Ch.19 Scramble

Chapter 19 of Bellageist: Burning Angels

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Bellageist: Burning Angels

Chapter 19

Scramble

The holographic display snapped off with a zip. Its absence sank the room into darkness. Overhead lights flickered back on.

Subcolonel Preyor slapped his retractable pointer shut and gave the assembled pilots an encompassing stare: organic eye grave, artificial eye dull red and calculating. “Men of the 9^th Aerogroup, take to your craft. Launch is immediate. Fortua favor us.”

The aeromen, over a hundred pilots, technicians, and tactical specialists, rose from the quarter-circle of seats with a shuffle of boots on metal. They removed their datasticks from chair sockets and inserted them into wrist slots in a chorus of clicks, the devices ready to transfer objectives and other data to their crafts upon seating.

Everyone had zipped up in his thick aerosuit, a lightly armored, self-sufficient, combat/life-support unit. Miniature warbots, essentially, though Grince found the comparison quite a stretch. Officially designated “lightweight”, the sud who termed it thus was washing everybody or had never worn one for a hot minute.

The suits further differed from warbots by lacking onboard reactors. They remained unpowered until takeoff, the battery slots also doubling as main connectors to their crafts. Even if it had not been against protocol, no one wanted to waste battery power on a leisurely walk to their craft, it being well known those precious minutes or hours were better spent keeping one alive should he be forced to eject.

The aeromen had already worked up a mild sweat under the weight of their inert suits. Eagerness and nervousness became palpable feelings in the air. Every single fighting aeroman in the base had been assembled for this short but important briefing, their numbers packing the chamber to full capacity.

“This is an all-or-nothing scramble,” Waynard said to Grince as both men waited to file out from their row of seats.

Grince, annoyed, did not respond.

Waynard leaned over Grince’s shoulder, his raised visor protruding rudely. “This is highly unusual!” he half-yelled in false conspiracy.

“Nothing about this is unusual,” Grince griped, lightly pushing Waynard’s head away. Grince found space to step out and did so.

Waynard followed, bullying other aeroman out of the way to stay close. “Bitter?” he asked, smiling.

“No.”

“Yeah right. What is it this time?”

“Are you serious?” Grince said, turning to face Waynard, blocking the way, irritating other pilots who sought to shoulder past. “I’m missing out on another space run. Frag that! Why didn’t I get selected? I got the highest multi-vector combat scores in my academy year.”

“Keep moving!” someone yelled.

Waynard guided Grince forward. “Not to be Batua’s advocate or anything,” he said. “They’re also flying their Nighthawks. Your Rebel would be target practice outside atmosphere. Who would fly Rebellious?”

“Some shatlord who isn’t as good as me,” Grince said simply. “Like Aton. They transferred Aton to a Nighthawk. Aton!”

“Come on, Grince. You’ve never actually sortied to space. Aton and the rest all have prior experience.”

Grince rolled his eyes.

“But you’re different, of course.”

“Damn right,” Grince said before he caught Waynard’s mocking expression.

They made it through the door, joining the haphazard spill of pilots assembling outside. “Grince, master of the sky. Master of the cosmos.” Waynard jumped in front of Grince and blocked his advance. He raised his arms regally and bowed. “Master of the fragging galaxy.”

“Frag you,” Grince laughed despite himself, nudging Waynard aside. “I didn’t have ‘prior’ experience on my first atmospheric sortie either. I shot down two Fangs before—”

“Your flight recorder’s auxiliary battery shorted, melting the main power cable,” Waynard interrupted, imitating Grince with enthusiasm. He clenched his fists and steered them in the air as if flying a fighter through the adjunct chamber. “No wait; it was battle damage that magically crisped it without erasing previous data. You shot down another two Fangs, but the cameras of your jealous peers could only confirm one. Your squad mates turned the noses of their craft rather than risk glorifying you. The crecheless bastards.”

