Alien Firestorm (Fire and Rust Book 2) Read online

  “Hey, Daddy,” said Emily Conway.

  “Hey, Pumpkin, how are you doing?”

  She gave him a big, beaming smile. “Great, Daddy. Will you be home for dinner?”

  “I’ll do everything I can, Pumpkin. If I’m going to be late, you can stay up.” He leaned closer to the lens and made out like he was puzzled. “What happened to your tooth?”

  Emily’s face brightened. “It fell out! I sneezed in class and it landed on the floor.”

  “Keep it somewhere safe. Your mom tells me you did real well in school today.”

  This time, the smile was sheepish and self-conscious. “Mrs Purvis likes me. Can I have a puppy for my birthday, Daddy?”

  “I don’t know about that, Pumpkin. Maybe I should speak to your mom about it.” It was a good time to finish. “I’ll see you later tonight. Be good for your mom.”

  “Will do. I promise.”

  Conway ended the call and went back through the sliding doors of the studio. One of the receptionists let him pass the security gates with barely a glance. The building was huge and it took Conway a few minutes to locate the VIP waiting area. It was a large room, with no expense spared on the decoration. Framed awards hung on the walls, along with posters of old TV and movie stars. The carpet was thick and luxurious, while every chair or couch was clad in soft leather. Kemp was drinking something green from a peculiarly-shaped glass and Sergeant Lockhart was eating peanuts.

  “Time to get our gear,” said Conway.

  He led them from the VIP room towards the underground parking lot. It was brightly lit and patrolled by several security officers. Conway wasn’t surprised, given the quantity of expensive vehicles. The transport took up three spaces. Its angular body was made to accommodate eight fully-suited troops and also to withstand small arms fire. Conway walked straight up to the trunk and pressed his security key onto the metal release panel. The lid clunked and lifted a few inches.

  Inside were five combat suit helmets, each with a name painted above the visor. On top of that, Gilner assault rifles, grenade belts and a stubby shoulder launcher. Conway reached for the launcher and noticed how heavy it was.

  “Sergeant Lockhart, is this fully loaded?”

  Lockhart blinked. “Yes, sir. Six in the magazine.”

  “Colonel Doyle only gave clearance for the Gilners to come off base loaded, on account of the TV guys wanting to see a close-up of the magazines.”

  “I thought it was all to be loaded, sir.”

  “Does that mean these are live grenades as well?”

  Lockhart got the faraway stare again. “Yes, sir.”

  Conway had no idea how Lockhart had managed to get them away from stores. He pointed at a rucksack and raised an eyebrow.

  “Spare ammo, sir.”

  “Old habits die hard, eh?”

  “That’s it, sir. Old habits.”

  Conway sighed. “Well, the studio did say they wanted to see us armed to the teeth. Let’s tool up.”

  Sixty seconds later, Conway slammed the lid of the trunk. Like Lockhart said, old habits died hard and for some reason he felt much better knowing his gear wasn’t just for show. With a Gilner in one hand and his suit helmet in the other, he led the squad towards the VIP waiting room again. A check of the time told him that it wasn’t long until they were due in front of the cameras and his mouth felt dry. He’d fought a hundred battles with the Fangrin and here he was with butterflies.

  The five of them sat and pretended to be calm, while a man in a sharp suit from the studio described the routine. Conway nodded and didn’t speak much.

  “Well folks, two minutes,” said the man. “Time to put those helmets on and get ready to snarl for the cameras.”

  Conway lifted his helmet.

  “Watch out for your make-up, sir,” said Barron, smiling innocently.

  With a shake of his head, Conway dropped the helmet into place and fastened the seals. A green light appeared on his HUD to inform him everything was connected and air-tight. The rebreather kicked in and Conway wished he was back on Graxol-4.

  The five of them headed down a flight of steps towards the first floor. Employees from the studio directed them the right way. Conway found himself backstage, staring at the bright lights of the studio floor.

  “Leave helmets on until Ms Gaines introduces you by name,” he repeated on the comms.

