Evan Currie - Heirs of Empire

“Nothing I can share over drinks.” Kayle smiled.

“Very interesting, then.”

The crown prince shrugged. “It depends. Some of it could be, but for now it’s just … well, you know the game.”

Beuforte nodded. “I do at that. So what does the emperor command concerning this situation?”

“Call in the Cadre teams. Anything less than red-level priority is suspended,” Kayle said. “Stand down everything . Go dark.”

“That bad?” The general sighed.

“Yeah,” Kayle said. “It’s that bad.”

“All right. It’s done. Anything else?”

“One thing,” Kayle said, standing up. “I need a team sent to the Redoubt.”

“Red level, I presume?”

“White.”

The general nodded slowly. “I’ll see a reactor transport off the grid within the hour.”

“Thank you, general,” Kayle said, standing up. “With your leave?”

“As though you need it.” The general snorted. “Go on, pup. We’ll speak later.”

“As you say.”

Kayle smiled, saluting before he turned to leave. He wasn’t required to, strictly speaking, but he’d learned through hard knocks that it paid to be respectful to people capable of taking your head off with a thought. The fact that they weren’t technically permitted to do so really didn’t matter as much as most people seemed to think.

Outside, William was waiting for him.

“What now, sire?”

Kayle sighed. “Take me to my brother.”

Reaction craft were the fastest transports in the empire, capable of acceleration and top speeds that were unequaled by almost every other method of transport available. They were also obscenely expensive, however, since they relied on consumables to provide thrust. Since those fuels were extremely costly in both time and money to synthesize, only the military generally had access to them.

The Cadre jump ship punched out of the capital under the shade of night and topped out at a hundred and twenty miles over the surface, moving just over fifteen thousand miles per hour. The curve of the land climbed up in all directions around the craft, soon blending into a distant haze.

The haze itself continued up for a ways, then cleared to expose the mottled pattern of the sky’s blues, greens, browns, and other colors. Still, the Cadre pilots had other things on their minds than the view as they increased the speed and hammered their passengers around roughly in the hold.

The Redoubt came into sight within two hours, and they fired reverse thrust to kill their speed, dropping back into the firm grip of gravity.

“Redoubt Control, this is Cadre Flight Aleph on approach. Clearance is requested.”

After several long moments with no response, the pilot glanced over his shoulder. “No contact from the Redoubt, sir.”

“All right. Land us hot.”

“At your command.”

Interface projections in front of the pilot altered as the ship began its descent, atmospheric friction blinding the visual display in spectacular fashion as armored sections closed over all sensitive systems. For a little over three minutes they were flying entirely on internal dead-reckoning systems as the extreme heat and friction rendered external sensors useless. The heat faded, leaving the armor of the jump ship still glowing dull red as the craft reached the lower atmosphere and decelerated to supersonic speed.

The protective armor retracted, bringing visual and external sensors back just before everything went to the upper reaches.

Alarms wailed, cockpit lights went dark and red, and the pilot instinctively leaned the whole ship hard left and stood on the thrusters.

“What’s going on?” the Cadre commander demanded from behind, struggling against the sudden force that slammed him into his harness.

“Respectfully, sir, not now !” the pilot screamed, putting the ship into a powered dive that quickly climbed back to hypersonic speeds and caused the sensor shielding to snap shut again as friction once more made its power felt.

In the back of the jump ship, the Cadre team could do little else besides hold on for their lives as the ship began to buck and twist in every possible direction.

Plummeting for the ground, the pilot kept the ship moving in an effort to dodge what he’d glimpsed briefly before he’d been forced to accelerate again.

Mindful of his altitude, he pulled up hard as the jump ship came within a few hundred feet of the desert floor, bleeding speed as quickly as he dared. Once the exterior cooled enough for the armored panels to open up again, the pilot got his visual instrumentation back.

Alarms sounded through the jump ship as he stood on the thrust again, lancing the ship straight up. Targeting scanners from the Redoubt were locked onto them, and bursts of energy were exploding all around.

“Prep for emergency drop!” he yelled over his shoulder. “This is your stop!”

The Cadre commander started to say something as he slammed his hand down on the controls, but it was lost as the wind howled through the interior of the jump ship and the ejection systems did their job. The Cadre team was launched into the air, fired down with enough force to throw them hundreds of feet from the ship before they recovered from the sudden acceleration.

The pilot turned his focus on his attacker now, leveling the ship out and lining up for his last run.

“Faithful forever.”

The six ejected Cadre squad members got their fall under control, stabilizing in the air and finding one another after the initial shock of being ejected without warning. They brought their projection armor online with a tap, the rushing wind going quiet as they got communications back.

“What the hell was that?”

The unit commander, Seph Meynard, twisted in the air until he could find the jump ship, not answering the question. The others followed suit, mostly ignoring the spinning ground below as it lunged up toward them. The jump ship was in the midst of a star storm of fire, its own weapons roaring in return as the Redoubt’s formidable defenses lanced out in an attempt to strike it from the sky.

“Emptiness above,” he swore. “Someone’s taken the Redoubt.”

It was painfully obvious as one of the shots holed through the leading airfoil of the jump ship, rocking it to one side. Then, once they’d bracketed the ship and gotten its range, another flurry of shots from below turned it into a fiery rain of scrap and shrapnel.

“Dive,” he ordered. “Get on the ground fast, before they get our range.”

The squad tucked their arms and legs in, pitching forward, and dove like their lives depended on it.

Moments later it was clear that their lives likely did depend on it as fire from the Redoubt was re-aimed in their direction. Explosions tore the sky asunder, shaking the squad members to their core even through their armor.

“Go stealth!” Seph ordered, triggering his own system as he did. “Spread out, meet up on the ground!”

The team banked hard away from each other as the photons that made up their armor color shifted randomly out of the visual spectrum. Latticework photons had many properties, but there were limits. They were, in effect, frozen light. That meant that they constantly emitted some waveform of light, so they couldn’t go completely stealth against high-technology scanners.

What they could do was shift to less used frequencies and lower the power rate of their output. It wasn’t perfect. Those frequencies could still be picked up by a skilled operator, and at lower output levels their armor was significantly weaker … but it was what they had to work with.

Invisible to the naked eye, and hopefully invisible to the scanning beams from below, they dove for the deck, slowing their descent until the last possible moment. The continued fire from the Redoubt exploded around them, but quickly became less focused as the team broke up and proceeded to evade.