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  “Why have we not heard of this?” Vornac asked.

  “It’s not something that we advertise,” Mark explained, “and the signals we use are somewhat…exotic.”

  “Do you have interstellar comm capability?” Procarva asked.

  “Unfortunately no. That’s something we’re still waiting for the Bsidd to hook us up with.”

  “But you fly your own fighters?” Vornac asked.

  “Yes we do, but only in atmosphere and with a protective shell around the pilot to maximize survivability. Machines are expendable, personnel are not.”

  “Perhaps that is so with such a long lived race,” Tibeerva said respectfully. “But many others do not share your philosophy. Especially not the Cajdital.”

  “It’s our training that allows us to live so long,” Mark explained, “not our physiology. You and others could live long as well, it is not just a Human thing.”

  “I find that hard to believe,” Procarva said.

  “When your society treats you as expendable, very few live long enough to find out.”

  “Your thoughts are interesting, Human,” Tibeerva offered, “but your race is still new to the galaxy. To many what you say is sacrilege. Life is destined to die, therefore it is in how we die that matters. There is no greater honor than dying while defending your people against the enemy. Pity are those who die in their sleep a useless death.”

  “So many say to justify battlefield suicide,” Mark argued. “You can die today, gaining victory, or live in defeat only to return later and achieve 100 victories. Which then is of more value to your race?”

  “If you lose today, there might not be a tomorrow.”

  “Such are the concerns of a shortsighted race.”

  Tibeerva laughed a deep booming laugh. “Always spoiling for a fight, aren’t you? I’m amazed you’ve survived this long.”

  “Me or all of us?”

  “Both.”

  Boen put a hand on Mark’s shoulder. “We watch each other’s backs…and we’re just plain good at what we do.”

  Vornac smiled, showing off his intimidating teeth. “You’re not the best pilots here, despite your age.”

  Mark smiled back. “We’re catching up.”

  9

  December 18, 2399

  Jartul System

  Daka

  “Damn it,” Mark swore as he saw Boen get shot down, then he pulled his skeet through a vertical loop as a pair of simulated lizard fighters dropped in behind him and began to light up his shields. As soon as he came out of the maneuver he had to dodge right to avoid running into another group of 5, but he snapped off a quick shotgun-like blast from the scattergun and hit two of them doing partial damage, but not knocking either out of the massive aerial battle.

  Mark couldn’t think ahead, much, as he was flying in and out of enemy fighters just trying to keep himself alive, but he did keep his situational awareness intact and was trying to divert to a specific section of the map to where the fighting was the thinnest. He and Boen had flown straight into the lizard formation to disrupt and distract their hundreds of fighters while the rest of the Star Force pilots nibbled away at the edges, but even that he couldn’t monitor, for there were so many fighters around he was literally bouncing between them like a pinball, snapping off shots where he could.

  If it wasn’t for the scattergun he likely wouldn’t have been able to hit any because he wasn’t getting an opportunity to aim. The lizard fighters were fast, nimble, and had small silhouettes, so all he could do was pull the trigger when one passed near his firing line and hope to make a hit. That said, he’d already killed 20 or more in his run through the swarm, but he didn’t dare look at the score board now for fear of actually colliding with one of the fighters.

  Dipping down on his anti-gravs and pulling his skeet through a skid turn, the trailblazer twirled around an invisible drain as he headed down towards the surface, hoping to make himself very hard to hit but likewise making it impossible for him to fight back. Right now though all he needed to do was run away and if he couldn’t do that directionally, then maybe he could cut low and catch a gap in their formation to exploit.

  He pulled several fighters in pursuit down with him, but when he bottomed out and rocketed off in a straight line over the simulated surface of Daka he managed to get away from the massive brawl overhead, though those tailing him were still occasionally peppering his shields with plasma hits. Fortunately they didn’t get too many in sequence and his matrix was able to partially recharge as he weaved his way off to the edges of the map and away from the beehive.

  Once he assumed he was far enough away he kicked in his anti-gravs and shot his skeet up into the sky, then skid-banked to bring his forward weaponry around to target one of the 7 fighters in pursuit. He nailed the first with a normal plasma cannon blast using his left trigger, then winged another pair with the scattergun before going evasive. He ducked, dived, skidded, twisted, and anything else he could think of to disrupt any easy firing angles for the enemy while taking brief moments of opportunity to down his pursuit, then when he had only 3 remaining he went on the offensive, trading plasma with the unarmed fighters.

  By the end he had only 7% shield energy left, but all 7 of the fighters were down and his hull hadn’t been scratched…but as he swung around and gained more elevation he got his first clear look at the ensuing battle, as well as their score tally, and saw that his 21 other fighters were nearly half gone as the beehive had collapsed around them.

