Chapter 15:
Talon flew swiftly. Anger raged in his heart. He was no longer just angry with his enemies, but at the fact that he was being separated from a woman he loved.
He might never see her again despite his promise and hers. It was just a fact of battle.
His parents had died too soon, and without ever being able to tell each other they loved each other one more time. He had not had nearly enough time with Jessica, and he wanted that time with her.
The small craft was much faster than the cumbersome and large ships currently firing their weapons at Old Earth. He said, “Let’s see how you like this.”
He dropped a neutron-radia-spore bomb directly onto the upper decks of a rust bucket of a ship and then banked hard right, one hand already toggling the control so that he could stay in touch with the others and let them know to get as far away from that ship as possible.
The ships flew by him; Caleb and the others soared higher and then spread apart, away from the explosion that rocked the ship and then sent the debris hurtling downward. It never made the surface because it disintegrated, its larger pieces breaking up and the smaller ones vanishing completely.
A federation fighter craft came up behind him. A dogfight ensued. Whoever the pilot was, he was determined to kill Talon and protect the enemy ships.
But why? Why would Federation soldiers betray their very oath?
He understood that the Federation was in collusion with the Gorlites, and had always been, but surely the Federation soldiers could see that that race was currently killing Federation-held people.
Talon spun the ship in a lightning-fast loop that put him behind the Federation fighter craft. His fingers found the controls, and he sent a blast of laser light at the ship, but its pilot was equally skilled and fast, and the craft escaped unscathed.
Talon swore a few times and then hit the throttle. He increased the speed, leading the Federation ship toward a small spinning asteroid belt. He knew it was risky. One wrong move, a single dip of the wing, and he was dead.
He made it past the first flying asteroids. His hands took the ship down, flying at a severe angle that made his stomach clench and roll. His feet slid sideways, and if it hadn’t been for the tightness of the control command space, he probably would have been knocked away from those controls.
The craft behind him either didn’t register the small asteroid that had broken away from the larger chunk or didn’t have time to avoid it. Either way, the result was the same. The Federation craft took a severe hit and then exploded into a ball of flame.
Talon zoomed to one side and let the draft of the explosion take him higher. His eyes darted across the battleground of the skies. He could see that one of his crew was in trouble, running from a harrier that was doing its best to lock its weapon sights onto his craft.
Talon spared in behind the enemy ship and fired, one cold and calculated blast later, and his crewmember was free of the threat.
But Talon was now engaged in a fight between himself and a larger ship, one that was far more heavily armed than he was. He had to use all of his skills to dodge the blasts; hoping to evade them again, he slid around the fuel stream of a Gorlite ship and as he had hoped, the blast caught that stream and ignited it, causing the Gorlite ship to catch fire.
That might not be enough to cripple or destroy that ship but at least if the creatures on it were too busy trying to save their ship and lives, they might be too busy to keep firing on him and his small number of crew in their aircraft.
Talon took the craft lower. The others were harassing the other ships, trying to line up long enough to drop more bombs on them. Talon knew the odds of them taking out more than a half dozen of those ships were low, but even a half a dozen would certainly skew the odds more in their favor, particularly if Jessica and the others were able to raise an army on the ground in the meantime.
Jessica.
She was his match in every single way. When this was all over, and he hoped that eventually one day there would be a space and time where they could be at peace with themselves and with each other and with the universe, he was going to tell her everything about her that he loved.
The fighting continued. He took his craft up beside the one flown by Caleb. He checked his weapon supply and saw with a sinking heart that while the craft were armed for warfare, they were lightly armed. He only had one more bomb and enough munitions to, if he was lucky, take out one more ship and some of the smaller Federation craft.
He kept dodging fire, but there were only so many times he would be able to do that, and he was smart enough to know it. It did no good at all to keep flying if he had no weapons left. He would be better off doing what damage that he could and then get back to the ground, and Jessica.
Caleb dropped a bomb on top of a large craft, and they both quickly darted out of the path of the explosion and found themselves engaged in another dogfight. Talon managed to take the ship down and out of the path of impending death just as he was being pursued from the back by one Federation craft and approaching a small Gorlite-laden ship.
Those two ships collided in mid-air. That collision destroyed the Federation craft, but the other limped along up until a well-aimed blast by Harlon took out its engines and sent it plummeting toward the surface.
Talon could barely keep up with the number of ships now headed toward the planet. He had been right to set his craft down; they would’ve all died aboard. Now he was facing a choice of going back down and attempting to get more weapons onto the ship that he was currently piloting or finding a new ship that was already loaded with weapons.
He was not the only one facing that choice either. Harlon had already dropped one bomb, as did Caleb and several of the others. Those bombs were effective, wrecking ships so neatly that there was absolutely no way that anything aboard them could survive, but for every ship they took out, there seemed to be two more shucking off their cloaking devices.
Sweat flicked his body, and the thrill of battle deserted him. Once upon a time, he had lived for this, but now he just felt weary and disgusted. There was so much death all around him.
He dropped the last bomb and then took out a medium-sized Federation cruiser that clearly had no weapons but which tried to block his way so that an incoming Federation fighter craft could fire upon him.
Talon toggled the com-buttons. “Can you hear me?”
