Cadet Flight Methuselah

008

“Flight lead what the FUCK was that?” came Seig's shaken voice over the comex. He was still facing Hostile One so there was no way he could see what was actually going on. All he knew was that Home Base was now flashing in red on his battlesphere readout and there were six different alarms blaring in his cockpit telling him that the Heinlein was seriously damaged.

Once the dreadnought had cleared broadside range the hangar bulkheads on the port side had been raised to admit Backstop's fighter and the last Nim had glimpsed of it he had been limping back to the beach to trade out for one of the redundant Proteus marauders kept in reserve for landing missions.

Now there was nothing but a smoking crater inside the flight hangar where his fighter should have been, a massive hole in the side of her home that was engulfed in orange flames and which flickered with severed fiberoptic conduits and high-energy lines where there was no oxygen to burn. A few seconds later even the fires went out as the air was vented from the flight deck in an emergency depressurization to control the spread of the flames. She watched with a nauseous feeling churning in her stomach as the vacuum of space claimed the slightly glowing wreckage of a marauder and several flaming but quickly extinguished bodies clad in reflective blue and yellow jumpsuits. The urge to throw up was almost overwhelming as she lost sight of the corpses in the black of space.

Karda babbled over the comex next, his voice wavering like nothing she had ever heard from him before. “Was that... w-was that Backstop?”

“Jesus Christ,” muttered Damien, his voice cracking as he caught sight of their ship. “Him and all port flight deck are gone.”

“Heinlein Wing this is CIC. Be aware that a new wave of enemy fighters are inbound from Hostile One. Recon indicates they are of an unknown class and capability and will be callsign 'vulture.' Be aware that port side flight hangar has sustained significant damage from an unknown IED. Beaching suspended until further notice. CIC exit channel.”

Nim felt a cold chill settle into the pit of her stomach, worse than the one she had gotten looking at the event horizon of the wormhole the alien ship had been spit out of. Major Sonera is dead... What about the flight crew, the deck guns? How many people died just now?

“Methuselah Flight, priority red!” barked Keiji's voice over the comex, giving their wing the signal that they all needed to drop down into their squad's channel for an emergency briefing. “Methuselah Flight, priority red!”

A few seconds afterward, likely when she received the same information as Keiji had from Calli, Shelke called for her squad to do the same. “Loonies Flight, priority red! Loonies Flight, priority red!”

The sudden dead silence over the comex snapped Nim out of her funk and forced her to focus. Dropping her icon down into Methuselah's channel she rolled her marauder around and flew over to run parallel beneath Karda, coming dangerously close to the belly of his ship while she kept an eye on anything aiming for him from below. With as shocked as he sounded she knew he wasn't going to be paying attention to anything lower than eye level and she wasn't about to loose the youngest kid in their flight while she was right there.

TY RIPTIDE, came Karda's text message across her screen a moment later. She typed back a quick YW and they waited until everyone's icons flashed green a second later.

“Get in visual range of another fighter and see if anyone has black tar stuck to their hull,” said Keiji curtly.

Nim pulled around to Karda's front and did a barrel roll, prompting him to do the same once she was finished. She didn't spot anything anomalous on his hull, but he had taken a few good hits that had scarred his forward plating. It wasn't dangerous against the fighters they had been seeing but they still had no idea what these new vultures were packing in their arsenals. For all they knew the crabs were just armed recon probes and now the aliens were sending in their special forces to shred them to pieces.