Evan Currie - Heirs of Empire

“Bren? We can’t leave him there!” Lydia objected.

Brennan’s grip tightened around the twin sticks, knuckles whitening as he stared unblinking.

An explosion rocked the door, throwing Kayle out and back. The armored Cadreman hit the roof in a skid that brought him halfway back to the skimmer. Brennan threw off his restraints and popped the canopy, but before he could get out Kayle turned over and waved violently at him.

“Get out of here!”

As men came pouring out of the door, Kayle flipped back over to his feet, charging them with his armor glittering brightly from internal light. Brennan winced as carbine blasts shook his brother’s form, barely slowing his charge.

At the last moment before Kayle reached the armsmen, blades of hard light erupted from every facet of his armor and he dove into them. The blood spray was nightmarish as the fight turned to extremely close combat, brutal in ways that ranged fighting never could be. Men fell to the roof, sometimes minus limbs, losing life’s blood with alarming speed.

In the middle of it all, Kayle seemed untouched by any of it. His armor gleamed, clean and pure as the sun. Blood couldn’t stick to hard light projections, and any damage he’d taken had already been repaired … on the outside at least. He spun, tearing a man’s throat out with a bladed elbow, then snapped a kick into another.

A carbine blast from behind the men took Kayle in the shoulder, driving him back a step, then another holed through his armor and lower abdomen. The moment of lessening pressure was enough, and the armsmen regrouped.

The flurry of blasts drove Kayle back to the ground, and men poured out of the palace onto the roof, one of them pausing to put a single round from his carbine into Kayle’s head before turning to the waiting skimmer.

Brennan didn’t remember saying anything, though he could hear someone screaming. Maybe it was him, maybe Lydia. He couldn’t tell. It might have been both.

He jabbed his thumbs down on the launch studs and the twin rockets on either side of his skimmer roared, launching the sail line into the air. A thousand feet up the rockets activated their projectors, casting a light sail across the sky; far below it the skimmer twisted with the wind and began to slide along the rooftop of the palace.

Men ran after them, but no one seemed to be firing as Brennan drew in the line and lifted his skimmer into the air.

On the rooftop, a squad leader skidded to a halt and held out a hand demanding a radio.

His sub handed the device to him, and he quickly got in contact with the strike coordinators.

“A skimmer just launched from the palace … No, do not fire on it. Track it and force it down,” he ordered.

There was a pause and a mostly garbled response.

“Because the Imperials are on it! The general wants them alive !”

Another rapid exchange, some garbled sounds from the box, and he growled and took a breath before replying.

“Just do it.”

He shut the radio off and handed it back to his sub, shaking his head before looking back to the fallen Cadreman who’d held the door. He sighed, “Find out who that was and locate his Armati. The general wants them all under his control.”

“Yes, sir!”

“Bren … ,” Lydia whispered weakly. “Kayle … he …”

“I know. I saw,” Brennan croaked back, hands working the controls of the skimmer automatically.

He was riding the low winds, a river of air that moved a little over a hundred miles an hour between seven hundred and thirteen hundred feet above the surface. They were generally predictable and easy to navigate, mostly because they’d been mapped for over a century. Brennan continued to winch in the line, dragging the skimmer up closer to the sails, which increased his altitude and speed as he reduced line drag.

“What are we going to do now?”

“I don’t know,” Brennan admitted. “I just don’t …”

A shadow crossed his canopy, causing him to turn and spot a military skimmer coming in hard from his left side. He could see the lights flashing, a signal code ordering him to put the skimmer down.

“Lyd,” Brennan said, his voice and mind going cold. “Hold on.”

“What?”

The military skimmer had sails three times the size of theirs, but with weapons and armor it probably massed five times more at least. Bren jerked twin sticks in opposing directions, and his skimmer keeled over and banked to the right as he climbed for the first wind layer, trying to eke out as much speed as he could.

The military skimmer followed suit in short order, but its maneuvers were not quite as sharp as his had been.

Both craft clawed for altitude, shortening their sail lines and drawing themselves up into the lee of their own sails. That cut down on air resistance, and in short order the two were flashing through the skies at just over a hundred miles per hour.

“Not going to lose anyone here,” Brennan mumbled to himself, his head moving on a swivel as he tried to keep the military skimmer in sight.

So far it wasn’t shooting, so he figured that they’d gotten orders to force him down.

That’s good. Getting shot down would suck.

“Bren, there’s another one.”

Brennan looked back, then up to where she was pointing. He let out a curse as he spotted it.

“What?”

“They’re in the median layer, Lyd,” he said. “I can’t lose them.”

“What do we do?”

Brennan looked around and then down as he considered the situation. Military flyers could go a lot higher than his skimmer could. They carried bottled air and stronger sails, which would allow them to breathe in the upper atmo and deploy sails into winds that would tear his baby apart.

“Sorry, sis,” Brennan said, wincing as he reached for the controls. “Have to do it.”

“Have to do whaaa —?” Lydia’s question turned into a wail as he killed the sail projectors and wound them back in, the skimmer suddenly nosing forward and dropping like a stone.

“Burning skies!” the coflyer of the skimmer swore. “He just killed his sails.”

“He what?” the flyer demanded, looking down. “Where?”

“Overwatch just lost him. They’re moving too fast and overshot the dive point. They’ll come around, but it’ll be a couple minutes.”

The pilot killed speed as fast as he could, letting out the sail line. The drag of the line and the weight of the skimmer against the air would eventually pull them out of the sky, but there wasn’t much else he could do.

“Did you see where he went?”

“Down into the skyline on the north sector of the city,” the coflyer answered. “He’s in an unpowered dive. We’ll never be able to follow.”

“Not in these buckets,” the flyer agreed. “I’ll circle around, try and keep overwatch. Maybe we can spot him when he comes out of the dive.”

The military skimmers were heavily armed and armored, which made them great in a fight but gave them a distinct disadvantage if their prey was willing to go unpowered. Civilian skimmers could glide, after a fashion, being built with lightweight composites and projectors. A sky fighter, however, was designed to take—and dish out—a beating.

They curled back around, keeping an eye out as they tried to locate the missing skimmer, but nothing came to sight after several long minutes.

“Damn. Those were the Imperials too. The general is not going to be happy.”

“We’re losing ground, Everett!”

William nodded. The fighting wasn’t going well. The invaders had greater numbers than they should have, and the initial strikes had destroyed the coordination of the palace forces. Even knowing something was brewing hadn’t prepared him, or anyone, for what had actually happened. It was all so unthinkable.