Chapter 3: Falling Toward Gomorrah
Artesia strode three steps behind and to the left of Axis Doombringer's imposingly broad back. While she liked to view herself as an equal, at least, to Axis, here such pride would be counterproductive. Years of experience had taught her which battles were worth fighting and which held no measurable gain.
Their boots rang in unison off the glossy metal deck plates of the Emperor's Fang, a Kreeghor Dreadnaught-Class battleship, and the largest warship in known space. It was three miles of armored hull and deadly weapon systems. It was fast, despite its seemingly ungainly size, and it carried more fighters than most carriers. It was the ultimate symbol of the Emperor's will.
Well, one of the ultimate symbols, Artesia thought, catching a glint of light off of Axis' Invincible Guardsman insignia.
The mismatched pair stopped inside a severe, spartan, waiting area. The walls the same monotonous black as the floor, polished to a high metal sheen, as was the ceiling, with recessed light panels glowing softly from where the floor met the walls. On one side a bulkhead appeared to be missing, threatening to suck occupants of the room into cold, harsh space. In truth the transparitanium used was just that clean, that flawless.
Axis and Artesia stepped toward the view port, looking out at a charred, blackened planet below. Brolanti's Gain had once been a lush, green and blue farm world. It had been productively settled by a majority of agricultural-minded wolfen and humans under the flag of the Empire. While not one of the major breadbaskets, the planet had done well for itself. However, Brolanti's Gain did not stay a little paradise for long. Soon after it became a booming farm world the planet's primary, Arsini Proxima, began running out of the fuels that kept its nuclear fires burning. The star expanded in a matter of days from a largish yellow star into a bloated and corpulent red giant, content for the time being to burn what was left of its hydrogen supplies and its growing abundance of heavy metals in its misshapen nuclear core. Eventually, even that fuel would wear out, and the outer shell of the star would explode in a supernova into nearby space, leaving nothing but a small, moon-sized white dwarf and a massive nebula which would one day foster the birth of new stars and new planetary systems. In a couple million years, there would be no Brolanti's Gain.
Two of the inner planets of the system had been devoured by the expansion of Arsini Proxima. The remaining two inner planets, including Brolanti's Gain, were burnt to a cinder by the slowly dying star. Only the system's two gas giants and their lifeless moons were unphased by the sudden transition.
The Emperor's Fang sat quietly on the night side of the blackened farm planet, orbiting near the one important asset that remained to make the planet valuable to the Empire, the Invincible Guardsman training academy and scientific laboratory. The sprawling eight-mile space station was known to the rest of the Three Galaxies to be an important, but strategically useless, observatory monitoring the dying star system for scientific data. In truth, a full 65 percent of the station actually was dedicated to observational studies. A lie always hides a bit more quietly beneath a cozy layer of truth.
Artesia looked at Axis out of the corner of her eye. He appeared lost deep in thought, a common activity for Axis, and one that set him apart from many of his fellow Kreeghor. She could only assume that he was remembering his own training at the academy, or perhaps the secret oaths of service he had taken there. She had heard many of the rumors about the brutal training regimen there, one of the more common being that students were forced to assemble an energy pistol in an open airlock without the benefit of a space suit. The faster they got it done, the faster they were allowed back inside.
For a Kreeghor, Artesia thought, it was not so bad a task. Their supernaturally sturdy bodies could survive vacuum for a few minutes. Even a Silhouette, like herself could. But for a human or a wolfen more than 15-30 seconds would mean severe injury or death.
Her musings were distracted by footsteps echoing down the long hall they had walked a few moments before. Axis gestured to her urgently and she began to mutter a short incantation. Before the source of the footsteps came into view the shadows of the room seemed to come alive and draw Artesia into them.
Axis, confident his partner was hidden, squared his shoulders and stood with more bearing than usual as into the room, with characteristic bluster and drama, strode Sythh Kalis, a fellow invincible guardsman.
Sythh, a Seljuk, topped Axis by more than a head. Like the Kreeghor, the Seljuk were a reptilian species, but the two species varied dramatically. Where the Kreeghor's bodies were covered with rigid, thick, scales that served almost as an exoskeleton, the Seljuk's skin was a smooth, snake-like texture. Seljuk were descendants of a powerful predatory saurian race from their planet's ancient past, bipedal tyrannosaurus rex's with twice the strength of an adult dragon, and the honor of a Cosmo Knight.
Axis knew that while many Kreeghor talked honor, the Seljuk lived it. For the Kreeghor, an unarmed foe was the best kind. It was said that a Seljuk would not only refuse to attack an unarmed foe, but would loan their enemy the money to decently arm themselves…and at a low interest rate.