“It was three more!” Grince insisted, reaching over and slapping Waynard’s arms down. “And even if you don’t believe me, the second time I went up I got four kills, all recorded. Most pilots do nothing but fly circles with shat in their crags then get shot down on their first sortie. I’m the fragging shat, and that’s no brag.”

“True,” said Waynard. “When put in that light, it makes no sense not to send you on the space run.” He tilted his head and tapped his helmet’s jaw protector, thoughtful. “Unless…”

Grince momentarily resisted the urge to be baited. “Unless what?” He smiled.

“Unless Preyor thinks your head has grown into too dangerously large a target. In the void of space, I bet I could spot your flaming red crag from two million kays away.”

“You know what, I think you’re right,” Grince laughed.

“Lieutenant!” someone bellowed from across the room ahead of them. “Get your useless crag over here! Join your squadron!”

“Coming,” Grince said, waving at his squadron leader, Captain Som. He kept his attention on Waynard.

“Well in case we don’t meet after the mission…” Waynard said, smiling and offering his hand.

“I hope you freeze in hell long before I do,” Grince took Waynard’s hand and mirrored the smile.

Their traditional parting grip lasted a little longer than usual, a nerve in both men’s hands unwilling to let go.

Waynard and Grince had been split up, Waynard going over to Hyper Squadron to take a recently arrived replacement under his wing.

Grince hated it. Waynard had been a reliable partner. He could not help but assume Preyor had split them up just to be a cragwipe.

Waynard pulled Grince a little closer, his expression turning serious. “I have a bad feeling about this one, Grince. Survive. For real. None of your stupid reckless shat this time, okay?”

Grince nodded, awkward. Despite his bravado, the briefing had left a bad taste in his mouth as well, not just from disappointment at missing out on a space run. “I’ll be careful. You come back too.”

“Fortua’s blazing shat! I think they’re going to kiss!” one of Grince’s squad mates yelled.

“Get a damned move on, Lieutenant! We got to go! I want X-ray to be the first fighter squadron airborne,” Grince’s squadron leader shouted.

Waynard grinned and held more tightly. “Fight the good fight! Fortua’s favor! Beware the eternal foe—”

“Oh shut the frag up,” Grince grinned, kicking Waynard in the ankle and tearing his hand away.

Waynard winced, faked injury, and hopped on his foot. Grince joined his squadron and play-punched the mocking wingman in the shoulder.

“Let’s go,” Captain Som said, the only man not laughing, his dark-brown face a narrow and blank mask in the shade of his open visor. He strode down the hall.

Grince and the rest of X-ray followed. The horseplay continued.

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Grince and his squad mates from X-ray entered the mountain-hangar personnel lifter first. Two dozen other pilots and crewmen from squads Intra and Rain crammed in behind them, filling the lifter to capacity. The rest of the aeromen from the briefing waited below. Burdened by their unpowered aerosuits, none approached the stairs.

Halfway through the elevator ride, a tinny sound rattled the walls. Some kind of ringing barely rose above the wheeling screech of the lifter’s gears.

“What’s that noise?” someone asked.

“Sounds like the alert system,” Intra’s squad leader said apprehensively.

None disputed his assessment. The aeromen remained silent as the lift rumbled and climbed.

Finally, it docked with a clank to a maintenance room on the third floor. The doors opened with a gasp of pressure.

The keening wail of the base-wide alarm spilled into the cramped elevator.

The pilots drifted out, their eyes wide in surprise. They looked to one another, seeking answers unforthcoming.

“What’s going on?” an aerotech, head emerging from within a partially dismantled bomber engine dozens of meters away, shouted the question they all wondered.

“Grace of Fortua! Look!” a panicked shout. “We’re under attack!”

Captain Som, Grince’s squadron leader, moved to the speaker, his men following. They joined a tech standing before a down-angled viewport cut through the mountainside.

Grince could not believe his eyes. Cabal warbots rampaged deep inside the base, their weapons flashing in the rain.

