Chapter 62 End of the beginning
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"Claw, where is the nearest fighter bay?" Malachi asked.
He'd been running for only a few seconds when he realized he had no idea where he was, or where he was going.
"Bay four six three is three miles from our current position." An arrow appeared in his line of sight. "This will lead you to it."
Following the dancing arrow, Malachi arrived at the launch bay in no more than thirty seconds. Once he entered the bay itself, he saw that it was without power. With a thought, the overhead lights came on and the atmospheric shield sprang up.
Leaping into the closest Talon, he went through preflight in record time. When the engine took more time, than he thought it should to spool up, he gripped the control stick and pumped energy from his suit into the systems. The engine whined high for a second, then settled into its deafening roar.
Interfacing his suit into every system the craft had, he brought up the communication channels. Selecting the fighter to fighter channel.
"This is Hawk one to all Hawk flight. I will be weightless in a few seconds. Does anyone have eyes on the targets?"
"Nice to have you with us, sir." Malachi recognized the voice of Jeremy, "Hooter" Nickles, one of his flight leaders.
"Nice to be back, Jer. What have we got?"
"We have nearly ninety bogies inbound. They're in four groups of twenty and they're coming in straight as an arrow. I've got sixty Talons as top cover, while sixteen of us go straight in and try to disrupt their formation."
"Switch it, have the sixty go in, keep sixteen for top cover. These things want nothing more than to bleed us dry and are more than willing to lose ninety some of their pilots to do it." Malachi's Talon shot out of the launch bay. Pulling hard on the stick, he hugged the surface of the nest until he broke over its northern pole and his radar could give him a clear picture of the battle.
He'd always distrusted computers. Sure, they could give him a three-dimensional picture of the battle, complete with moving images. He, on the other hand, felt that he needed to see the battle, to feel what was going on. The computer would give you all the information, sure, but in a very antiseptic way. In order to fight a battle, a man had to feel it, touch it, be in the middle of it. Only then could he fight it with the best odds of bringing the most of his forces home alive.
Pushing his fighter to the knifes edge of light speed, he covered the three hundred thousand miles in a under ten seconds. At that speed, his gravity wake was thrown out behind him like the wake of a speed boat on a flat pond. Throttling back, he took his gravity drive offline and drifted into position, taking station at the head of the sixteen fighters flying high cover. Switching from gravity drive to main propulsion his ion drive flared to life.
"Falcon one, this is Hawk one. What is your status?" He asked, his suit automatically routing his voice to his wanted recipient.
"We're holding station, thirty degrees relative of your position. The cloaks are holding. I don't think they've spotted us as of yet."
Malachi took a second to look at the display overlaid on his HUD. The Falcons were his ace in the hole. As long as the Rougarian pilots don't see them, they should be able to catch them between two forces and wipe them out.
Watching out his cockpit canopy, he saw the first volley of missiles streak from the wave of Talons, followed seconds later by another, and then still another. Missiles had to be launched while still a considerable distance from the enemy. Even at ranges that could be measured in the hundreds of thousands to millions of miles, when your missiles moved at close to the speed of light, there was no way to fire one once the range closed to cannon range.
"We've got incoming. ECM is definitely degrading their target acquisition, but I'm counting one hundred and thirty-four inbound targets."
"Thanks Paul." Malachi gave his thanks to the controller of the electronic countermeasure and control craft. It had been launched with the first flight of Talons and was now loitering between the orbital planes of Mercury and Venus. It fed Malachi and his man's information faster than the Talons limited sensor suite was able to pick up. Giving every pilot precious seconds they wouldn't otherwise have, and in the kind of battle they found themselves, every second counted.
On his HUD, Malachi watched each salvo of missiles have less and less distance to travel until neither side fired at all. A quick check showed him he was missing twelve fighters and seven pilots. He winced. The fighter craft losses they could absorb with ease, the pilots themselves, not so much. They had left earth with a little over three thousand of the most trained and practiced fighter and bomber pilots on the planet. The problem now was that they had no way to replace their inevitable losses.
The battle was as violent as it was short. Malachi and his sixteen fighters flew straight into the oncoming fighter swarm. With their shield at maximum frontal coverage, they took the initial enemy fire then passed through the formation while taking a few of the enemy with them. Before they had a chance to swing around for another pass, it was all over.
With sixty Talons falling on them from above, Joshua Talons decloaked and caught them broadside. Pushed between two separate forces, the Rougarian pilots stood no chance. Their formation was cut to ribbons in a matter of minutes.
"Nicely done gentlemen, that is how you spring an ambush." Pulling back on his stick, Malachi picked up his radar display. Several blue dots began to flash on his small screen.
"Hawk one to nest, urgent request as many SAR flights as possible. We have at least twenty-three pilots in need of assistance. I'll keep my flight out here to provide an escort." He cut the channel and switched to the inner fighter.
"Okay guys, I want each of us to find and direct the SAR flights to each of our guys. Make sure the search and rescue birds can do their jobs." He heard a chorus of double clicks on the mic as acknowledgment of his order.