It was no surprise, then, that very few Seljuk were members of the Transgalactic Empire. Those who were members were born as part of small communities or colonies the Kreeghor had conquered long ago. Their home world and most of their race were solid, and formidable, members of the Consortium of Civilized Worlds, the Empire's most hated nemesis.
But Sythh was a decorated member of the Invincible Guardsmen, and Axis respected that. On no less than two occasions Sythh had covered Axis's back in pitched battle and Axis had grudgingly admitted to himself that had he the Cosmic Forge in his back pocket, he would have felt no safer than he did in those moments.
Unfortunately, Sythh was rash and unimaginative. He believed that through sheer force alone one could crush any enemy. Axis knew that one day a clever enemy would end Sythh's life.
"Greetings Axis Doombringer. I knew you to be present when I saw the star's hesitate to twinkle, lest they risk your displeasure," Sythh bowed in honor.
"Greeting Sythh Kalis. I knew of your arrival by the darkening of space, for surely even the universe itself hides because it fears to owe you anything, especially your destiny," Axis replied, completing the Seljuk tradition of honoring a worthy warrior with expansive boasts of his or her power.
The Seljuk chuckled and grasped forearms with the smaller Kreeghor. Several of Axis's arm scales cracked under the pressure of the vice-like grip and Axis knew he'd have to see a healer for the bruised arm, but also knew that the Seljuk would not dishonor him by holding back any of his formidable strength.
"I don't see that spying wench of yours around anywhere," The Seljuk grinned, looking around the chamber. "Did you finally get tired of her and space her, or did you find one of her kind to breed her and send her home where she should be?"
Axis knew well and good that the Seljuk, whether by smell or some form of enhanced sight, already knew Artesia was in the room. He could almost feel her stiffen at the insults.
He never did understand why she insisted on being in on the meetings invisibly, when most if not all of the guardsmen knew she was there. But, as she predicted, none of them ever dared comment on her presence, or confronted Axis about bringing her.
Sythh Kalis stood for a while in silence, staring down at the charred planet. He sighed, a whistling-like noise, and turned to face Axis.
"You know what you plan has risks," he said. "Many things could go wrong with this plan of yours."
Axis definitely thought he felt Artesia stiffen at that.
"I have no doubt things will unfold as we have foreseen," Axis assured the massive saurian. There, that ought to quiet her for a while, he thought.
"I doubt your mental prowess about as much as I'd doubt your physical prowess, friend," Kalis said, nodding in deference. "Just be sure that the goals of your allies and your own are the same. Or at the very least, they do not conflict."
"The others come," Axis replied, sweeping his hand across the view port as a spiny, fish-like shuttle swept under the view port.
Kalis sighed inwardly, walking to a non-descript wall. His badge glowed faintly and the wall disappeared. Moving to the table he activated three-dimensional maps and graphs and charts and figures over a large, glossy black metal table. As a group of invincible guardsmen containing a half-dozen species flooded the room, a shadow slipped into the far corner.
The rest of the invincible guardsmen pointedly paid no attention to that shadow as Axis began to speak.
While he laid out his plans he wondered to himself about Artesia's presence. It was symbolic, he knew. But of what?
There were two possibilities, he thought. One was that she was a symbol of his power. None of the other guardsmen would bring a person not of the Order to the gatherings. Especially one whose most noteworthy ability was the skill of using scraps of information to paint all too accurate pictures of someone's future plans. Perhaps, she was a way of telling them just how much power and respect he wielded. He liked that.
Or, it could be, he admitted, that it was a show of her power and influence. And he did not like that one bit.
But, he sighed inwardly, knowing Artesia the answer was probably both.
"This is crazy, you know that, right?" Lani asked Ty as she strapped herself into the co-pilot's seat.
"And that's exactly why they'll never see it coming," the captain of the ForgeArrow quipped. "Right kid?"
Ty threw a grin over his shoulder at Rivin, who was manning the weapons console. Rivin nodded and put on his best grin, hoping he didn't look as ill as he felt.
"We ready back there Churt?" Ty asked into the intercom. A small holographic projection appeared on his console of the grizzled dwarf's face, covered in soot behind a pair of goggles.
"No, but we might as well go anyway," the dwarf grunted. "Just remember, we got two, count' em, two uses of this phase emitter and it's burned out till we can put into port. So don't screw up!"
Before Ty could respond, the gruff dwarf slapped off the connection. Ty reached to console and pulled up a wire with a small plug attached to it. Reaching behind his ear with practiced ease, he slid the plug into his cybernetic universal headjack.