Lasers and sliver shards spat from the column of walkers like a train of sprinkler heads. They destroyed parked support vehicles, buildings, mobile cranes, and stockpiled supplies. Fires roared high behind them, marking their progress from a tank-sized hole through a section of wall right where it neared the valley’s lake. Rain-swept smoke clouds rose from the path of ruin, their roiling banks illuminated by fire, lightning, and muzzle flashes. Embers fought to rise amidst the heavy downpour, climbing towards a sky that rumbled with thunder.

In the few seconds they watched, stunned, they witnessed the murder of dozens of Geoforce technicals and more than a few dismounted combat jocks. The men in the distance ran in terror, many helplessly blasted down or trampled by machines five times their height.

The invaders met zero resistance. Even the permanently manned gun emplacements sat silent. Grince looked and found one: a decapitated gun tower spewing smoke and flame. Somehow, the Cabal had got inside without alerting any sentries. The base-wide alarm should have triggered long before such a thing could happen.

More aeromen joined them at the view port. “They’re breaking through to the lower level!” one exclaimed.

Grince’s eyes dropped down and his shock grew. By “lower level,” the man meant the first floor of the hangar the Rebels had cut directly out of the mountainside.

“They’re making for the freight lift!” said Captain Som. “Someone contact engineering! They need to cut power to the freight system! The Cabs could run amok in here they reach that lift!”

“Too late!” a tech at a relay terminal at the far corner of the maintenance room yelled. Shouts and gunfire came through his terminal’s speakers. “Engineering’s lost control of the lift systems! The Cabs have taken level one! The freight shaft is bringing a group of them to level two!”

Someone pulled at Grince’s elbow.

“Move!” Som shouted into his ear.

Grince’s mind remained blank. He automatically walked with captain. Soon, he felt grateful to follow someone moving with purpose. Som grabbed and shook another man. The captain’s urgent energy eventually broke them from their stupefied paralysis.

“Move! Move! To your craft! Double time!” The sensation spread to the other two squadron leaders who likewise mobilized their squadrons.

“Someone call Aerosig and give them a status report!” a tech yelled.

“I’m doing it! I’m doing it!” the man at the terminal screeched, his shaking hands fumbling and dropping a headset and its flailing plugs.

“To the armory!” a chief aerotech appeared and shouted, running in the opposite direction of the scrambling pilots. He gestured at mechanics and other specialists, waving them onwards. “Grab guns and helmets, then head for the hangars!” He moved to follow his own order.

Techs, most of whom looked bewildered, lagged behind him. Dropped implements clattered and machine parts went skipping over the floor. A wheeled toolbox toppled, bolts and other contents spilling wide and sliding dangerously underfoot. Men ran all directions, but a kind of order materialized. The sound of boots pounding hard on concrete added a beat to the background wail of the base alert.

Grince ran through the chaos with X-ray, Intra and Rain squadrons following behind. Frantic activity and shouting voices packed the dimly lit, stony rooms and hallways of the subterranean mountainside hangar.

Grince’s group squeezed into a tighter connecting corridor. Aerotechs from a different room, freshly armed with rifles, pressed their backs into the walls to give right-of-way to the mass of aerosuit-bedecked pilots, letting them pass before hurrying on to their own destination.

A thought occurred to Grince. He wondered if he had the courage to enter a room with a live Cabalite inside. The idea seemed insane; a human, small, unarmed, defenseless, trapped in a tight space with a raging multi-ton war machine hell-bent on the destruction of his kind.

His mind screamed at him to stop this foolishness and turn around. The aero craft are gone, there is no helping it, reason cried.

He looked at the faces of the pilots he ran beside. Terror inhabited every expression to some degree, even Som’s, yet forward they ran.

Grince fought to hide his fear. He hoped he did not look as crazed as those around him.

“If those Cabs even scratch my precious Torrent, I’ll tear their damn crags off,” one pilot declared over the pounding footfalls.

Chuckles followed the comment. Forced, nervous laughter, but Grince appreciated the distraction. “At least we’re not those techs,” Grince added. “‘Grab helmets and guns.’ Yeah! Great idea, chief!”

