemy fighter
successfully evade it.
  

  
“Sensors are
showing another capital ship approaching from outside the sector.”

  
From outside?
He wasn’t aware that any
other Sector Command vessels were so close. As far as he knew, the jump gate to
Second Earth was still functional, but it was more than a day from their
current position, and the
Rhea
would
have known well in advance if another ship was scheduled to come through.

  
“One of ours?” he
asked hopefully.

  
“Negative,
Commander. And this time, it is
definitely
Kafaran.”

  
My God.
The situation had just gone from
dismal to absolutely hopeless. Shawn said a rapid, silent prayer before he
spoke again. “It’s confirmed?”

  
“Affirmative.
Captain Krif requests that all forces disengage and return to the
Rhea
immediately. Try to pick up any
survivors you can along the way, Lieutenant Commander. We are evacuating the
area.”
  

  
T
he
fifty-odd assortment of fighters and bombers—all that remained of the
Rhea
’s original complement of over one
hundred combatants—turned almost in unison to head back to their carrier in
retreat. As Shawn watched his sensors, he was astonished to see that the
still-unidentified invaders were doing the same. It seemed that the arrival of
the Kafarans into the melee had shaken the fight out of both sides.

  
And there was
little doubt that it
was
the
Kafarans. Looking down at the long-range sensor display, Shawn would have
recognized the distinctive shape and coloring anywhere. Kafaran vessels, no
matter their size, all looked like greenish, ovoid boulders. Some were
stretched thin, while others were almost spherical. The only smoothness on
their hulls was a grayish, almost cowl-like covering over the forward-dorsal
area that extended in a nearly unbroken line across the spine. Along the sides,
extending to what should have been the keel, were hundreds—sometimes
thousands—of soft green lights. At times arranged in clusters or in geometric
shapes, these were often attributed to being view ports or small thrusters. On
the stern were the drive engines, always recessed into the hull and with a
sharp, tail-like protrusion spreading over them, their bright green glow
signifying that they were as fast as they were dangerous.

  
The vessel that had
just moved into the Second Earth system was no exception to these rules. It
looked like two enormous, egg-shaped rocks, placed on top of one another with
the top-most one jutting out slightly more forward than the other. Along its
silvery spine was a tall spire, perhaps a hundred feet long, pointing aft as if
it were an unfurled poisoned quill. A countless number of pinpoints of glowing
green lights dotted its entire surface, and Shawn didn’t need to verify with
his computer what he already knew based on firsthand experience: this was a
Kafaran heavy carrier, second only in armament and strength to a Kafaran battleship.

  
As the majority of
the
Rhea
’s fighters made their
respective approaches, Shawn—along with Raven and Commander Saltori—formed a
protective screen that would guard the landing Sector Command fighters, whiles
simultaneously watching both the unknown invaders and the Kafaran carrier for
their next moves.

  
Shawn watched his
sensor display with awe as two gravity wells—unthinkably close to one
another—formed with little warning, just behind the Kafaran carrier. In a
sudden flash of dual brilliance, two additional Kafaran ships entered the area.
Seeing that they were smaller and sleeker than the carrier, Shawn guessed by
their size that they were both destroyers. He quickly opened a channel with the
Rhea
’s command center.

  
“Commander Hayes,
are you seeing this?” he asked, still looking wide-eyed at the two lumbering
forms.

  
It took a moment
for Caitlin to come back over the channel. “That’s confirmed, Ripper-One. We
now have three Kafaran ships on the midrange sensors. We’ve crosschecked their
hull markings and physical characteristics with known vessel types, and have
confirmed the presence of one carrier and two destroyers.”

  
“What’s their
projected heading?”

  
“Stand by,” Hayes
replied, followed by a pause of nearly a minute while the command center
correlated the data. “Their initial insertion-point heading put them directly
on an intercept course with the
Rhea
.
However, since they jumped in they have gone to a full stop.”

