Moving the wounded from the Destroyer and into the Cair was exhausting. By the time Yen collapsed behind the controls, sweat was beaded along his brow and his breathing was labored. Adam slipped through the cockpit doorway moments before Yen detached the boarding causeway and the Cair ship broke free of its moorings.
With his fingers moving adeptly across the ship’s controls, Yen turned the Cair so that they were facing the rest of the Alliance Fleet. Yen felt drained. The adrenaline that had kept his reflexes so keenly empowered was starting to wane. There were limits to how much a body could remain in a heightened state before the exhaustion of battle began to settle into its bones. Unfortunately, Yen knew, there was still far too much to be done before he could earn a good night’s rest.
Accelerating forward, Yen skimmed the hull of the Terran Destroyer. The once gleaming hull was scarred by missile strikes and rail gun slugs which had gored unflattering streaks along the armored plating. Slipping left and right, Yen avoided the protruding radar arrays and weapon ports that jutted from the otherwise sleek surface. At such a low altitude, the Terran warship would have difficulty pinpointing their position. Aside from any defending fighters, Yen could fly virtually invisible until it was time to break from his position and fly at high speed toward the Revolution.
On both sides of their speeding Cair ship, Yen and Adam were able to see other Cair transports still docked to the Destroyer. Over a dozen teams had attacked the Terran Destroyer en mass and many of those teams were still inside, fighting and dying to complete their mission. Yen frowned, feeling cowardly for flying away from the Terran ship while so many of his brethren were still fighting. Still, they had come to complete a mission and, as far as he knew, they were the only team to succeed. Guilty as he might feel, he had no reason to feel as though they did an inadequate job.
His worries about the other teams were interrupted as one of the Cair ships to the right side of the cockpit erupted in flames. Though soundless in the void of space, Yen flinched as the core of the ship collapsed in a ball of flame. The wings crumpled, tilting toward the hull of the Destroyer before breaking free and floating into space.
“We got fighters coming in fast,” Adam cried out.
Against the black backdrop of the starlit night, Terran fighters dove toward the Destroyer. They fired volleys of missiles as they approached, the trails leading unwaveringly toward the helpless Cair ships. Long plumes of smoke trailed behind the rockets as they covered the distance. Slamming into the Cair transports, the Alliance ships were consumed in flames one after another. Of all the ships that were destroyed in the fighters’ first pass, Yen only saw one try to break from its position and run. Unfortunately, it too was destroyed by a well placed rocket attack. For the rest of the ships, however, Yen knew that either the teams were obliterated onboard or they were now trapped within the Destroyer, greatly outnumbered and now hunted with no hope of escape.
“They’re targeting the Cairs,” Yen said, giving voice to the obvious atrocities of war.
“It’s their job,” Adam replied. “All the more reason for us to get the hell out of here.”
Yen nodded in agreement as he began entering commands into the console. Though the gravitational inhibitors worked effectively to lessen the force of the acceleration, Yen pushed the engine hard enough that he even felt the pressure on his chest as they broke free from the hull of the Destroyer and began flying toward the Revolution.
As they crested the nose of the Destroyer and once again entered open space, Yen heard Adam share his gasp of surprise. What had been a relatively empty void between the two lines of opposing ships when they had boarded the Destroyer was now filled with an embattled squadron of Terran fighters. Aside from the fighters designated to destroy the Cair ships, the squadron moved as one, circling in a tight turn and charging back toward the Destroyer. Squinting against the darkness, Yen could barely make out the faintest shimmer of metallic hull against the background of space. Typing onto the controls, the console monitor zoomed in on the glistening ship standing between the Terran fighters and the Destroyer. As details began to clarify on the screen, Yen groaned. He could clearly make out the markings of the Cair Ilmun.
One wing was twisted, mangled from gunfire. Large puncture holes were visible on the magnified display. From his angle, he could see the last hitched gasps of breathable oxygen venting from the holes. Though a low fire still burned in the Cair Ilmun’s engines, all around the ship was littered debris, contents jettisoned from the crew compartment. Though Yen watched for a few heartbeats, the Cair Ilmun didn’t move from its position. He wanted to believe that Keryn was okay, but he had no way to know if she was even still alive. The damage to the Cair Ilmun was extensive and it showed no sign of maneuvering out of the way, even when the Terran fighters fired a barrage of rockets in her direction. The smoke-trailing missiles streaked toward the Cair Ilmun, but it remained stoically defiant in their path.
“Move,” Yen whispered into the quiet cockpit. Adam flinched beside him at the sound. They both watched as the rockets grew closer, the onboard computers locking onto the small ship.