Instantly, readouts of the ship's status and all major instruments were broadcast directly onto his retina, in perfect focus with the rest of the cockpit. The ship's computer softly intoned pertinent data directly to his inner ear. He reached out and touched controls in mid-air only he could see, twisting a dial here, pressing a button or throwing a lever there. He was, for all intents and purposes, one with the ship.
Lani, loathe to ever getting a cybernetic implant, did her part through an old-fashioned control panel, and was somewhat relieved when she saw Rivin doing the same.
Rivin, meanwhile, was impressed with the arsenal available on the runner ship. Besides a pair of heavy laser cannons facing forward (used by the pilot or co-pilot) it also had dorsal and belly plasma turrets each with 10 defensive mini-missiles that could be fired from his panel or controlled directly by gunners in the turrets, as well as two long-range missile launchers, two concealed anti-matter cruise missiles and military-grade shields. Rivin whistled at the power outputs.
"They let you bring this thing into port?" Rivin asked, incredulously.
"The ports we go to don't ask questions," Lani chuckled. "A few credits in the right place handle the 'civilized' ports we put in at."
"Don't feel bad kid," Ty grinned. "Your people just pay me more than they do you."
The ship lifted gracefully off the floor of the deep ice trench and began to navigate it at increasing speed. Ty waited until it took him directly under the Kreeghor battleship before arrowing straight up at the ship's belly.
The ForgeArrow ripped off of the comet as though shot from a cannon, and the four Fang fighters escorting her swept in hurriedly to intercept.
On the ship's bridge the captain called for battle stations and gave an order to raise shields against the apparently suicidal little vessel. But it was too late.
ForgeArrow cut under the shields moments before they were raised and then slid into the warship's belly seemingly like a ghost.
The insubstantial vessel made a beeline for the ship's engineering section, which Churt had guaranteed had a large enough space to become substantial.
Had they lived, the engineering crew of the Smasher-class cruiser would have certainly told their children and their children's children about the sight they saw that day. The ForgeArrow, like some space-faring predator, solidified in the air over the main reactors, barely missing catwalks and girders alike, still shaking off frost from the comet below. They stood in stunned awe for about two seconds. But then, Rivin put the ForgeArrow's arsenal to work.
Trying to pay no attention to where he was, Rivin thumbed off volleys of defensive missiles and plasma blasts haphazardly into the sensitive engineering deck of the enemy vessel.
Finally, as the ForgeArrow swung around to face the reactors, he loosed its two anti-matter cruise missiles and winced instinctively. It takes a cruise missile less than a second to travel over a mile from launcher to target. Faster than the human eye can usually follow. The ForgeArrow launched hers at the Smasher's reactors from about 50 feet away. No time for a normal human to engage the phase emitter to avoid the resulting explosion, but with his link to his ship, Ty had programmed his vessel to go into phase the moment the ship fired its cruise missiles, and it's computer moved even faster than the missiles did.
Ty slammed the thrust forward, rocketing out of the engineering deck as it became engulfed in flames and titanic explosions. The ship emerged from right between two blazing white thrusters, quickly leaving the cruiser behind.
Meanwhile, the forces of nature ran wild in the Smasher's engineering deck, beginning a chain reaction that spread throughout every deck of the ship, every nook and cranny. For a moment, the ship's superalloy hull actually expanded to contain the explosion, but the end result was the inevitable atomization of the massive warship.
Unfortunately for the ForgeArrow, the phase emitter only lasted a few meters beyond the hull of the cruiser, and the little ship caught the full brunt of the Smasher's destruction. Also, unfortunately for the ForgeArrow, it couldn't operate its shields while the phase emitter was active. The cruiser's blast slapped the smaller ship away like a leaf in a storm. The electromagnetic pulse was so powerful that the ForgeArrow's hardened circuits couldn't handle it. A surge of feedback looped through the system, right up the jackwire and directly in to Ty Darion's brain.
Ty convulsed suddenly, spasming as he grabbed at the headjack as it seemed to broadcast liquid fire into his brain. His synaptic impulses lit up like a roman candle, and the ForgeArrow listened. It tried to speed up, slow down, bank, dive, fire its main cannons and jump to Faster-than-Light travel all in the same instant.
Ty succeeded in getting the jack out of his head, but slumped in the seat ineffectually. Lani scrambled at the secondary controls, screaming in frustration, ignoring a sudden litany of colorful dwarven curses coming through the intercom from engineering.
"Kid! Grab the main controls!" She shouted, her own hands full at the moment.
Rivin rushed across the bridge and hauled Captain Darion's twitching form out of the chair, and then slid in himself. At the removal of the jack, the console had reverted to conventional use and the smooth panels flipped over, revealing standard controls.