More snickers, a little more genuine this time. “Poor bastards!” a man from Rain shouted from the rear of the jogging mob.

Grince thought about Pence and immediately regretted his poke. He touched his flight suit’s breast pocket and felt the hard edge of the shining heart Pence had gifted him. He shook his head and tried not to dwell on it.

His mind returned to the idea of Cabalites infiltrating the hangars. An insane burst of anxiety prompted him to count his steps.

One-two-three-four-five-six-seven… the number increased rapidly as he stared at the floor flying beneath him.

The counting worked well as a distraction until a little whisper invaded his brain. It told him he counted down the steps to his death. He grimaced, ceased counting, and looked up.

They entered Hangar 1. Three mighty Tempest aeromarine bombers dominated the bays. Grince suddenly wished he had been trained instead as a gunner or bombardier so he could board these bombers and escape the doomed hangars that much sooner. The Grince of ten minutes ago would have sooner died than give up flying fighters. He shamefully suppressed a laugh.

The Tempest crews from Rain squadron split from the group and leapt onto ladders, scrambling up into the large craft. Heavy hangar doors cracked open with a screaming hiss of hydraulic pressure. Industrial-cautionary klaxons sounded, and warning lights submerged the hangar in rotating yellow flashes. Thunder from the storm blasted through the widening gap in the bay doors, and the smell of rain-soaked stone blew over them.

“Lucky crags,” one of the men from Grince’s squad breathed, obviously sharing his thinking.

“Shut up,” Som said conversationally. “Keep moving. Keep your eyes open for alternate routes. We might need to backtrack if we see trouble. Now, double time!”

Grince nodded, following. Alternate routes. Double your double time. Good ideas. But they already knew the layout of the base. There were no real alternate routes. Still, when Som said it out loud, he made it sound like they had options, like everything would be OK.

They entered another corridor. Two groups of armed aerotechs running opposite directions stumbled into each other. They pushed apart and argued, every man’s voice rising above his neighbor’s. An alert interrupted their shouting match, the techs’ wrist databands beeping simultaneously with the pilots’ helmet casters.

Hallway speakers also blared to life, interrupting the alarm: “Scramble alert. All men to battle stations, the base is under attack. Aero hangars infiltrated. Enemy strength undetermined. Orders from ground control:” a new voice took over, Colonel Guydamont’s: “Pilots scramble! Make haste to your placements. Avoid contact where possible, but launch by any and all means. Mission paramount! Fortua’s favor.” The voice reverted to the original speaker. “Scramble alert…”

“You don’t say!” A man from Intra said. The aeromen smiled, too winded now to properly laugh.

The useless message repeated, but at least the alert had interrupted the arguing techs who now cleared the clotted hall.

The pilots entered Hangar 2. 6 Pegasus precision aero bombers rested in catapult launchers, readied by quick-working aerotechs. The hangar doors already stood open, storm wind pushing in waves of torrential rain that drenched the lip of the cliffside bay.

Grince gulped down the air, its coolness feeling good in his lungs. The Pegasus pilots from Intra squadron parted and ran to their bombers and Grince’s squadron of six continued on.

They passed yet another huddle of armed aerotechs forming a makeshift barricade. Liquid canisters and munition boxes had been stacked with construction materials and every other sturdy item conceivably found within a military installation, all facing the cavernous freight conveyor halls deeper in the complex. Some men continued to add to the improvised defense while others took positions behind it.

Anti-armor rifles rattled in anxious hands. More techs ran in from other doorways on either side of the hangar. Some carried their guns with practiced ease. Many fumbled with the weapons.

“Disengage that safety, apprentice! You can’t shoot until you rack the slide!” a journeyman aerotech snapped at a young man next to him.

The man in question pulled uselessly at his gun with fear-frozen rat-claws. An ill-fitting helmet fell from his head and smacked the tarmac.

The journeyman picked up the helmet and slammed it back on the apprentice’s head. “Strap that thing on! Did you get any spare clips? Blazing shat, apprentice! Run back and grab some! You think this is a game?”