“Come on, Keryn,” Yen said a little sterner. “Get out of the way.”
The missiles broke from their tight formation, spreading out in order to strike the Cair Ilmun from converging angles. Yen’s heart ached at the thought that the woman he loved was only moments away from dying and he was helpless to stop it.
“Move, damn you!” Yen hissed.
At the last possible moment, the Cair Ilmun’s engines flared to life and it dropped into a steep dive. The missiles were unable to maneuver quickly enough. As the first few slammed into one another, they erupted into a growing blossom of superheated plasma. The ball of flames expanded as the heat consumed the other rockets until the entire dark space was lit up from the blast. Squinting against the sudden bright light, Yen searched the area for any sign of the Cair Ilmun. The explosion had been both massive and devastating. Even with Keryn flying quickly away, Yen found it hard to believe that she had avoided that blast completely unscathed.
“I don’t believe it,” Adam said breathlessly as he pointed to an unassuming stretch of empty space. Following his gaze, Yen saw it as well. A small glistening ship burst from the cooling cloud of plasma and flew not away from the Terrans, but right at them. “She’s suicidal!”
“No,” Yen corrected, “I’m pretty sure she’s homicidal. And she’s going to need our help.”
Accelerating quickly forward, Yen knew that it would be precious seconds before he joined the fray. Already, he could see the combined tracer rounds of more than a dozen fighters firing toward Keryn’s position. To his amazement, she deftly avoided their gunfire. Flames leapt from the front of her barrels as she returned fire, scoring nearly perfect shots straight through the cockpit of one of the charging fighters. There was no explosion marking the ship’s demise. Instead, the fighter tilted one wing and drifted away at an odd angle, the ship no longer manned by a living pilot.
As he flew forward, Yen marveled at the aerial acrobatics that Keryn showed. She shot through the midst of the Terran fighters, her gunfire clipping the wings of two of the ships as she rocketed past. Splitting, the fighters circled around on different paths trying to cut her off. The Cair Ilmun quickly eluded any potential trap they set, regardless of their angle of approach. To Yen’s wonderment, yet another fighter was destroyed as Keryn returned fire, pulling the Cair Ilmun into such a tight loop that Yen found it hard to believe that a maneuver like that was possible.
Yen could tell that the fighters were equally surprised, though they began to regroup quickly. Keryn had the advantage for a short while as the Terrans underestimated her abilities, but Yen doubted that would last much longer. Accelerating faster, Yen could hear Adam’s quick breathing as the excitement built within the cockpit.
Activating the radio system, Yen spoke into his throat microphone. “Keryn, we’re coming to help.”
“It’s appreciated,” her voice called back. Yen was taken aback by Keryn’s calm and collected tone, despite putting the Cair Ilmun into a tight pirouette in order to avoid another hail of gunfire. Something about her sounded different, almost as though she were taking pleasure in her near death experience.
“Are you okay?” Yen asked hesitantly.
“I’ve never been better,” was Keryn’s complete reply. Yen knew they didn’t have time for formalities, but something seemed greatly wrong with Keryn’s behavior. With all the damage to the Cair Ilmun, it was possible that she had lost a lot of breathable air and was suffering from dementia. Still, her lightning quick reflexes and inhuman maneuvers left Yen doubting that she was flying with a lack of oxygen.
“Keryn!” Adam interrupted. “You’ve got a fighter behind you!”
Yen noticed it too late to yell a warning. He cursed himself loudly in the cockpit for letting his concern for Keryn distract him from watching the fighters. Even with Adam’s warning, though, the Terran pilot was closing quickly on the tail of the Cair Ilmun. A missile launch would be moments away, Yen knew, and there would be little Keryn could do to avoid it at that range. Instead of weaving from side to side in order to lose her pursuer, Keryn cut the engine on the Cair Ilmun. Launching a rocket forward toward empty space, she used the recoil from the rocket launcher to drive her ship backward in the frictionless space. The Terran fighter dipped slightly as it realized what Keryn was doing, but its cockpit still scraped along the bottom of the Cair Ilmun. Sparks flew as the armor on both ships grazed one another until, finally, Keryn was behind the Terran. Igniting her engines, she fired her machine gun, tearing apart the hull of the fighter.
Entering combat, Yen’s worry deepened. Keryn was a youthful and inexperienced pilot, yet she was flying as though piloting through a dogfight was as natural as breathing. She had already made short work of three of the fighters and Yen had no doubt that she would quickly dispatch the rest. Still, what she was doing should have been impossible for even one of the most seasoned pilots onboard the Revolution. Something had happened, something Yen couldn’t just yet fathom.