Lani opened her mouth to give Rivin some instructions, but before she could even gather her thoughts he had leveled the ship out and sorted out the cacophony of confused commands the ship was trying to process. That struck her as odd. The ForgeArrow's control set-up had been designed specifically for and by Ty and there was nothing similar, that she knew of, in known space.
But that was a problem for another time. Right now, the ForgeArrow was speeding in-system, and as systems crashed her control panel turned more and more a threatening red hue.
"We have to set her down!" Lani yelled over the tumult of alarms and beeping, trilling warnings.
Rivin nodded, "Just scout out a place and I'll set her down."
Lani flipped through the holographic system map and centered on the fourth planet.
"Put us on this heading," she said, transferring the coordinates to his console. "Planet called GM-4. Standard atmosphere and gravity."
Rivin nodded again and directed the ship toward its destination.
It took about three hours for the ForgeArrow to close in on the system's lone habitable planet. During that time the main computer core had crashed, and had taken the artificial gravity system with it. Lani had taken Ty and placed him in the ship's small, two-bed medical bay and strapped him down securely before propelling herself through the zero-gee back to the cockpit. She had taken over primary controls for most of the flight once things had gotten settled down, and Rivin worked as co-pilot. Both had grim looks on their faces. Without the contra-gravity system they'd have to enter the planet's thick atmosphere in a way that hadn't been common in at least a thousand years.
"Okay," Lani sighed in resignation. "Give me an entrance angle, speed and a nice soft, huge stretch of flat land."
Rivin panned through the data and transmitted the information directly into the computer.
"Looks good," Lani approved. "Raise our shields and hold onto your intestines."
Lani rolled the ship until the green, gray world filling the cockpit was under the ship, then pitched the nose up so that all they could see were stars and a soft glow from the planet's horizon.
"Firing retros," she said. Then pressed a button and held on. The ship jerked convulsively for a few moments and then pitched wildly.
"Aw Hell…." Rivin muttered, looking down at the controls.
Lani looked over at him wide-eyed as she corrected the ship's entry angle. "What?"
"That was it for the retros."
"Great."
Rivin went to quick work, recalculating their entry angle for their speed, about twice that they should be coming in at.
Lani looked at the computations. "We can't. There's no way I'll bleed enough speed."
Rivin looked over at her as the ship began to rumble against the outer edges of the atmosphere. "See that lake I highlighted?"
"Yeah?"
"Ever skip stones across a pond?"
"You're joking."
Rivin shook his head. "Far from it. At the speed we'll be hitting, and at the right angle, it should whack a LOT of our inertia, but you've got to bleed as much speed as you can first, and hit it at the right angle."
Lani shrugged. "I can't pull that off."
Rivin shook his head more fiercely. "Rise and fly!"
Lani hurriedly undid her straps and pushed off the pilot's seat. But, used to artificial gravity, she didn't compensate for the effect of acceleration and inertia as the ship hit a real atmosphere and crashed to the deck behind the chair, sliding toward the back of the cockpit.
Rivin flung himself at the pilot's seat and angled himself in, hauling the straps over each shoulder and yanking the ship's nose up.
He used every trick he knew as the ship plunged like a shooting star into the planet's atmosphere, and invented a few new ones. Coming in almost totally belly first, it was a battle to keep the craft's tail from slewing from one side to the other. The speed indicator plummeted, but didn't seem to be plummeting nearly fast enough.
The ForgeArrow punched through the cloud layer like a bullet and Rivin waited until it was only a couple miles off the surface before kicking in the main engines and pushing the ship forward horizontally. The sudden change in vectors bled a huge amount of the ship's speed and angled the craft toward a massive lake.
A hundred fires sparked in the lush green and purple forests behind the ship, and over a more barren desert it left a strip of rugged glass in its wake.
Finally, Rivin hauled up on the nose, one more time, giving the planet the ship's belly once again, then leveled her out exactly even with the lake, descending at a 30 degree angle. Just at the moment of impact on the lake, he activated the main thrusters again and literally bounced the ship once, twice, three times across the surface of the water, instantly flash-boiling a couple million gallons to steam.
Kicking the shields to full power to the ship's belly, Rivin led the ForgeArrow into a soft grassy plain. The ship slid on its shields for two solid miles in a bone-jarring landing that plowed a 30-foot deep, 100-foot wide rip across the soft earth. In a fountain of superheated purple grass, exploding earth and quite a bit of bedrock the ForgeArrow finally skewed about 45 degrees to starboard and came to a gentle stop.
Rivin took a long-held breath and looked back at Lani, who, to his surprise, appeared to be adhered to the floor on a sheet of yellowish goop. She looked up at him and grinned.
