Son of Justice (34 page)

“Let’s thin the herd a bit, Captain,” she began.

“Coordinated strafing runs around the line?” Gurney asked. He was ahead of her, apparently.

“Yes, Captain,” she confirmed. “Save your plasma drops, but these guys are lined up nice and pretty. Let’s make ’em pay.”

“Oh yeah! We’ve got this. Give us a minute to coordinate and then enjoy the show.”

Becca couldn’t help but smile, despite their dire circumstances. They were severely outnumbered, but the human spirit always seemed to rise to the occasion.

“Roger that, Alpha-21.”

“Alpha-22, on my mark, proceed to the target, turn south and circle the ship on a clockwise route,” Captain Gurney ordered. There was nowhere else he’d rather be at this moment than where he was: nestled comfortably in the cockpit of his fighter carrier. He felt a small twist of nervous anxiety in his chest, but the sensation was quickly overtaken by an angry need to strike out against the enemy below. All of his training and work at becoming one of the best pilots in the alliance had been to prepare him for what was to come, and he had to smile. He had never felt so alive. “I’ll turn to the north and attack in a counter-clockwise maneuver. Focus your fire on the outer ring and, with luck, we’ll meet on the far side and continue the run.”

“Roger that, Alpha-22, ready on your mark.”

“Alpha-23, when we begin our runs, you work on the slice of the pie that directly faces the colonel and her merry band of ground pounders. I don’t know what she has in mind, but we might as well soften things up for her.”

“Roger, Alpha 21. I’m not sure what these things eat, but I’ll give them some plasma to chew on.”

“That’s the spirit, 23,” the lead pilot replied.

Gurney had only been in the air for a couple of hours, but outside of the single plasma drop, their time had been a monotonous game of watch and wait. He wanted to hit back at the aliens who had invaded an Alliance world and killed his brothers and sisters. He was especially anxious to pull trigger on those traitorous, Minith flockers that had joined the ranks of the gray, off-world misters.

Misters
.
Yeah, that’s as good a name as any for the waterlogged creatures.

“Let’s take out these misters and the Minith who’ve joined them, shall we?”

He received dual affirmatives, and gave the command to execute their assigned maneuvers. Upon giving the mark, he turned the nose of his craft toward the enemy and tweaked the joystick to initiate an approach that would take him around the ship in a counter-clockwise fashion.

Gurney placed his jet’s automated gun sights on the conveniently arranged ranks of enemy below, began the wide, looping approach that would carry him around the ship, and triggered the dual plasma cannons built into each wing.

The purple-colored tracers cut the air and closed the distance to his target in under two seconds. His speed was such that he barely had time to register the damage he was bestowing on the misters below, before he was past them and engaging more of the invaders. Occasionally, a large, green, two-legged target registered in his view. When that happened, he made a slight juke to the right or left to accommodate those special targets. He didn’t know how effective those moves were, but he felt a pleasant tingle in his chest that made them worthwhile.

He was halfway through his pass when a sudden, powerful punch tossed him sideways.

The punch was followed by a loud clap and an immediate change in elevation.

A second punch slammed his helmeted head against the jet’s clear canopy.
Flock!
His instincts kicked in, and without thinking, he peeled away in a roll that changed his course, and initiated a steep climb. He had suddenly gone from the hunter to the hunted, and he switched his mindset accordingly. He didn’t want to feel a third punch, so he raced upward and away, his goal now to outrace or outmaneuver whatever might be tracking him.

“This is Alpha-23,” Gurney heard his fellow pilot yell. “I’m under fire from Alliance air defense!”

Gurney didn’t have to tell the other man that those were no longer Alliance positions. The Minith aligned with the misters had obviously taken over the air defenses in place around the spaceport.

But he now understood who was tracking his own craft. That knowledge gave him both hope and despair as he made another, sudden change in his course and altitude. The hope came from knowing exactly what he was up against. He knew the systems that were targeting him, had trained against them hundreds of times and knew their strengths and weaknesses. The despair came from the same place. He knew he had a fifty-fifty chance at outmaneuvering a handful of the weapons. Unfortunately, the spaceport was surrounded by more than a handful. There were dozens of the air defense weapons deployed around the facility. The only question now was how many were in the hands of the Minith traitors?