“I-I’m d-doing my best, d–damn it!” The young man turned ran back towards the armory, dragging his gun by its muzzle and holding onto the top of his helmet.

“Senior Daschle! Sitrep on the blast doors! Why won’t they close?” A master aerotech shouted.

“Jammed,” the senior answered. “Unresponsive. The Cabs must be doing it. I’m attempting to wire in a physical workaround, but we need engineering or system ops on this.”

“System infiltration? Never mind! Forget the blast doors! Do a manual override on the hangar doors! Keep those open! The Cabs might close them and prevent the launches!”

“But… what about us?” the senior asked, turning, his eyes wide, one white-knuckled hand clutching a clump of severed wires.

X-ray did not remain long enough to hear the master aerotech’s response. Their run took them to the next corridor.

The pilots breathed hard, their unpowered suits taking a toll on their fitness. A dull ache grew in Grince’s chest. His stomach felt sick and empty while his intestines clenched tight. Sympathy for the techs started to gnaw at him with teeth sharper than his individual fear. Grince started to think the techs looked like copies of Pence.

Grince was no stranger to combat. Yet the ragged and vulnerable determination he saw in every man struck him on an unusually personal level. He felt like weeping at the beautiful insanity of it all.

I’m really losing it, he thought.

Sweat streamed inside his thick aerosuit and tickled his skin. The pilots started to pay the price for running so much in full aerogear. Grince thought to recommend they insert their batteries to make the running easier, but he bit the comment back. The slots in the back were difficult and time consuming to reach and he did not want to start a chain of complaints about tiredness. They would just have to fumble them right back out when they got to their craft, and time ran short.

“Two more hangars to go,” Som breathed, seeming to read Grince’s mind. “Keep it up.”

Another pointless feel-good remark, but Grince repeated it silently. Two more hangars. He bent his head to suck in air faster, but his helmet shifted against his collar and the jaw protector slid up over his mouth. It felt like suffocation. He leaned his head back instead. Dim corridor lights flew overhead. Muffled, echoing explosions shivering the complex. Dust and pebbles rained from cracks in the ceiling, attacking Grince’s eyes and forcing his head back down.

Two more hangars. They could do this. Run hard, and we can get to our fighters without ever seeing a Cab up close.

Grince wondered why this hallway seemed so empty when the others had been packed with running techs.

They heard weapons fire ahead. Sharp and distinct, gunfire reverberated hollowly up the corridors, not muffled like the thumps coming from the valley.

“Shat! Shat, shat, shat,” a pilot next to Grince panicked and slowed.

“Can it!” Som said without breaking stride. “Keep moving!”

They saw no fighting yet, but red and yellow muzzle flashes reflected off the distant mouth of the corridor ahead.

“I can’t do it!” the man declared, halting. “I’m an aeroman! Not a ground pounder! I’m not trained for this stupid shat!”

Grince slowed, his will faltering as well. He looked towards Som, but the captain did not look back.

Come back and deal with this! Grince gestured at the captain, pleading silently to the shrinking figure of his forward-charging squadron leader.

Grince looked towards the balking squad mate. He understood why Som had not stopped. Pure, unrestricted, eye-bulging horror consumed the aeroman’s face. The man’s heart looked ready to burst from his hyperventilating mouth.

The man’s fear infected Grince, contagious, threatened to shatter his resolve as well. Grince burned with shame to discover the delicacy of his personal courage.

Give me a fighter and surround me with a hundred Cabs and I’d be fine!

He knew that to be bravery of some kind.

But run naked into a firefight?

He unconsciously touched the Shining Heart through the fabric of his breast pocket, and an impulse struck him. “Just do it, man! Come on!”

The man leaned forward as if to comply, but his toes seemed nailed to the floor. “I can’t!”

“Look, you’re just as likely to face a Cab if you run back the way we came,” Grince found the logic helped spur him back into action.

The man stared, uncomprehending.

