Birdie Down Read online

15

  ‘Switch to chemicals,’ Abel ordered. ‘Quickly!’

  The helmsman appeared to flicker as he leaned across his console to enter the ignition code.

  ‘And someone kill those damned lights!’

  ‘Done, sir. Chemicals engaged.’

  ‘Are the flux-drives offline?’ Abel asked.

  ‘Yes, sir. Offline.’

  The alarm and flashing lights died away, leaving the command cabin bathed in a red low-light, the tannoy system crackling softly in the background, tuned into Cummings assault frequency. As yet, they had picked up nothing.

  Petroff stepped forward from the back of the cabin to stand alongside his frigate’s commander.

  ‘What caused it?’ he asked.

  ‘Haven’t a clue. We’ll check later.’ Abel replied. He took a quick look at some data on his screen, and then walked over to the StarGazer operator.

  ‘So we’re relying on Cummings, then?’ Petroff tried confirming.

  Abel continued speaking to his SG. He pointed at the cabin’s forward screen. Across the room, his 2-I-C engaged anxiously with the Chief Engineer, huddling over a schematic of the flux-drive. A sudden loss of faster-than-light capabilities was almost unheard of in a ship of this class, and the complexity of a flux-drive design made a failure hard to fix at battle stations. Fortunately the failure had occurred over Constitution, not tens of light years away. But that was the only good news.

  Abel returned to his command couch and sat down.

  ‘Yes. For now. It’ll take at least an hour by chemicals alone.’ And that was pushing it. They weren’t designed to push the ship through so much space: just to move it back and forth between jump sites. He turned away, feeling uneasy. He had sent men into harm’s way, and was not there to back them up. ‘Helm, are we ready?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Ready.’

  Abel strapped himself back into his seat. Petroff took the hint and scurried back to his.

  ‘Take us in. Full speed. Direct approach.’

  ‘Aye, sir. Direct approach. Full speed.’

  A pre-recorded acceleration warning sounded throughout the ship.

  ‘They’ll be capable of jumping again before we get there,’ Petroff observed, raising his voice but sounding less disappointed than Abel expected him to be. Abel was expecting a rant. Maybe a tantrum. Instead Petroff was calm.

  ‘Unless Cummings can stop them,’ Abel replied.

  ‘And there’s no way we can see what’s going on?’

  There was a sudden and violent burst of acceleration. Petroff gripped the arm rests as Abel replied.

  ‘That’s what I was just checking on. We can: the SG’s just patched into a different set of cameras on the platform. But she can’t see what’s going on at the rear of the V4. Its tail end is pointing away.’

  Petroff looked up at the forward screen as it flickered to life. The SG adjusted the focus and closed in on the ship. There it was, just as Abel had said. The V4 was hanging in space not far from the platform, its nose pointing towards the camera. The rebels had slipped in underneath the platform, though he could not understand why. Even if Constitution’s ground-based sensors could not differentiate between the V4 and the platform, the V4 would interrupt the platform’s signals and give the game away.

  ‘And we can’t throw the light-tug out? We’re close enough, aren’t we?’ Petroff asked.

  ‘Not with the platform in the way, Jack.’

  Petroff then saw the logic in dropping in below the platform. But it still only made sense if Scatkiewicz had known the Venture Raider was on this side of it. And there was no way he could have known that before dropping into local space—could he?

  The low crackle over the cabin’s tannoy suddenly changed into a series of frantic verbal commands. It was Cummings, issuing orders.

  Petroff leaned back in his seat.

  ‘Well, at least we get to stop the ground attack.’

  16

  Constitution

  The rebel shuttle trailed the prisoner convoy as it made its descent towards Welwyn’s spaceport. The lead shuttle was taking the direct route, and everyone else was staying in line. The descent was a steep one. Goosen felt the shuttle vibrate as it decelerated through an increasingly dense atmosphere. The sparkling lights of re-entry had fallen away minutes ago.

  ‘Er, Birdie?’ Bing said.

  ‘Yes, Pug,’ Goosen replied without looking over at him. Pug was not a perfect nick name, but it was good enough.

  ‘There are nine of us now.’

  Goosen did not say anything, but the urge to look behind him was strong. He looked down at the proximity display. There had been nothing there as they entered the atmosphere. Now there were two extra bleeps, each of them transmitting their regulation Lynthax recognition codes.

  ‘And they’re closing. Fast,’ Bing added.

  ‘We stay in line,’ Goosen replied eventually, fighting the urge to make a break for it. ‘They’ll not know which of us isn’t kosher.’

  ‘Unless they make the assumption that we wouldn’t be leading the charge,’ Bing replied. ‘I know I should have traded places with Smithy.’

  ‘How’s that?’ Goosen asked.

  ‘Well, if I was piloting one of them,’ Bing replied, pointing ahead of them, ‘and I knew the lead shuttle was a rebel, I’d lead the others in a different direction. I’d isolate you. Make you the stand out.’

  ‘Oh, yeah?’ Goosen said, feeling a little jittery. ‘But if I was in the middle?’

  Bing was not sure. He watched one of the Roland Assault Vehicles pass them by and go to the head of the convoy.

  ‘I dunno. In any case, how do we know for sure these beggars don’t have a plan to settle down somewhere else, not Welwyn? If they do that we’ll still have to break away. Then we’re definitely on our own.’