  Accelerating up to dizzying speed he entered the skeet’s super-pursuit mode for a few seconds, stretching out his minimal shields to make the craft more aerodynamic, then he reverted back to normal and hit the brakes, flipping his engines over to reverse and coming down on the cluster of enemy fighters tracking a pair of his pilots from above.

  He used his scattergun to peel off two of them, then fired his plasma cannon to get another group to break off pursuit of Kara, giving her a moment of relief by drawing them to him. He killed another one before they could fully circle around, then he started his fighter dancing an evasive jig while Kara returned the favor and came around to clean one off his tail. The pair kept switching up the lizards, forcing them to focus on one while the other flanked them or split their numbers to pursue each individually.

  That eventually happened, but Mark was able to make quick work of the 3 that came after him, then before he could get back to Kara another 6 flew in from elsewhere and made his next few minutes hell as he took a shot to the tail of his skeet, which fortunately didn’t penetrate the fighter’s thin armor.

  A tone sounded in his pod, indicating that they’d passed the prerequisite score to advance into the next round, but he didn’t let up. Beating half the other race’s involved in the annual combat tournament and solidifying themselves in the upper half using their skeets and not the Valeries had been the goal, and this was their 7th run out of 10 attempts, but that wasn’t good enough for Mark, because he knew they were among the best pilots on the planet and he wanted to set a first round score that would indicate as much.

  This would be their last run, though. He’d promised as much to his pilots. Most of the other races had already used up their 10 attempts, so their top scores were locked in. Mark had held off on their attempts, stretching them out so they could see how the others were performing, knowing that Star Force pilots worked better when they had a benchmark to hit. Some other races had the same idea, so the Humans weren’t the last to still be making their runs, but according to the tone he’d preprogrammed into their simulation they’d mathematically secured their slot in the second round and any score beyond this point was purely for sport.

  By the time he had shaken off and killed two of his trailers Kara had already gone down, as had all but three of his pilots left in the simulation. The remaining lizard fighters, still numbering in the hundreds, began to reposition and overwhelm the last of the skeets so Mark knew his time was just about up.

  He pulled up hard and s
hot his fighter straight up, using both conventional and anti-grav engines to gain as much altitude as possible, then tipped over near the peak of the map and came charging back down firing away with his scattergun and killing the closest fighter. After that he only did damage as his shots spread out too far for a concentrated kill while he was weaving his way back down to the surface at crazy speed.

  Three of the lizard fighters had managed to stay with him a few hundred meters back, but they were having trouble shooting him as he evaded, and he had the distinct feeling that one of them had collided with another, but he wasn’t paying close enough attention to the sensor screen to be sure. All of his attention was focused forward at the fighters between him and the ground.

  He pulled up on the nose of the fighter, faking that he was going to angle off along the ground, then pulled down and executed a reverse loop that shot him out the other way inverted, skimming across the grassy plain of the planet. Before he could flip back over he took a shot to the underside, knocking out his streamer cannon…but he wasn’t using that weapon anyway, so it wasn’t a loss.

  Another tone sounded in his pod, indicating that he was the ‘last of the Mohicans,’ so to speak, and that the rest of the Star Force fighters had gone down…and that now every lizard fighter out there was coming after him and that he wasn’t going to have anywhere to run to.

  Having been in a similar situation before, he knew that the only thing he could do was to keep moving erratically, bouncing around and trying to take as many of the enemy fighters as he could down with him. The trailblazer lasted another 1:12 before a green plasma blast hit his skeet in the nose and send it careening down to the ground where his simulation suddenly ended.

  Mark blew out a breath like it was a projectile, ticked at having died. He hadn’t expected to survive the run, nobody ever did, but there was a part of him that always resented getting shot down. In his mind that was still a failure, and had this been real he would either be dead or stranded on the surface of the planet in his skeet’s armored pod.

  He triggered the release on the simulator after running through the post-mission stats, resulting in a crack of white light around the base that quickly grew to encompass the interior as the pod cockpit lifted off him. Outside Boen and the others were standing around, waiting for him to come out.

  “116 kills?” his fellow Archon asked. “You’re making us look bad.”

  “The longer you survive the more you can kill,” he reminded him as his eyes were drawn to the central hologram in the simulation room. It should have been showing what was going on in the simulators, but as far as he knew only the Humans were currently using this room. “What’s that?”

  “Nestafar 5th run. We’re piping it in from another chamber,” Sandra said from a few meters away. “We are done, right?”

  “Yeah, that one did it,” Mark confirmed, walking over to Kara and giving her a friendly jab in the ribs. “Thanks for the rescue.”