Grince ran on without him. Soon enough, he heard footfalls catching up behind him, the pilot coming to his senses. Or perhaps he feared being left alone. Grince refused to look in the man’s direction to find out, hastening, wanting to outpace him and his fear-disease. Grince tried to banish the expression he had seen from his mind. He never wanted to witness that again.

They approached the embattled hangar. Som had stopped. Grince made to run past him.

Som reached out and snagged a tuft of Grince’s aerosuit, pulling back hard. “Stop!”

Grince stumbled, fell onto his rear, then scooted back in surprise.

A 15-ton Rebel Infiltrator warbot, its arms spread wide, came flying from the rainy darkness through the open hangar door. It landed hard with a single, shattering clang, absorbing the end of a mighty leap with flexing knees, its feet punching imprints into the tarmac. Residual rainwater from the storm outside sloshed off its wiry limbs in glittering sheets. It might have crushed Grince if Som had not grabbed him.

The Infiltrator stalked past them, weapon rising to its shoulder. It advanced deeper into the hangar in a rapid side-stepping crouch, following another Infiltrator running ahead of it.

Seconds later, a third Infiltrator flew in from the darkness beyond the open bay doors, whooshing through rain. This one landed less ceremonially. One leg contacted the ground before the other. It skipped and flailed its arms for several meters, struggling for balance, then fell and slid on its back like a man tossed onto ice, its laser gun flying from its grasp. Sparks flew as its back scraped the tarmac, steaming the rainwater spilling from its metal hide. It left a trailing divot in the tarmac beneath its course, the grinding screech drowning out all other sound. It nearly collided with a parked Nighthawk aerospace fighter awaiting pilots before its momentum bled away.

“What’s going on? How many more are coming?” Som shouted his loudest at the prone Infiltrator. Som’s voice sounded underwater, Grince’s ears still ringing from the screeching crash.

The walker pushed itself away from the Nighthawk, dragging its feet from under the aerospace fighter’s landing gear, using exaggerated care not to bump anything. It stood and then bent to recover its three-meter-long laser weapon from beneath the fighter’s sleek, compartmental body.

“How many more?” Som yelled again, one hand cupped to his mouth and the other pointing towards the hangar door.

The Infiltrator’s blocky, cyclopean head turned at the shout. It backed away from the Nighthawk and approached the pilots. The thumps of its 15-ton footsteps pulsed through Grince’s bones. Rainwater still dripped from its limbs.

“Three more, for now,” the bot jock said, speakers mounted on the undersides of its head blaring loud over the cacophony of gunfire and the base alarm. The jock turned his machine’s gaze over its shoulder, distracted as another Infiltrator expertly landed on the lip of the bay, hitting the ground at a full run that shook the floor. Its shoulders shed two neat streams of rainwater like a trailing cape. It crouched into a slinking run and disappeared deeper into the complex.

“Give us a sitrep!” Som demanded.

The jock looked back at them, and his machine nodded its head. “Captain. Yes sir. We’ve already regained control of the hangar floor entrance. But the Cabs made a stand in the freight artery. They’re giving us hell there and have level access locked down tight. We’re trying to envelop them from up here. You’d better hurry ‘cause their objectives are clearly the aero craft on the hangar floors.”

“No shat?” a pilot said.

“Shut up,” Som snapped. He gestured towards the jock, face serious. “Fine grasp, private. Please continue,” he said, noting the barely discernible single green chevrons painted on the Infiltrator’s camouflaged shoulders.

Yet another storm-drenched Infiltrator arrived, landing unsteadily, but keeping to its feet after a few quick corrective steps.

“This hangar was the first to open up,” the private resumed when the arrival passed them. “And it’s the easiest entrance for us to jump to. It’s about forty meters from a crane. Ground control thinks the Cabs might try climbing the repair wells to get from level two to this floor, but we don’t have the numbers to worry about that yet. My squad’s objective is the freight lifter. They’re flooding up through it as we speak, so I gotta go. Clear this area!”