  ‘Stop trying to scare me, Bing. Just get the light-tug ready. We’ll be there in a—Ooh, crap!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They won’t need to pull away: they just need to know how to fly!’

  Bing looked at him waiting for an explanation.

  Goosen pointed to the front.

  ‘They’re barrel rolling.’

  Bing looked along the convoy. One by one the shuttles were flipping over and coming back to the upright.

  ‘So?’ he asked. ‘You can fly like that, can’t you? Tell me you can.’

  Goosen froze. He could only guess as to how it was done.

  ‘Ah, come on! Tell me you can!’ But Bing already knew Goosen couldn’t. Goosen’s body language said it all. ‘Oh, jeeze.’

  The RAV dropped back along the line to fly very close alongside of them. The pilot waved a hand, inviting them to roll.

  Goosen waved back, pointed to his joystick and threw both hands in the air.

  Eventually the RAV dropped behind them. Bing strained against his seat belt to watch it disappear over Goosen’s shoulder. He then pushed his face against his side of the cockpit window and looked backwards. A second assault vehicle hung a little way back, somewhat lower.

  ‘Very convincing, Birdie. Really—’

  There was a loud bang from the rear. The shuttle rocked and shuddered. Instinctively they both looked behind them, but the cabin’s door was closed.

  They then looked back at each other, eyes wide open in shock.

  Another shudder. An ee-aw, ee-aw alarm. A red, triangular shaped warning appeared in mid-screen.

  Goosen looked up at the flight data projection.

  ‘Ah! We’re losing power.’

  He flicked the autopilot off.

  The shuttle yawed unexpectedly to port before Goosen could steady it. A line of light flickered past them to starboard, lighting up a menacing slate-grey sky. It clipped a prisoner shuttle out front. Engine parts flew off it. The shuttle flipped and spiralled downwards, its starboard engine spilling smoke and flame.

  ‘Oh, crap,’ Goosen said as he struggled to keep their own shuttle level. ‘They’re trying to take us down. Comms on, Bi
ng. Speak to the V4.’

  Bing threw a switch. The shuttle continued to rattle. It shuddered violently as an engine coughed. He stiffened in his seat, his eyes flickering across the cabin displays. They were quickly turning red. Their speed bled away dramatically.

  ‘There’s nothing, Birdie. It’s dead.’

  Another shudder. They had been hit again.

  Goosen recalled unwanted images of grounding a shuttle on the Gap Plain, just outside of Go Down City, Trevon, during an unofficial training session. It was the only terrestrial landing he had made and it was hardly a successful one.

  ‘OK. You may want to close your eyes for a bit. We’re going down.’

  He swung the joystick across to starboard and kept it there for a few seconds. Below them, the crippled prisoner shuttle came back into view ahead of a curling column of black smoke. It had stopped spinning and was levelling out, but it was very low to the ground and the angle of descent was still too steep for a safe landing. Goosen tried to follow it down, yawing back and forth, trying to confuse his unseen attacker. He passed through the plume of smoke, dropped the nose sharply, and pulled the shuttle to port.

  The great colourful canvas they had flown high over not minutes ago now became a fast approaching web of individual tracks, rivers and small clearings in what looked to be a thick but lightly-logged tropical forest. There was no sky. They were going in vertically. And fast.

  Goosen pulled back on the joystick and fired the forward control thrusters at maximum burn. The shudder intensified, only to ease as the thrusters burned out and the nose began to rise. The forest carpet moved slowly downwards and a line of light appeared from the top of the cabin.

  Trees swept past below them, not tens of metres away, blurring into streaks of green, browns and reds. Between squeals, Bing caught snapshots of the cabin interior, the sky, Goosen jiggling the joystick and pressing his feet down into the floor.

  As they clipped the dense tree canopy, the forest snapped and crackled like gun fire. Branches ripped at the rad-hardened glass cockpit and tore at the shuttle’s sides. In the shuttle’s wake, the faltering exhaust flayed at the forest, pushing clouds of leaves into the air like bats from a cave.

  Ploughing deeper into the canopy, they glanced off a thick tree trunk and flipped to port. Goosen lost the joystick. His head flew forward to bury his chin into his chest before whipping back into the seat. Bing lost the light-tug remote. It crashed against the cockpit glass. His arms and legs flailed about.

  Airbags exploded from the floor and the ceiling, the shuttle sides and from between the two seats. Bing screamed.

  They came to rest, nose down and wedged between two enormous branches. Above them, the rear engines continued to push smoke and flame back out through the canopy roof, burning leaves and scorching bark.

  There was a loud ripping sound. A branch peeled away.

  The shuttle jerked sideways and slipped through the lower half of the canopy. It slammed into the forest floor and rolled onto its back.

  The engine coughed and sent a stream of sparks into the the light brush, setting it alight. It burned through its cowling and then died.

  A ruptured tank emptied fuel down the shuttle’s sides and drained into an ancient forest floor.

  Inside the cargo hold, the light-tug moorings gave way and it crashed down onto the ceiling. More sparks flew from the smashed cargo hold lights.

  Smouldering insulation filled the passenger cabin with a thickening mist of toxic gas.

  Slowly, eventually, everything found a resting place, the turbo-fans clicked slowly to a stop, the shuttle’s metal airframe ceased its groaning and, aside for the crackling of burning leaves, the forest fell silent again.