"Now THAT was a landing!"
Artesia strode three steps behind and to the left of Axis Doombringer's imposingly broad back. While she liked to view herself as an equal, at least, to Axis, here such pride would be counterproductive. Years of experience had taught her which battles were worth fighting and which held no measurable gain.
Their boots rang in unison off the glossy metal deck plates of the Emperor's Fang, a Kreeghor Dreadnaught-Class battleship, and the largest warship in known space. It was three miles of armored hull and deadly weapon systems. It was fast, despite its seemingly ungainly size, and it carried more fighters than most carriers. It was the ultimate symbol of the Emperor's will.
Well, one of the ultimate symbols, Artesia thought, catching a glint of light off of Axis' Invincible Guardsman insignia.
The mismatched pair stopped inside a severe, spartan, waiting area. The walls the same monotonous black as the floor, polished to a high metal sheen, as was the ceiling, with recessed light panels glowing softly from where the floor met the walls. On one side a bulkhead appeared to be missing, threatening to suck occupants of the room into cold, harsh space. In truth the transparitanium used was just that clean, that flawless.
Axis and Artesia stepped toward the view port, looking out at a charred, blackened planet below. Brolanti's Gain had once been a lush, green and blue farm world. It had been productively settled by a majority of agricultural-minded wolfen and humans under the flag of the Empire. While not one of the major breadbaskets, the planet had done well for itself. However, Brolanti's Gain did not stay a little paradise for long. Soon after it became a booming farm world the planet's primary, Arsini Proxima, began running out of the fuels that kept its nuclear fires burning. The star expanded in a matter of days from a largish yellow star into a bloated and corpulent red giant, content for the time being to burn what was left of its hydrogen supplies and its growing abundance of heavy metals in its misshapen nuclear core. Eventually, even that fuel would wear out, and the outer shell of the star would explode in a supernova into nearby space, leaving nothing but a small, moon-sized white dwarf and a massive nebula which would one day foster the birth of new stars and new planetary systems. In a couple million years, there would be no Brolanti's Gain.
Two of the inner planets of the system had been devoured by the expansion of Arsini Proxima. The remaining two inner planets, including Brolanti's Gain, were burnt to a cinder by the slowly dying star. Only the system's two gas giants and their lifeless moons were unphased by the sudden transition.
The Emperor's Fang sat quietly on the night side of the blackened farm planet, orbiting near the one important asset that remained to make the planet valuable to the Empire, the Invincible Guardsman training academy and scientific laboratory. The sprawling eight-mile space station was known to the rest of the Three Galaxies to be an important, but strategically useless, observatory monitoring the dying star system for scientific data. In truth, a full 65 percent of the station actually was dedicated to observational studies. A lie always hides a bit more quietly beneath a cozy layer of truth.
Artesia looked at Axis out of the corner of her eye. He appeared lost deep in thought, a common activity for Axis, and one that set him apart from many of his fellow Kreeghor. She could only assume that he was remembering his own training at the academy, or perhaps the secret oaths of service he had taken there. She had heard many of the rumors about the brutal training regimen there, one of the more common being that students were forced to assemble an energy pistol in an open airlock without the benefit of a space suit. The faster they got it done, the faster they were allowed back inside.
For a Kreeghor, Artesia thought, it was not so bad a task. Their supernaturally sturdy bodies could survive vacuum for a few minutes. Even a Silhouette, like herself could. But for a human or a wolfen more than 15-30 seconds would mean severe injury or death.
Her musings were distracted by footsteps echoing down the long hall they had walked a few moments before. Axis gestured to her urgently and she began to mutter a short incantation. Before the source of the footsteps came into view the shadows of the room seemed to come alive and draw Artesia into them.
Axis, confident his partner was hidden, squared his shoulders and stood with more bearing than usual as into the room, with characteristic bluster and drama, strode Sythh Kalis, a fellow invincible guardsman.
Sythh, a Seljuk, topped Axis by more than a head. Like the Kreeghor, the Seljuk were a reptilian species, but the two species varied dramatically. Where the Kreeghor's bodies were covered with rigid, thick, scales that served almost as an exoskeleton, the Seljuk's skin was a smooth, snake-like texture. Seljuk were descendants of a powerful predatory saurian race from their planet's ancient past, bipedal tyrannosaurus rex's with twice the strength of an adult dragon, and the honor of a Cosmo Knight.
Axis knew that while many Kreeghor talked honor, the Seljuk lived it. For the Kreeghor, an unarmed foe was the best kind. It was said that a Seljuk would not only refuse to attack an unarmed foe, but would loan their enemy the money to decently arm themselves…and at a low interest rate.