"Commander, you are needed on the bridge now. Our situation has changed." The captain's voice was drained of all emotion, sounding like he'd just been punched in the gut.
"Two tails, you've got the squadron, I'm needed back on board."
"I've got it, sir. Once all the guys are picked up, we'll all head back in."
Malachi didn't respond. He was already pulling his fighter out of formation and pointing its nose back towards the nest.
"Where is he? Is he okay?" Tamar's entrance onto the bridge was neither quiet nor unnoticed.
"Central. I told you to seal this bridge. How did she get here?" Captain Prey asked, not turning to acknowledge her arrival.
"I don't need your permission, captain. Now answer my question," Tamar's nerves were at the breaking point. It had taken her fifteen sanity snapping minutes to get to the bridge, and she was in no mood to play word games with anyone. "Where is my husband?" Her scream shook dust from the overhead.
All eyes turned to her in those last words. Like lighting, the bridge crew began to murmur amongst themselves. Heads began to tilt towards one another until they were brought up short.
"This is neither the time nor place people. Get back on task, now!" Thomas thundered, snapping everyone back to their tasks.
"Where do you think he is?" Captain Pray swept his hand towards the main viewer.
Tamar looked towards the front of the bridge and gasped. She had never been on the bridge before, had never seen technology such as was laid out before her. The banks of control console spread out in a vee pattern, with the captain's chair at its intersection point. But what made her heart skip wasn't how she was seeing it, it was what she was seeing. On the main viewer spread the massive furball happening not over three hundred thousand miles in front of the nest.
Red and blue dots spiraled and looped in intricate lattices of death. It didn't take more than a few seconds for her to realize that with every heartbeat there were fewer red dots. Then, without knowing how, or even meaning to, the bridge speakers cracked and came alive with the inner fighter chatter.
"Bank left!"
"You've got one on your tail!"
"I'd give a million to know who done that!"
But the voice she wanted to hear wasn't there. She ran past everyone on the bridge and jumped onto the railing that surrounded the thirty-foot drop to the viewers' projector. Her head whipped from side to side as she tried to find him in the chaos.
"He's fine, if you must know. His transponder shows him right there." one of the blue dots shifted to purple, but it didn't bring her much comfort. He was alive, but right in the middle of the largest dogfight she'd ever seen.
Captain Prey showed her where Malachi was, if anything, to just shut her up. What in the hell was she going on about him being her husband? Malachi was never a man to want to marry anyone, heck he never liked women to begin with, to him they were a waste of time at best, something lesser men strutted after, but never him.
Captain Prey was so deep in his thoughts, he almost didn't notice when the main viewer flickered. When it happened again, he was about to ask Central what was happening when a voice cut through the bridge.
"Commanding officer of the earther vessel that now sits between the seventh and eighth planet. I am the prince of the Rougarian empire which you now face. I send you this message to give you my first and final warning. Stay where you are, leave us to our business. Once we leave, you can have this planet. If we do not receive a reply from you in thirty of these mud balls rotations, we will begin to slaughter everyone of these pathetic planet's highest lifeforms. Do not test us. If we can not have them, then no one will, and by the time we're finished, you will be all that's left of your pitiful race." The transmission can to an end, leaving everyone on the bridge in stunned silence.
"That was expected, I guess. But it does finally give us a timeline to go on." The captain's voice turned every head in his direction.
"What? Do you think they were here just to study our planet?"
"They are here for our people!" The door to the bridge was bent inward at the edge when it failed to slide to the side fast enough as Malachi burst through.
"Air bags a little slow." Joshua muttered under his breath.
"Very funny." Malachi responded.
"Oh right, you could hear that, couldn't you?"
Before he could answer, Malachi was almost knocked off his feet by a flying ball of black hair.
"Don't ever do that to me again. You scared me half to death."
"Sorry, but that's my job, and this will not be the last time I have to do it."
"Then you'd better refit one of those fighters to be a two-seater, because I'm going with you."
"No, you are not. I do what I do to protect you and everyone else on board this ship. If you were with me, I wouldn't be as effective and you know it." Malachi's voice had taken on that authoritative tone Tamar knew only too well.
What neither of them seemed to notice was every head on the bridge was following their discussion as if at a tennis match. Malachi would speak and every head turned towards him. The ball was then batted to Tamar and the fans would switch their attention to her and back and forth. What kept their attention locked was the fact that this was the most words any of them had ever heard him speak.
"A hem, sorry to interrupt you two, but we have bigger fish to fry." Captain Prey pointed back to the main viewer where Earth floated, still surrounded by six huge Rougarian behemoths.
"What does frying fish have anything to do with this?" Tamar growled. Not trying to hide the question in her tone.
Several of the bridge crew snickered at her lack of knowledge until she turned and glared, showing her teeth.
"It's an idiom from before your time, far before your time," Tomas said, trying to calm her. None of them knew that the only thing that kept her calm was the presence of the man she had her right arm wrapped around.
Stepping back to his command chair, captain Prey didn't sit. He walked around till he stood behind it, then grabbed the back rest with both hands.
"Okay, people. It's time to get to work."
End of Finding Darkness, book one.
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