“This is 22, I’m hit!” The previously calm demeanor was gone and Gurney listened helplessly, embroiled in his own struggle for survival. “I’m going down!”

Gurney cursed. He then juked right, dropped the nose, and pushed his craft as hard as he could. Distance between his ship and the weapons below was paramount, and he fought for control as his aircraft began a violent, teeth-rattling shimmy. At least one of the hits had done damage. He offered a silent prayer to the pilot in Alpha-22 and fought to stay airborne.

The view of the ground in front grew larger as he dropped altitude and gained speed. He was thinking he might just make it out of this jam when he spotted an unexpected sight ahead. He put his damaged vessel on a course to get a closer look, then keyed his mic and sent out a query. He understood the danger of multitasking at this moment, but had to get a message to Conway.

“Yes, Gurney, I’m here,” came her immediate reply.

“Colonel, the shout’s hit the air,” he keyed. “We’re under fire from the air defenses around the alien ship.”

“I’m tracking that visually, Gurney,” the colonel answered. “I saw one of your guys go down a kilometer south of my current position. He landed hard, but he looks to be okay. I’ve got a couple carriers of my troops headed out to retrieve him.”

Gurney offered a silent “thank you” at the positive news, but it did little to relieve the tension in his body.

“Great, Colonel, but we’ve got other problems,” he relayed, unable to delay his report. The constant, all-out shaking threatened to drop him from the sky at any moment. “There’s a large force of Minith ten kilometers west of the spaceport. They appear to be entering the Telgoran underground, and they’re heavily armed. I think our green, former friends intend to pay our gray, current friends a visit. And it doesn’t look like a friendly one.”

“Flock me! As if we—”

Gurney didn’t hear the rest of the colonel’s response. An explosion rocked his craft and cut off radio contact.

“Ahh!” He shouted, banged his fist against the canopy that surrounded his body, and struggled against the controls. The propulsion unit on his right side was gone. He could stay in the air using only the left for a short while, and he argued with himself over what to do. If he initiated a landing now, he
might
walk away from the impact.

Or he could do something about the large force of greenies that were marching toward the Telgoran entrance below.

It wasn’t really much of a choice.

He fought the carrier through a rough banking curve that put him on a course with the traitors below. He was lined up on his target when the left-side engine gave out. He suddenly found himself surrounded by the relative, rattling silence as his dying carrier jet went into a glide.

His fate now sealed, he did the only thing that could make him smile.

He sent the last two plasma drops on their way, then calmly pointed his jet into the Minith soldiers below.

* * *

Oinoo cursed the incompetence of the Minith. His people had traded with the large, green bi-peds for decades before the humans had defeated them. He should have known that they were incapable of keeping their side of any bargain.

Before this “Alliance” had been put in place, the Minith incompetence had been a joke among his pod—a fact to be taken advantage of and exploited at every turn. His agents had routinely shorted their trading “partners” of their full payments. Along the same vein, they regularly made off with greater loads of agsel than what they paid for, and they had never been found out. That should have been an indication to Oinoo that they would be incompetent in all areas, including the one they claimed was their greatest strength: war.

The Minith certainly seemed menacing enough. Giant, angry monsters, always eager to fight and quick to show their aggression and violence. Their reputation as fierce warriors had been the primary reason why his own race had never tried to wrest control of the agsel-laden planet before . . . well, that and the ease with which they could be stolen from. But now, when he needed them—no, when he
counted
on them—to be strong and wield a heavy tentacle against the much weaker, but smarter, humans, they failed miserably.