It was no surprise, then, that very few Seljuk were members of the Transgalactic Empire. Those who were members were born as part of small communities or colonies the Kreeghor had conquered long ago. Their home world and most of their race were solid, and formidable, members of the Consortium of Civilized Worlds, the Empire's most hated nemesis.
But Sythh was a decorated member of the Invincible Guardsmen, and Axis respected that. On no less than two occasions Sythh had covered Axis's back in pitched battle and Axis had grudgingly admitted to himself that had he the Cosmic Forge in his back pocket, he would have felt no safer than he did in those moments.
Unfortunately, Sythh was rash and unimaginative. He believed that through sheer force alone one could crush any enemy. Axis knew that one day a clever enemy would end Sythh's life.
"Greetings Axis Doombringer. I knew you to be present when I saw the star's hesitate to twinkle, lest they risk your displeasure," Sythh bowed in honor.
"Greeting Sythh Kalis. I knew of your arrival by the darkening of space, for surely even the universe itself hides because it fears to owe you anything, especially your destiny," Axis replied, completing the Seljuk tradition of honoring a worthy warrior with expansive boasts of his or her power.
The Seljuk chuckled and grasped forearms with the smaller Kreeghor. Several of Axis's arm scales cracked under the pressure of the vice-like grip and Axis knew he'd have to see a healer for the bruised arm, but also knew that the Seljuk would not dishonor him by holding back any of his formidable strength.
"I don't see that spying wench of yours around anywhere," The Seljuk grinned, looking around the chamber. "Did you finally get tired of her and space her, or did you find one of her kind to breed her and send her home where she should be?"
Axis knew well and good that the Seljuk, whether by smell or some form of enhanced sight, already knew Artesia was in the room. He could almost feel her stiffen at the insults.
He never did understand why she insisted on being in on the meetings invisibly, when most if not all of the guardsmen knew she was there. But, as she predicted, none of them ever dared comment on her presence, or confronted Axis about bringing her.
Sythh Kalis stood for a while in silence, staring down at the charred planet. He sighed, a whistling-like noise, and turned to face Axis.
"You know what you plan has risks," he said. "Many things could go wrong with this plan of yours."
Axis definitely thought he felt Artesia stiffen at that.
"I have no doubt things will unfold as we have foreseen," Axis assured the massive saurian. There, that ought to quiet her for a while, he thought.
"I doubt your mental prowess about as much as I'd doubt your physical prowess, friend," Kalis said, nodding in deference. "Just be sure that the goals of your allies and your own are the same. Or at the very least, they do not conflict."
"The others come," Axis replied, sweeping his hand across the view port as a spiny, fish-like shuttle swept under the view port.
Kalis sighed inwardly, walking to a non-descript wall. His badge glowed faintly and the wall disappeared. Moving to the table he activated three-dimensional maps and graphs and charts and figures over a large, glossy black metal table. As a group of invincible guardsmen containing a half-dozen species flooded the room, a shadow slipped into the far corner.
The rest of the invincible guardsmen pointedly paid no attention to that shadow as Axis began to speak.
While he laid out his plans he wondered to himself about Artesia's presence. It was symbolic, he knew. But of what?
There were two possibilities, he thought. One was that she was a symbol of his power. None of the other guardsmen would bring a person not of the Order to the gatherings. Especially one whose most noteworthy ability was the skill of using scraps of information to paint all too accurate pictures of someone's future plans. Perhaps, she was a way of telling them just how much power and respect he wielded. He liked that.
Or, it could be, he admitted, that it was a show of her power and influence. And he did not like that one bit.
But, he sighed inwardly, knowing Artesia the answer was probably both.
"This is crazy, you know that, right?" Lani asked Ty as she strapped herself into the co-pilot's seat.
"And that's exactly why they'll never see it coming," the captain of the ForgeArrow quipped. "Right kid?"
Ty threw a grin over his shoulder at Rivin, who was manning the weapons console. Rivin nodded and put on his best grin, hoping he didn't look as ill as he felt.
"We ready back there Churt?" Ty asked into the intercom. A small holographic projection appeared on his console of the grizzled dwarf's face, covered in soot behind a pair of goggles.
"No, but we might as well go anyway," the dwarf grunted. "Just remember, we got two, count' em, two uses of this phase emitter and it's burned out till we can put into port. So don't screw up!"
Before Ty could respond, the gruff dwarf slapped off the connection. Ty reached to console and pulled up a wire with a small plug attached to it. Reaching behind his ear with practiced ease, he slid the plug into his cybernetic universal headjack.