  
It never ceased to
amaze Shawn that the Kafarans had long ago figured out how to jump into a
system without the need for a jump gate to be stationed nearby. During the
Galactic War, the Kafarans used this to their advantage, but Sector Command
quickly discovered an inherent weakness in the design: it took an enormous amount
of power to accomplish such a feat. Any enemy ship that performed such a
maneuver would be nearly exhausted of energy until its reactor could recharge.
That took time, and it was then that Sector Command fighters would usually
pounce.

  
“No movement at all?”
Shawn asked in understanding. The Kafarans easily had the numerical superiority
in the engagement, but he knew that a ship of the size of the Kafaran carrier
could take up to thirty minutes to recharge.

  
“None, Commander,”
Caitlin replied flatly.

 
 
“What about the invaders?” he asked, his
mouth going dry at the sight of so much destructive Kafaran might before him.

  
There was another
pause on the communications network before she responded. “No movement. All
enemy fighters have returned to their ship. However, there seems to be a lot of
communications traffic coming from the Kafaran carrier and directed at their
destroyers.”

  
During the Galactic
War, a concerted effort had been undertaken to intercept and decode Kafaran
message traffic. After years of study, it had proven an almost fruitless
endeavor. Although the scientists at Unified R&D had discovered how to
divert the enemy’s communications, whatever system the Kafarans employed to
send the traffic was still totally alien and beyond deciphering by Sector
Command forces.

  
“They’re probably
coordinating their efforts for an attack,” Shawn replied. He glanced down to
his short-range sensors, silently delighted that the last of the
Rhea
’s fighter wing had landed without
incident. The next voice he heard over the communications channel was that of
Captain Krif.

  
“Kestrel, I’ll need
you to land and rearm your fighter. I have a feeling that neither one of our
friends out there is going to let us get away from this sector without a
fight.”

  
Shawn shook his
head. “You’re kidding, right? You want me to go back out there? That’s crazy.”

  
Krif’s voice was
laced with disdain. “Take a look out your view screen, Commander. We need to
put some distance between ourselves and those bastards out there. At full
speed, it will still take us eighteen hours before we’re close enough to the
jump gate to make the leap. The only way we can make it is to slow whatever
advance the enemy is going to make—and rest assured, they
are
going to advance. It’s simply a matter of time.”

  
Are they?
Shawn wasn’t in the mood to
argue with Krif, no matter how wrong he felt the captain’s stance on this
matter was. When Raven signaled that she and Commander Saltori would be
remaining spaceborne while he rearmed and refueled, Shawn slowly brought the
nose of his Maelstrom in line with the carrier’s landing deck and angrily
signaled his approach. As soon as Commander Hayes gave him the appropriate
signal, he switched the landing computer on and allowed the
Rhea
to take momentary control of his
fighter, moving him quickly toward the fighter’s designated landing spot.

  
When the hangar
bay’s bulky outer doors had closed and the bay was properly pressurized, the
equally large inner doors parted before the solitary fighter. The guidance
beams took over, carrying Shawn’s Maelstrom through the opening on its way to a
launch station where it would get rearmed and refueled. His fighter slipped
silently past
Sylvia’s Delight
,
slumbering peacefully in her maintenance bay on Shawn’s left side. Examining
the Mark-IV with pride, Shawn wondered if he’d ever get the chance to sit at
her controls again. With a slight jolt, Shaw’s fighter traversed another
decompression door, and he now found himself in the main hangar as his fighter
continued past the remainder of the
Rhea
’s
once-proud combat wing.

  
It was no surprise
to Shawn to see that some of the fighters that had returned from the battle
would never fly again. Some had gaping holes in their wing structures or
fuselages—or both. Near the exit ladder on one of the Devastators belonging to
the Marines’ Rough Riders squadron, there were several thick streaks of blood
that had dripped down the side of the craft and formed a pool on the hangar
deck. In an effort to avert his eyes, Shawn turned his head to the right, only
to see several of the
Rhea
’s crewmen
pull a lifeless body from the shattered cockpit of a Seminole fighter belonging
to the Golden Suns. Leaning his head back against the padded rest of his seat, he
looked up in time to see a Trickster from one of the jammer squadrons pass
overhead, its lower turret ripped clean from the fuselage—presumably along with
its operator. Shawn offered a prayer for the wounded and dead personnel as his
own debilitated fighter moved beyond the chaos of the main hangar bay and into
the relative peace of the launch bay.