Opening fire, Yen’s tracer rounds tore into the cockpit of a surprised Terran fighter. The remaining fighters immediately broke from their current formation and attempted to readjust to face two determined and deadly pilots. Pressing their advantage, however, Yen pulled up beside Keryn and gave chase to the unorganized Terrans. Though the radio remained silent, the two Cair ships began maneuvering around one another like professionals. As they engaged the Terran fighters, one would draw the enemy’s fire as the other moved into a flanking position. The fighters carried a heavier arsenal and outnumbered Yen and Keryn, but they seemed to stand little chance against the unstoppable team. Though his concern was not abated, Yen had to admit that he was very impressed with Keryn’s piloting skills.
Using a disabled fighter for cover, Keryn dropped toward the exposed underbelly of one of the remaining Terrans. Most had already broken ranks as the once organized dogfight degraded into a chaotic battle during which only the two Alliance ships seemed to understand the rules. The Terrans, by comparison, seemed always to be two steps behind the flanking and dodging Cair transports. The fighter that Keryn now attacked had been one such ship. As his remaining comrades broke to the left in order to avoid her and Yen’s latest assault, he had unfortunately turned right. Skimming past the debris that now filled the space around them, Keryn opened fire on the strong metal on the bottom of the fighter. Her rounds tore through the armored plating, piercing the bottom of the pilot’s chair and vaporizing the Terran within the cockpit. Another fighter drifted free, a victim of Yen and Keryn’s daunting attack.
Within minutes, the last of the fighters were destroyed. Yen checked his stores and realized that he was running low on both machine gun ammunition and the meager supply of rockets loaded on the Cair ships. Keryn, having started the battle before him, couldn’t be in much better shape. They had pulled off a miracle by defeating an entire squadron of Terran fighters with just the two Cair ships, but they had now reached a point where luck ended and common sense reasserted itself. Yen turned his ship back toward the Revolution, ready to return to the safety of the much larger Alliance Cruiser. It took him a few moments to realize that Keryn wasn’t following his lead. Checking his radar, he saw her still hovering in space, watching the Destroyer that they had both just left.
“Keryn, this is Yen,” he called over the radio. Only static answered his call. Yen frowned, the deep sense of wrongness seeping back into his mind. He activated his throat microphone again. “Keryn, this is Yen. Answer me.”
“They deserve to die,” she replied, her voice low and cool, but carrying a razor’s edge of anger. “All the other teams that went with us are now dead or captured. The Empire caused way too much damage for us to simply fly away.”
Yen’s brow furrowed. “We’re not just flying away. The Destroyer is disabled. I made sure of that before I left. Leave it to someone else to finish. Let one of the Cruisers do the dirty work.”
“And let someone else take the glory?” Keryn retorted sharply. “We did the hard work, Yen. I fought through the Terran fighters to get you there. You took the risks of losing your own life and that of your team just to follow through on something as mundane as destroying the engine of the Destroyer. I’m telling you that we can do so much more. We can not only disable the warship, we can decimate it.”
Anger burned in Yen’s chest. The sacrifice and danger that he and his team had gone through was hardly mundane. They had done what no other team had accomplished in over a century. He had struck a decisive blow against an arrogant enemy. Who was she to downplay his accomplishment?
“I don’t know what’s going on with you,” Yen barked back, “but I’m ordering you to turn the Cair Ilmun around and return to the Revolution!”
“’When we’re in combat, I am the Captain of the ship. I answer to no one else.’ Sound familiar, Yen?” Keryn growled. “And you sure as hell can’t tell me what to… cut hard right!”
The tactical command thrown in at the end of her sentence confused Yen and his hesitation almost resulted in the death of him and his team. Tilting the wings of his Cair hard to the right, a heavy metal slug nearly half the length of his ship went flying by. Painted dark colors, it virtually vanished into empty space as soon as it had gone a few hundred feet beyond him. On the console, the radar was blinking wildly. The Destroyer, though unable to fly, still had a full complement of weapons. Dozens of rail gun slugs were filling the space behind Yen.
“We need to get out of here, now!” Adam yelled as another slug narrowly missed their ship.
“Keryn, get out of there,” Yen called into the radio. On the radar, however, Yen saw the blue dot signifying the Cair Ilmun growing further away rather than closer. Instead of retreating with him, Keryn was actually charging the Destroyer.
“What are you doing?” he yelled into his microphone.
“No one fires at me,” Keryn hissed. “I’m going to make sure they never do it again!”