Instantly, readouts of the ship's status and all major instruments were broadcast directly onto his retina, in perfect focus with the rest of the cockpit. The ship's computer softly intoned pertinent data directly to his inner ear. He reached out and touched controls in mid-air only he could see, twisting a dial here, pressing a button or throwing a lever there. He was, for all intents and purposes, one with the ship.
Lani, loathe to ever getting a cybernetic implant, did her part through an old-fashioned control panel, and was somewhat relieved when she saw Rivin doing the same.
Rivin, meanwhile, was impressed with the arsenal available on the runner ship. Besides a pair of heavy laser cannons facing forward (used by the pilot or co-pilot) it also had dorsal and belly plasma turrets each with 10 defensive mini-missiles that could be fired from his panel or controlled directly by gunners in the turrets, as well as two long-range missile launchers, two concealed anti-matter cruise missiles and military-grade shields. Rivin whistled at the power outputs.
"They let you bring this thing into port?" Rivin asked, incredulously.
"The ports we go to don't ask questions," Lani chuckled. "A few credits in the right place handle the 'civilized' ports we put in at."
"Don't feel bad kid," Ty grinned. "Your people just pay me more than they do you."
The ship lifted gracefully off the floor of the deep ice trench and began to navigate it at increasing speed. Ty waited until it took him directly under the Kreeghor battleship before arrowing straight up at the ship's belly.
The ForgeArrow ripped off of the comet as though shot from a cannon, and the four Fang fighters escorting her swept in hurriedly to intercept.
On the ship's bridge the captain called for battle stations and gave an order to raise shields against the apparently suicidal little vessel. But it was too late.
ForgeArrow cut under the shields moments before they were raised and then slid into the warship's belly seemingly like a ghost.
The insubstantial vessel made a beeline for the ship's engineering section, which Churt had guaranteed had a large enough space to become substantial.
Had they lived, the engineering crew of the Smasher-class cruiser would have certainly told their children and their children's children about the sight they saw that day. The ForgeArrow, like some space-faring predator, solidified in the air over the main reactors, barely missing catwalks and girders alike, still shaking off frost from the comet below. They stood in stunned awe for about two seconds. But then, Rivin put the ForgeArrow's arsenal to work.
Trying to pay no attention to where he was, Rivin thumbed off volleys of defensive missiles and plasma blasts haphazardly into the sensitive engineering deck of the enemy vessel.
Finally, as the ForgeArrow swung around to face the reactors, he loosed its two anti-matter cruise missiles and winced instinctively. It takes a cruise missile less than a second to travel over a mile from launcher to target. Faster than the human eye can usually follow. The ForgeArrow launched hers at the Smasher's reactors from about 50 feet away. No time for a normal human to engage the phase emitter to avoid the resulting explosion, but with his link to his ship, Ty had programmed his vessel to go into phase the moment the ship fired its cruise missiles, and it's computer moved even faster than the missiles did.
Ty slammed the thrust forward, rocketing out of the engineering deck as it became engulfed in flames and titanic explosions. The ship emerged from right between two blazing white thrusters, quickly leaving the cruiser behind.
Meanwhile, the forces of nature ran wild in the Smasher's engineering deck, beginning a chain reaction that spread throughout every deck of the ship, every nook and cranny. For a moment, the ship's superalloy hull actually expanded to contain the explosion, but the end result was the inevitable atomization of the massive warship.
Unfortunately for the ForgeArrow, the phase emitter only lasted a few meters beyond the hull of the cruiser, and the little ship caught the full brunt of the Smasher's destruction. Also, unfortunately for the ForgeArrow, it couldn't operate its shields while the phase emitter was active. The cruiser's blast slapped the smaller ship away like a leaf in a storm. The electromagnetic pulse was so powerful that the ForgeArrow's hardened circuits couldn't handle it. A surge of feedback looped through the system, right up the jackwire and directly in to Ty Darion's brain.
Ty convulsed suddenly, spasming as he grabbed at the headjack as it seemed to broadcast liquid fire into his brain. His synaptic impulses lit up like a roman candle, and the ForgeArrow listened. It tried to speed up, slow down, bank, dive, fire its main cannons and jump to Faster-than-Light travel all in the same instant.
Ty succeeded in getting the jack out of his head, but slumped in the seat ineffectually. Lani scrambled at the secondary controls, screaming in frustration, ignoring a sudden litany of colorful dwarven curses coming through the intercom from engineering.
"Kid! Grab the main controls!" She shouted, her own hands full at the moment.
Rivin rushed across the bridge and hauled Captain Darion's twitching form out of the chair, and then slid in himself. At the removal of the jack, the console had reverted to conventional use and the smooth panels flipped over, revealing standard controls.