  
As soon as his
Maelstrom came to halt in launch bay four, Shawn noticed Trent leaning casually
beside a stack of crates that had been piled several yards away from the
fighter. After unstrapping and extricating himself from his cockpit, Shawn took
several labored steps down the exit ladder that would bring him to the
mechanic’s level. He hadn’t realized how tired he was until he was able to
stretch his legs after the heated combat.

  
“You okay,
Skipper?” Trent asked, absently rubbing at some grease on his hands with an
equally dirty rag.

  
Shawn couldn’t help
but smile at the irony of the maneuver. “A little tired, but I’ll live.”

  
Trent nodded toward
Shawn’s fighter nonchalantly. “Looks like the ship held up pretty well.”

  
Shawn turned to
give his fighter a visual inspection. There were several scorch marks and pits
along the once-sleek fuselage, and his mind could recall when each of them had
taken place. He looked to the port vertical stabilizer, holed through in
multiple places and held together by only a thin strip of exterior skin. At
that moment, the strip gave way, and gravity finished off what the alien
fighters had started. A three-square-foot section of the stabilizer fell,
bouncing off the port wing and crashing to the launch tube deck.

  
“Yeah,” Shawn
chuckled halfheartedly. “She sure did.” He then turned back to Trent. “At least
this time you can’t say that the damage was entirely my fault.”

  
“True enough,”
Trent smiled. “But I certainly hope you gave better than you got. I mean, I’d
hate to think of the credits they’ll have to spend to fix this thing—all going
to waste by you letting those bastards use you for target practice.”

  
“I wasn’t keeping
count, if that is what you’re asking,” Shawn said defiantly as he put his hands
on his hips. “Let’s just say I did my best and leave it at that, shall we?”

  
Trent held his
hands up in surrender and smiled. “Hey, man, don’t get your waste-tube tied in
a knot. I’m tickled pink you made it back, okay?”

  
Shawn looked over
Trent’s shoulder to a door that had just parted. Trent likewise turned his gaze
when he discerned that Shawn had lost all interest in bantering with him.

  
There stood Melissa
Graves, dressed in the dark gray and black suit of the Office of Special
Intelligence. When she caught the eyes of the two men, she allowed the doors to
close behind her as she walked toward them.

  
Trent turned his
eyes back to Shawn and then began primping the commander’s disheveled flight
suit—much to the surprise of the pilot. “Now, you play nice, okay? I don’t want
to have to separate you two.”

  
Shawn slapped
Trent’s hands away as they neared his matted hair. “Stop it, you idiot. Go get
my fighter ready.”

  
“Ready? You mean
you’re going back out there?”

  
Melissa would be
there any second, and Shawn didn’t want to waste any precious time explaining
the situation to Trent. “I’ve got my orders, Trent, and so do you. Just get it
done, old buddy.”

  
“Yes, sir!” Trent
saluted briskly, smiled mischievously, and then skipped off to his task.

  
Shawn watched Trent
bound off, then regarded himself in one of the few reflective panels on the
Maelstrom’s skin. Quickly fixing his hair, he turned back toward Melissa in
time to see her to step within talking distance.

  
Melissa looked
around the bay to see if anyone was watching. When she noticed several
maintenance technicians and ordnance personnel scrambling toward the Maelstrom,
she extended a shaking hand toward him.

  
“Welcome back,
Commander.”

  
He removed his dark
glove, then slipped his palm over hers. As he held her hand gently, he softly
rubbed his thumb over the back of her hand. “It’s good to be back. I only wish
I could say that I was staying.”

  
With their hands
still embracing, she took a cautious step toward Shawn as a look of confusion
crossed her face. “What do you mean?”