  “Then lift it off and give everyone your biggest smile,” said Barron. She gave Conway a nudge with her elbow. “You’re going to kill it, sir.”

  Freeman picked up something unexpected from the suit comms.

  “Got a base-wide alarm, sir,” he said. “We’ve missed it because we’ve been offline.”

  “An exercise?”

  “Checking.”

  Conway watched the host, Darcy Gaines, rise with the grace of a ballet dancer. He heard her talk about the bravery of the ULAF troops. Next thing he knew, he was being gently pushed towards the stage. Conway stepped out, unable to get over how stark the lighting was. Darcy waited, smiling and perfect, like a sculpture come to life.

  The applause began and Conway turned towards the studio audience, raising his hand in greeting. His feet carried him towards the semi-circular leather couch. His eyes darted to the ammunition readout on his Gilner. Full.

  “Hello,” gushed Darcy, her voice husky in a way that was too real to be a result of practice. She stepped forward and gave Conway a light, impersonal hug, before moving on to Sergeant Lockhart who was next in line. Still the applause went on and the smiles on the faces were genuine. Conway felt his head swim and he told himself that his wife and little girl were going to watch this when it was broadcast tomorrow night. Emily didn’t want to see her daddy looking green. He took a deep breath and felt himself calming.

  Darcy extricated herself with difficulty from Private Kemp’s enthusiastic clutches. She took her place next to Conway.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I promised you something big tonight, didn’t I? Let me welcome the brave men and women of the Unity League Armed Forces. If it wasn’t for our soldiers fighting out there for what we believe in, we would never have made peace.” She turned and looked upwards through Conway’s visor. Darcy gave him the faintest of nods. The cue. “Let me introduce you to Lieutenant Tanner Conway, the man who has so many medals for bravery, they had to invent a new one just for him.”

  “It’s not an exercise, sir,” said Freeman in Conway’s earpiece. “Oh shit. We need to abort. We need to get out of here.”

  The applause climbed in volume and Conway’s hands froze, mid-way to the fasteners on his helmet. He turned, not sure what to do. Stay or get out. The timing was crazy. Then, he heard the sound. It was a distant shriek which cut through the applause and was picked up by his helmet microphone.

  The primal part of his brain told him that something terrible was coming and it was. The blast wave struck the UL3TV building and the next thing Conway knew, the floor wasn’t where it was meant to be and chunks of masonry were flying everywhere. He was thrown violently against a wall, but managed to cling on to his Gilner. The blast wave continued to shake the building and Conway looked frantically for somewhere that might provide shelter.

  “The car park,” he said.

  One, maybe two of the walls fell inwards and the ceiling collapsed. Rubble fell like a hard rain, and pieces of it smashed against Conway’s head and shoulders. He lifted an arm to protect himself. Acting on instinct, his eyes hunted for a path to safety. He looked around for Darcy Gaines and couldn’t see her in a studio that was suddenly filled with thick dust and grit. Everything was chaos and he didn’t know what the hell was happening or why.

  His internal speaker bleeped and a HUD notification advised him of a catastrophic drop in oxygen levels. A wind of blistering heat howled through the building, producing a sound that Conway never wanted to hear again. The air temperature went from air-conditioned coolness to nine hundred Fahrenheit in the blink of an eye. The wind struck him, enveloping his suit and conti
nuing into the studio audience. Many tried to scream, but the searing heat burned their lungs, sucking out the air and killing them without remorse.

  Conway knew there was nothing he could do. Somehow his squad was with him, desperately searching for a way to escape. Through one of the collapsed walls, Conway saw a hole leading all the way to the outside. He watched flames, hungrily searching for life. His suit smoked and the polymers charred.

  The floor went out from beneath Conway and he reached out with one hand, while the other refused to let go of his assault rifle. He found himself sliding down a slab of broken concrete, its rebar severed by the force of the blast wave. A figure slid with him and the two of them crashed into the floor. Conway had the wind knocked out of him and he struggled upright. The heat within his suit kept on climbing and he felt it scorch his skin.