Lani opened her mouth to give Rivin some instructions, but before she could even gather her thoughts he had leveled the ship out and sorted out the cacophony of confused commands the ship was trying to process. That struck her as odd. The ForgeArrow's control set-up had been designed specifically for and by Ty and there was nothing similar, that she knew of, in known space.
But that was a problem for another time. Right now, the ForgeArrow was speeding in-system, and as systems crashed her control panel turned more and more a threatening red hue.
"We have to set her down!" Lani yelled over the tumult of alarms and beeping, trilling warnings.
Rivin nodded, "Just scout out a place and I'll set her down."
Lani flipped through the holographic system map and centered on the fourth planet.
"Put us on this heading," she said, transferring the coordinates to his console. "Planet called GM-4. Standard atmosphere and gravity."
Rivin nodded again and directed the ship toward its destination.
It took about three hours for the ForgeArrow to close in on the system's lone habitable planet. During that time the main computer core had crashed, and had taken the artificial gravity system with it. Lani had taken Ty and placed him in the ship's small, two-bed medical bay and strapped him down securely before propelling herself through the zero-gee back to the cockpit. She had taken over primary controls for most of the flight once things had gotten settled down, and Rivin worked as co-pilot. Both had grim looks on their faces. Without the contra-gravity system they'd have to enter the planet's thick atmosphere in a way that hadn't been common in at least a thousand years.
"Okay," Lani sighed in resignation. "Give me an entrance angle, speed and a nice soft, huge stretch of flat land."
Rivin panned through the data and transmitted the information directly into the computer.
"Looks good," Lani approved. "Raise our shields and hold onto your intestines."
Lani rolled the ship until the green, gray world filling the cockpit was under the ship, then pitched the nose up so that all they could see were stars and a soft glow from the planet's horizon.
"Firing retros," she said. Then pressed a button and held on. The ship jerked convulsively for a few moments and then pitched wildly.
"Aw Hell…." Rivin muttered, looking down at the controls.
Lani looked over at him wide-eyed as she corrected the ship's entry angle. "What?"
"That was it for the retros."
"Great."
Rivin went to quick work, recalculating their entry angle for their speed, about twice that they should be coming in at.
Lani looked at the computations. "We can't. There's no way I'll bleed enough speed."
Rivin looked over at her as the ship began to rumble against the outer edges of the atmosphere. "See that lake I highlighted?"
"Yeah?"
"Ever skip stones across a pond?"
"You're joking."
Rivin shook his head. "Far from it. At the speed we'll be hitting, and at the right angle, it should whack a LOT of our inertia, but you've got to bleed as much speed as you can first, and hit it at the right angle."
Lani shrugged. "I can't pull that off."
Rivin shook his head more fiercely. "Rise and fly!"
Lani hurriedly undid her straps and pushed off the pilot's seat. But, used to artificial gravity, she didn't compensate for the effect of acceleration and inertia as the ship hit a real atmosphere and crashed to the deck behind the chair, sliding toward the back of the cockpit.
Rivin flung himself at the pilot's seat and angled himself in, hauling the straps over each shoulder and yanking the ship's nose up.
He used every trick he knew as the ship plunged like a shooting star into the planet's atmosphere, and invented a few new ones. Coming in almost totally belly first, it was a battle to keep the craft's tail from slewing from one side to the other. The speed indicator plummeted, but didn't seem to be plummeting nearly fast enough.
The ForgeArrow punched through the cloud layer like a bullet and Rivin waited until it was only a couple miles off the surface before kicking in the main engines and pushing the ship forward horizontally. The sudden change in vectors bled a huge amount of the ship's speed and angled the craft toward a massive lake.
A hundred fires sparked in the lush green and purple forests behind the ship, and over a more barren desert it left a strip of rugged glass in its wake.
Finally, Rivin hauled up on the nose, one more time, giving the planet the ship's belly once again, then leveled her out exactly even with the lake, descending at a 30 degree angle. Just at the moment of impact on the lake, he activated the main thrusters again and literally bounced the ship once, twice, three times across the surface of the water, instantly flash-boiling a couple million gallons to steam.
Kicking the shields to full power to the ship's belly, Rivin led the ForgeArrow into a soft grassy plain. The ship slid on its shields for two solid miles in a bone-jarring landing that plowed a 30-foot deep, 100-foot wide rip across the soft earth. In a fountain of superheated purple grass, exploding earth and quite a bit of bedrock the ForgeArrow finally skewed about 45 degrees to starboard and came to a gentle stop.
Rivin took a long-held breath and looked back at Lani, who, to his surprise, appeared to be adhered to the floor on a sheet of yellowish goop. She looked up at him and grinned.
"Now THAT was a landing!"