Oinoo watched the vid screens before him with rising anger. A fourth of his fighters—fighters that should not have even been needed, if that imbecile Drah had delivered on his contract—were dead or dying on the ground outside the ship. He had some small measure of satisfaction that the three human aircraft had been blown from the sky, but that wouldn’t bring back more than two thousand Zrthn mercenaries. Now he owed a death-rate payment to each of their pods in compensation. Even if successful—Drah claimed it was still a certainty, despite the “minor” setbacks—his costs for this mercantile venture had just tripled. His initial return on the investment would drop, and his influence within the pod would diminish. His head rotated with concern, and his tentacles tangled with anxiety. Hostile takeovers were always a questionable endeavor. Unsanctioned takeovers were even more so.

Unsanctioned takeovers, that were unsuccessful, were often a death’s sentence.

He pondered what to do with Drah when this was over. They had a verbal agreement—not quite a contract, but most would consider it a valid negotiation. He could break it, of course, but that might color his credibility when making future agreements. If anyone found out, that is. Accidents happened all the time that negated agreements.

Oinoo was mulling over the type of accident that he could manufacture when the sound of weapons-fire grabbed his attention. He looked to the vid screens but knew instinctively that the sounds hadn’t come from that direction. They had come from the ante-room on the far side of his personal command center space.

But . . . how? And more importantly, who?

* * *

Eli was pleased. The movement from the portal room to the battle carrier’s command center went quickly and without major incident—for the humans. The Zrthns aboard the ship hadn’t fared too well. Benson was correct. The strange, tubelike weapons the invaders carried did not work against their PEACE armor. They could move virtually without worry. There had been one situation just inside the portal doorway when Ellison slipped while stepping over a dead squid and landed face-first on the floor . . . but that hardly counted.

For the most part, they had found the corridors of the ship vacant, which made sense. Most of the alien force had been off-loaded onto Telgora already. Presumably, only support and command personnel still remained on the battle carrier.

Eli marched into the command center of the carrier, scanned the area, and held his fire. None of the dozen or so squids seemed to be armed, or if they were, they kept their weapons lowered and out of sight.
Smart
.

Seeing the situation was under control, Eli asked to have Aank brought forward.

As he waited, a door on the far side of the large area opened. Eli and the rangers with him pointed their weapons in that direction, but a diminutive Zrthn stepped through the doorway, unarmed. He was the smallest squid they had encountered yet. Where the rest of the Zrthns stood roughly two meters tall, this one fell a good half-meter short of that mark.
Interesting.

Even more interesting, at least to Eli’s mind, was the coloration that decorated the Zrthn’s body and tentacles. Brilliant swirls of various blue and purple hues covered every inch of the alien’s features.

“If the coloration is any indicator,” Eli announced to his fellow rangers, “this guy must be the leader of this armada.”

You are correct
, Aank informed Eli. The Waa engineer had arrived.

“You are correct,” the multi-colored Zrthn answered, speaking Earth Standard language. “I am Oinoo, a senior member of the Thmelia Pod. What are you doing on my ship?”

Eli was surprised the alien spoke their language. The words carried a heavy dose of the squeak-squeal that Eli had come to expect, but they were easily understandable. The current of arrogant superiority that accompanied the words was also easily understood. The urge to squeeze the Ginny’s trigger and silence that arrogance was intense, but he refrained.

“I’m Captain Eli Justice of the Shiale Rangers” Eli replied, through gritted teeth. “What the flock is your ship doing on
our
planet?”

The senior member of the Thmelia Pod—Oinoo—moved forward, closing the distance that separated them. Unlike the other Zrthns Eli had encountered, the small leader of this Zrthn venture seemed graceful in his movements. Instead of the wriggle-walk movement he had come to expect, Oinoo’s leg-tentacles moved in a short, fluid motion that seemed to float his body across the floor. His subordinates, which were a mix of the higher-ranking, blue-tinted squids and the standard, pale gray, moved quickly aside to accommodate his passing. He stopped three meters from Eli, certainly aware that every Alliance weapon in the room was pointed in his direction.

“I’m here to complete agsel negotiations with the supreme Minith commander, who now controls this planet,” Oinoo stated. His enunciation was improving, Eli noted. “If you and your . . . people . . . exit the ship immediately, without causing further damage or harm, I will speak to him on your behalf. You may receive a lesser degree of punishment for your deference. Do we have a contract?”