  The temperature fell as quickly as it rose. It dropped to seven hundred, five hundred and then three hundred. The building wasn’t stable. It creaked and groaned like it would come down at any time.

  “Anyone alive?” asked Private Kemp.

  They were all alive. Somehow, the five of them made it. Conway guessed that the studio was on the extreme edge of whatever made that blast. It meant the real killer was the heat and the combat suits were enough to stop it wiping out his squad.

  “We’ve got to get the hell away from here,” he said.

  Just when he was beginning to think that peace with the Fangrin might mean the shit was behind him, Conway once more found himself neck deep and he didn’t like it. As he climbed across broken pieces of the studio building looking for an exit, he tried to link in with the planet’s comms network to find out if his family were still alive. Secondary to that, to find out what was going on and why.

  The comms satellite was offline and his suit couldn’t locate any other receptors. Conway was so angry he could hardly talk. Ten minutes after their interview was due to start, he and his squad emerged from the studio building to a world that looked completely different.

  Chapter Three

  “Find those bastards,” snarled Griffin. Fury consumed him and he was ready to do anything.

  “I’m trying, sir.”

  The Star Burner was so close to New Destiny that it wouldn’t be long until the Raggers spotted them. The element of surprise was there, but not for much longer.

  The Raggers made an error, either through stupidity or arrogance, Griffin didn’t care which.

  “Got them!” said Dominguez. “They’re sitting in the smoke and it’s created an outline around their hull.”

  The enemy ship was indistinct, no matter how much work Dominguez put in to clean up the image. It was enough to allow the weapons to be fired on manual.

  “Targeting the two front railguns,” said Griffin. “Travel time, less than three seconds.”

  His hands trembled as he completed the fine-tuning. He centered the crosshairs on the vague shape in the middle of the thick smoke.

  “Firing.”

  The railgun coils whined and thumped, sending a vibration through the control sticks. Three seconds later, they punched into the Ragger spaceship. The enemy craft shimmered and became visible. Griffin didn’t recognize the type – it was larger than the Star Burner and with no visible weaponry. It looked like it was built to carry heavy loads - a dedicated bomber, he guessed.

  The Raggers were hurt. The bomber’s upper section had two massive indentations in its matt grey plating, deep enough that Griffin was sure the railgun slugs had penetrated right the way through. Before he could lock on the Ultor-V plasma missiles, the bomber got its stealth online and accelerated hard away, leaving a trail through the smoke.

  “Fast,” said Dominguez.

  “Follow it!”

  The railguns hadn’t recharged and Griffin could only clench his teeth in frustration. The Star Burner would soon enter the planet’s upper atmosphere and he was forced to back off on the controls. If the cruiser went in too fast, it would burn up and Griffin wanted revenge before that happened.

  “They’re boosting hard,” said Dominguez. “And climbing.”

  “Don’t lose them.”

  “They’ll be out of the smoke any second and then they’ll be gone, sir.”

  The railgun charge gauge hit 100% and Griffin fired again. His aim was good and both shots hit home. For the Raggers, the result was devastating. The bomber’s stealth shut down and the warship appeared on the sensor feed, looking like it had crashed twice into a mountainside.

  “It’s going down.”

  “Let’s finish them off. Ultor-Vs locked.”

  The lights and everything else on the bridge went out.

  “Shutdown weapon,” said Kroll.

  Griffin swore in the darkness and fumbled for the panel at his feet. Kenyon switched on his flight helmet torch and Griffin did likewise. He slid the panel aside and found the row of twelve blue switches. The sense of weightlessness told him the Star Burner was in free-fall. He hooked his fingers underneath the first three switches and clicked them upwards. Moments later, he’d done all twelve.

  “That’s the safeties back in the right place.”

  The lights came on first. They had the least to do. The Star Burner’s mainframe came online in sections and Griffin couldn’t understand why several of the auxiliary systems went green before the main propulsion or the life support.

  “Want me to pull out the overload protection?” asked Dominguez.

  “You can’t. It’s buried about three meters below the bridge floor.”

