Jon Messenger - Fall of Icarus

She didn’t give a warning when she began a heavy acceleration within the planet’s atmosphere. The conflicting gravities between the planet and the inhibitors on the ship made her feel even queasier then before, but she knew that Cardax had a head start. She no longer had the luxury of patience. When they hit the atmosphere, Keryn was nearly tossed from her seat by the impact. At first, the Cair Ilmun skipped like a stone against the protective layer around the planet. Finally, the ship eased through and rocketed into space.

As telemetries came online, the console before her showed two distinct engine signatures. Though they passed through the atmosphere at the same time, they immediately branched off. One began a slow arc away, heading toward the back side of the sun. The second hurtled away from the planet on a trajectory that would take it far outside the system. Keryn immediately read through Cardax’s strategy. The smuggler would burn at a high acceleration out of the system in order to save himself while his support craft would hide behind the sun and launch a surprise attack once she began pursuit. In a normal scenario, Keryn would have been impressed by his tactics. In fact, she would intentionally destroy the guarding craft first before pursuing Cardax. This, unfortunately, was a far from normal situation. Aside from her desire to kill Cardax, the Cair Ilmun had been heavily outfitted with state of the art armor and weapons. Even if Cardax’s support craft ambushed them, Keryn stood a strong chance of destroying both ships with minimal damage to the Cair Ilmun . Confident that she was making the right choice, Keryn accelerated toward Cardax’s ship.

Though she watched the radar to ensure the guardian ship was still traveling toward the sun, Keryn’s focus was on the plasma engine burning brightly before her. With the modified engines, the Cair Ilmun was quickly catching the fleeing craft. Reaching forward, she entered a series of commands into the console and brought her weapons online. A compliment of plasma rockets activated in the launch tubes beneath each wing. Machine guns whirred in preparation for the pending assault. Within the cockpit, Keryn’s violet eyes burned with rage and revenge. Though Cardax was fleeing at maximum speed, he would soon be within targeting range.

On the console, the targeting array turned from green to red, indicating that she was finally within range to fire her first volley. Keryn snarled as her hands fell to the console and she uploaded the final data to her missile launchers. With all preparations completed and Cardax’s ship within her sights, Keryn’s finger hovered over the firing mechanism.

With a pang of remorse, Keryn remembered the training her team had gone through together on the Revolution. Rombard’s stern leadership, McLaughlin’s carefree attitude, and even Keeling’s overbearing confidence; all the memories burned in Keryn’s chest and brought stinging tears to her eyes.

“This is for all of them,” she whispered into the quiet cockpit. “Burn in hell, you bastard!”

Pushing the firing button, four plasma rockets launched from underneath the wings of the Cair Ilmun . Streaking through the empty space, the smoky trails locked on to the fleeing ship. Though it tried to dodge the missiles, it was futile. The rockets struck the back of the ship nearly in unison. The small transport, laden with extra fuel cells, erupted into flames which consumed the entire ship. As the flames died away, scorched sections of the ship drifted free, filling the view before the Cair Ilmun with a sea of debris. Sobbing with relief, Keryn sagged in the pilot’s chair.

The silence in the cockpit seemed stifling as Keryn laid back in her chair. Aches that she had ignored all day suddenly assaulted her senses. Her neck tightened to where she wasn’t sure she would be able to turn her neck from side to side. Along her shoulders and arms, Keryn felt a tight burning from overuse. Exhaustion seemed to infuse every cell of her body. At the same time, she began to feel immediate regret. Their team had been sent on a specific mission: to capture Cardax and learn anything they could about Deplitoxide. Instead, she had let her emotions overwhelm her common sense. In an act of retribution, she had destroyed the one lead the Alliance had on stopping the latest threat. Resolved to her fate, Keryn reminded herself that with Cardax gone, there was a slim chance that the Terran Empire would ever find a resupply of the dangerous chemical. Though Deplitoxide would be a threat in the immediate future, the Terran stores would eventually run dry. Satisfied in her attempt at justification, Keryn allowed herself a thin smile.

Opening her eyes, she noticed a blinking light on the console. She had an incoming transmission, though the source was unknown. Could the High Council already know that she had failed her mission? Keryn had heard of the seemingly omnipotent power of the Council, but doubted that even they could have learned that she killed the smuggler instead of capturing him as she had been ordered. Still, her hand shook as she reached out and pressed the blinking button.

“And I was starting to worry that you weren’t going to answer,” a familiar Oterian mocked as his full visage appeared in the console’s monitor.

Keryn’s anger surged back to the surface. Cardax was still alive. She scrambled to read the radar and noted the second ship rapidly approaching the outer gravitational pull of the sun. As it grew closer, its speed increased exponentially. The second ship was never trying to hide on the back side of the sun. All along, Cardax intended to use the sun’s gravity as a slingshot in order to escape. And Keryn, blinded by emotion, had fallen right into his trap.

“Oh, don’t look surprised, little girl. You won’t catch me now, I can save you the trouble of trying to do the math. But you did great; better than I would have ever expected. But like I guessed, your best just wasn’t good enough.”

“You bastard!” Keryn yelled into the monitor. “I’m going to find you! I don’t care how long it takes, I will find you and I will kill you!”

“Such attitude,” Cardax said condescendingly. “I have no doubt that you’ll chase me. In fact, I’m counting on it. But last time I underestimated you. It won’t happen again. Next time we meet, I’ll make sure you’re good and dead before I leave the planet.”

“I swear that you will never get away from me.”

Cardax looked at something below the monitor screen. “I’m sorry, little girl. It seems that I’m losing the transmission. Apparently I was too busy escaping to keep you within range.” The Oterian shrugged. “Oh well, until next time. Bye now.”

With his parting words, the screen went black. Keryn howled in rage as she slammed her fist into the console until her hand was raw and bloodied. Collapsing in emotional turmoil, Keryn fell back into her chair and cried loudly into the lonely cockpit.

“There are so many of them!” Alpha Two bemoaned over the radio.

“Forget about them and just keep flying,” Iana ordered as she sped away from Earth. “If we don’t draw them away, the ground forces won’t stand a chance.”

Though Iana sounded confident on the radio, she felt the same fear that was evident in her Avalon counterpart’s voice. The radar showed hundreds of Terran launches, as wave after wave of fighters and impromptu vessels joined in the chase of the fleeing Squadron. What she originally assumed was twenty to one odds was quickly growing, and not in her favor. She had heard the cries of her fellow pilots as they were struck by machine gun fire and plasma rocket explosions, the Alliance ships being destroyed in the dead of space and left as little more than obstacles for the rest of the Terran ships to bypass as they hunted down the rest of the Squadron.