The First Nova I See Tonight by Jason Kilgore (best ereader for pdf and epub TXT) 📗

front sensors were pelted so much that it blinded them to some extent, challenging his aim.

Another, much larger boulder appeared, but just as he aimed, Yiorgos lurched the ship to one side and away from the boulder's trajectory. Dirken fell to his side like a marionette, his mag boots still attached to the floor.

Then an even larger boulder appeared, nearly the size of a hovcar.

"Shit!" Dirken shouted, then targeted it with the missiles. He fired a thermion warhead. The missile shot forth with a spray of exhaust and contacted the boulder. The explosion lit like daybreak and sent dust and boulders flying away from it, destroying the target. For a moment the view cleared.

"Lining up with the hangar!" Yiorgos called. "Dirk! We've got a mass to the left!"

"I see it!" An aggregate of boulders flew forward with breathtaking speed.

Dirken fired a graviton burst to the left of the mass and manually detonated it. The missile exploded in a blue-green light, then imploded on itself in a graviton burst that pulled everything toward it. The aggregated mass was pulled out of the flightpath and out of danger.

"Hangar in two minutes!" Yiorgos shouted as he pulled the ship into a steep bank, then up again. "Losing sensors due to ionization."

Dirken fired the prow gun, gutting through a row of icy ejecta.

The view was clearing. They were entering the shadow of the comet and out of the cone of the tail.

But then Dirken saw one last, large boulder hurtling toward them. He targeted and went to fire a missile.

"No!" Eow said, putting her hand on his arm. "We are too close. If you miss, the cannons will fire back!"

"Yiorgos?" Dirk yelled. "Do you see it?"

"I can't steer around it!" his partner replied. "I'm lined up with the hangar!"

Dirken fired the prow gun, and hit, but the plasma charge just cut a gouge in the boulder without stopping it. "Fuck!"

"DIRK!" Yiorgos yelled.

Gritting his teeth, Dirken fired a missile.

The missile launched and immediately hit, exploding in a blinding blast that rocked the ship. Pieces clobbered the fighter. The sensors went dead. One large rock hit the canopy so hard that Dirken was sure it would crack and they'd all go flying out into the vacuum of space. But it held.

"Exhilarating!" Eow declared. "Bravo!"

The dust cleared, and ahead of them they saw the yawning mouth of a hangar large enough for a cruiser to enter. Two huge cannons, the sort found on military battleships, sat on either side. Both were aimed at their little fighter and tracking it.

Dirken held his breath, watching the plasma emitters at the tip of those cannons. And then the fighter passed them.

Yiorgos rotated the fighter to match the angle of the hangar floor as indicated by a row of landing lights guiding them in, then the fighter coasted straight through the middle of the hangar and downward. There were no hangar doors. Rather, as they passed through a short entry lined with mechanical towers and vents, the vacuum of space around them tinted to a dim blue as they entered an artificial atmosphere — an atmosphere held in place by a highly advanced ion border.

The light brightened and they entered the gargantuan hangar. Parts of the walls and ceiling looked natural, others clearly carved out by industrial laser drills and reinforced with carbon fiber ribs, so the chamber was likely already a large hollow in the comet which had been modified. In all, the cavity was so wide that a cruiser could probably do flips in the center without endangering any of the parked craft. Curiously, the hangar wasn't a flat plane upon entering, but rather sloped down and away from the hangar entrance, the floor curving slightly to fit the curvature of the comet. It dawned on Dirken that this odd architecture was to account for and utilize the gravity of the comet as it spun. Even for a spacer like himself, it was a little disorienting, but Yiorgos seemed to have no problem adapting to it as he maneuvered the fighter.

As many as four dozen small ships and several larger ones, representing craft designs from all over that region of the galaxy, were docked in neat rows to either side. One very large cruiser was also docked ahead of them, its prow facing the entrance and painted with brown and red patterns that slithered over the zeppelin-shaped fuselage, shifting colors and forming a mesmerizing display.

"That large one there," Eow said, pointing at the cruiser, "belongs to Grimmag Ruby-Eye."

But Dirken's eye had instead been drawn to a mid-sized vessel, a cyan blue blockade runner that looked like a row of silver cubes with a massive engine at the back of it and gravwell panels arching over the sides like wings. A Jen'torian clipper. He knew this ship and its captain. He didn't even need to see the blue eagle painted on the front to know this was the Raptores.

"'TakTrak," Dirken said as Yiorgos guided the fighter toward a landing bay three times larger than it needed to be for such a small ship. The landing struts extending with a mechanical whir.

"What is a tack track?" Eow asked.

"Not a what — a who." Dirken sniffed and shut off the weapons console. "An old friend is here, that's all."

"Huh," Eow said, pulling the duffel bag with the Heart out from under the couch. "Do all your old friends give you a murderous gleam in your eye?"

The fighter landed, rocking as it settled onto the landing struts. Then the main engines cut out and all went silent.

She stood and looked him up and down. "It has been a… memorable… ride, space jockey." She ran a hand down his chest. "We must do it again some time."

He certainly hoped so, though maybe without the comet tail.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

THE RUBY LOUNGE

"How long til we can fly out of here?" Dirken asked Yiorgos.

Yiorgos had attached a cable from his right wrist to a port in the console and the ship's computer.