  “Strange for a bomber to be equipped with something as deadly as that shutdown weapon,” said Kroll.

  “Ah shit,” said Griffin in realization. “And strange for a bomber to be on a mission with no escort.”

  A projectile struck the Star Burner’s hull. Griffin couldn’t tell where the impact was, since the reverberations came from everywhere. The noise was deafening and followed up by a second strike. He had no way of knowing how badly damaged the spaceship was, since the damage control systems weren’t online yet.

  The comms came up first and Kenyon sent out a distress signal. “It linked to the closest military receptor, sir. Looked like a suit.”

  A missile impacted with the cruiser. This time it was easier to pinpoint the direction – the enemy spaceship was above them, so this definitely wasn’t a last throw of the dice from the damaged bomber. Other missiles strikes came, each explosion producing a thunderous crash which faded rapidly into the distance as the Star Burner plummeted towards the earth.

  “We’re going to hit,” said Jeffrey.

  “Looks like.” Griffin didn’t release his grip on the controls, hoping to get something from them. One of the engine modules came online, offering a fraction of its available power. The temperature display indicated it was burning. Griffin pulled on the sticks and the spaceship hardly responded.

  The sensors came up next. First static and then a spinning low-res feed. Below and coming up fast, the sight of a city flattened by incendiaries. The Star Burner began responding weakly to the controls, too little and too late. The life support came up at the same time as another two missiles struck the armor plating. Bright white filled Griffin’s HUD and he squinted. The single engine module was at thirty percent – not nearly enough for flight, but maybe enough for a hard landing.

  The Star Burner smashed into what remained of a burned-out skyscraper. The main structure had survived the Ragger incendiaries but it couldn’t survive this. When the spaceship impacted, the building’s walls exploded outwards in a storm of charred rubble and glass. The cruiser was too heavy to divert from its course and it hit another building a few hundred meters further on. Griffin couldn’t spare the time to blink in case it was enough to turn possible life into certain death.

  The Star Burner collided with a block of smaller buildings. The drag was enough to slow it down and the spaceship turned, flipped and flipped again. The sensors were a confusion of debris, darkness, light and plasma flame. An object flew ov
erhead and Griffin dimly recognized it as the portside wing.

  Eventually, the cruiser came to a halt, partly on its side. The alarm wailed and someone groaned. Griffin was alive, but he was sure not everyone had been so lucky.

  Conway and his squad stood a little way from the studio building and watched in silence as the Ragger bomber went down. With his zoom on full, Conway thought he could see the enemy spaceship’s hull buckle underneath the railgun hits. He could definitely hear the impacts, even from three or four thousand meters away. Each strike sent a hollow echo sweeping through the ruins of Satra, though nobody could bring themselves to cheer.

  “The comms are down,” said Freeman through the speaker in his helmet. “Even the suit network.”

  “Jammed?”

  Freeman didn’t want to commit. “That’s one possibility. The other is that everything is temporarily screwed because a whole city got taken out.”

  Conway growled. When the comms went down, everything usually went to crap. “Keep an eye on it and let me know if anything changes.”

  “What now, sir?” asked Kemp, his excitement at being on TV completely forgotten. Somehow, he’d held onto the shoulder launcher and he slung it in order to have both hands on his rifle.

  Before Conway could reply, he caught sight of a second warship. It was burning with plasma and coming in fast. He could see its pilot trying to correct the spin and to reduce the angle of descent. Conway was a novice when it came to flying and even he could see the spaceship wasn’t going to recover.

  “One of ours,” he said.

  “You sure?”

  “No.”

  A high-priority message came onto his comms, sent from a source with enough clearance to ignore the privacy settings on the squad open network.

  “Mayday, we’re going down. Request immediate assistance.”

  Another two missiles hit the spaceship moments before it went through the top floors of a badly-leaning building. The craft left a trail of plasma in its wake and then disappeared from sight. The rumble of explosions reached the squad and then came the deeper, heavier impact of the spaceship itself hitting the ground. The noise seemed to last for a long time and then it receded until Conway could no longer hear it.