The jock backed away from them and emphasized his suggestion with two sweeps of his warbot’s arm. He then strode towards the unseen fight they heard raging deeper in the mountain complex.

“How can we be sure there’s not more coming through?” one of the pilots asked.

“We could run right behind the next one, wherever it lands,” Grince said. “If the ground pounders are careful enough to time it so they don’t smash into each other, we can take advantage of that.”

“We’ll make a run for the other side after the next one lands,” Som ordered, apparently agreeing. “Cut in right behind it. Make it fast.” The captain lowered into a sprinter’s ready stance. The men of X-ray copied him.

They heard a whoosh, another multi-ton war machine’s massive form sweeping through curtains of rain as it leapt. This one was much larger than the Infiltrators, a 45-ton Super Seal, muscular, broad-shouldered, and long legged, leaping like a toad.

“Go!” Som said, charging. X-ray followed close at his heels.

The Super Seal came in at a bad angle, its shoulder clipping the edge of a hangar door. The collision sent it spinning and it smashed into the wall opposite from them with a crush of falling rock, quaking the room. Overhead lights rattled and flickered. It slid along on its back for a moment before the jock planted his warbot’s feet and masterfully redirected his crash-speed momentum back up into the Super Seal’s torso, bringing the machine upright and leaning straight into a run between two Nighthawks like a sportsman dodging defenders.

Grince’s squad sprinted right behind the powerful war machine as it engaged in the half-clumsy, half-majestic maneuver. Sparks in the warbot’s wake bounced over their flame-retardant suits.

“You dirt eaters are fragging nuts!” one of the pilots yelled at the back of the Super Seal.

“Can’t think of a greater compliment!” the Super Seal’s jock shouted over his frame’s shoulder. “Good luck, void-suckers!” He ran his frame away toward the unseen firefight.

Grince glanced longingly at the parked Nighthawks, wishing the man’s friendly insult had been applied correctly. He would be flying in air, not space - if he survived, that was.

The pilots crossed the hangar and entered the final corridor between them and their craft, every man winded now. They heard new hard landings behind them as more Rebel machines attempted the daring jump into the hangar.

“Dumb as they are,” a pilot said affectionately, “Fortua favor the Geoforce.”

“We’re the Aeroforce. It is we who hold the Geoforce in our angelic hands,” Som corrected.

“I didn’t know the captain had a sense of humor,” Grince smirked.

“He doesn’t. He’s serious. Look at him,” another pilot said.

Som harrumphed. The squadron laughed.

A gray-painted weapon arm snaked into view at the end of the hall.

Som’s eyes widened, the exposed whites lighting up his dark face. “Get down!” he cried out.

A sliver shard sped by them faster than the speed of thought, the heat of its passing blowing over their faces. It exploded behind them. The lights in the corridor flickered on and off or shattered. The world shook.

A sonic boom pounded hard against Grince’s eardrums. Men yelled unheard words. The intruding arm fired again before Grince had completed registering the first shot.

Another explosion harmonized with an agonized scream. Something hard and floppy smacked into the back of Grince’s head. He fell forward on his hands and then rolled onto his back. The object that had hit him lay at his heels: a severed arm.

“Shat!” he tried to say, unable to hear or feel himself talking. Flames filled the corridor. He scuttled backwards on his hands and feet, away from the bleeding appendage. His shoulder bumped into a stack of metal boxes. He adjusted his course and pushed himself behind them, wondering if they were any kind of protection against a warbot’s sliver gun.

A pilot across from Grince took cover as well. His mouth kept moving, repeating a word over and over, but Grince could not hear it. Grince looked left and right, seeking Som, hoping for an order or an encouraging word.

A wall of smoke billowed, then dissipated, revealing the captain. Som sat motionless against the wall, his expression loose and pathetic. He appeared intact, but blood leaked out of the lip of his left gauntlet. Dark liquid pooled around Som’s limp fingers, a red circle expanding a little too rapidly.

The seeking, gray-painted weapon arm at the end of the tunnel angled left and right, then fired again.

Grince knew darkness.

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