  “Sabers call it teamwork, but you’re welcome anyway.”

  A pair of heavy lands landed on Mark’s shoulders, then another ran through his hair. “You did well, Human,” Vornac said mirthfully. “That’s the second highest score yet. Why did it take you 7 runs?”

  Mark pried the hand off his head, then the other two off his shoulders so he could spin around and look up at the Calavari. “A change of tactics this time. Did we prompt you to have another go at it?”

  Vornac laughed. “You may have surpassed us this time, but this is only the first round. You may have the credit, if it stands up to the others, but be aware that some of us are only trying to qualify. How you only do so on a run this good is confusing to me. Almost as if it were luck.”

  “Please don’t say that,” Boen begged. “He’ll make us do it over again.”

  “Luck or not we’re through for the first time,” Kara added as a few of the pilots began to mingle their way out of the chamber while most remained to watch the Nestafar.

  “A surprise to most, but not us,” Vornac said approvingly. “We have trained you well,” he joked.

  The Calavari glanced around, seeing that no one was heading back into the pods. “If you truly are done for the day, I’ll see you up in the main lounge in a bit?”

  “Me, no,” Mark said. “I’ve got a workout to get in.”

  “I’m going to grab a shower then I’ll be up,” Kara said, raising an eyebrow at Boen.

  “I think most of us will find our way up there sooner or later,” the Archon agreed.

  “Good,” Vornac said, clapping palm in fist on his upper set of arms. “I want to see how the others react…especially if they don’t make it.”

  Mark glanced up at the hologram. “You don’t think they will?”

  “Difficult to say, but I intend to find out with drink in hand. As always, you’re welcome to partake.”

  “As always,” Mark replied, inferring his normal declination. Drunk pilots, or Archons for that matter, were dead pilots, as such Star Force had banned all alcoholic substances from use by their personnel and refused to sell them to the general population. The Calavari version was mild compared to some of their other inebriating concoctions, which could theoretically kill a Human, so Mark had issued orders that none of their people should ever so much as sample any alien foodstuffs or drink that hadn’t been cleared for consumption.

  Vornac walked off, leaving the Humans alone in their victory as they watched the Nestafar get cut to pieces by the simulated lizard fighters. They did manage a 3/1 kill ratio, but that was far inferior to most of the other races on Daka, putting them well below the qualification line. That said, they had another 5 runs to try and up their score.

  “See ya later,” Kara offered Boen and Mark before heading out herself. Once she got into the quiet hallway outside she jogged off to the right, passing Vornac as he headed to a nearby elevator terminal to speed him over to his destination. Kara, heading for the shower anyway, preferred to get a bit of an extra run in and hoofed it over to the entrance to the Human complex, which was more than 3 kilometers away.

  The closest simulator complex had been hogged by the Gnar most of the day as they practiced in repetitive shifts, making it impossible for all 22 Humans to get online at the same time, so they’d relocated to an empty one to make their three qual runs today, after a less than successful effort yesterday.

  The elevator entrance to their complex was slightly downhill of the simulator, prompting Kara to turn her jog into a heavy run, which felt good after being cramped up in a pod for the past several hours. They’d gone through some practice maneuvers before and in between their quals, stretching out the session considerably, but doing so in order to keep them from getting in a rut and simply repeating the same mistakes over and over again.

  Kara tagged the open button on the elevator twice and stepped in, letting the tri-door close and the atmospheric processor recycle the air. While they breathed the standard atmosphere within the base just fine, Mark had fine-tuned their complex’s atmosphere to Star Force standards, diminishing the amount of oxygen and upping the nitrogen. As such she always felt a bit more lethargic after losing the more oxygen-rich air, but then again she didn’t need to be sprinting around their interior hallways.

  The Archon headed over to her personal quarters and went straight for her shower…which had been one of the first upgrades Star Force had made once moving in. The Calavari had air turbine scrubbers to blow off dirt and grime, but then again they didn’t sweat either. The modifications made were one of many that all the incoming races were encouraged to make, given that the Calavari didn’t know about all of their individual needs…and very little about the Humans until after they arrived.

  Kara walked up the short rubbery staircase, stripping off her clothes as she went and tossing them along with her shoes on the floor, then pulled open the lid on her shower tank and slid inside. The water rushed up over her chin, then careened out overflow ports in the sidewall until it leveled out just below her shoulders
. She slid the lid back in place over top, which triggered the illumination panels running up and down the tank which had a clear wall looking out over the rest of her quarters, making the tube feel less claustrophobic.

  The water was already warm and filled with a soapy solution according to Kara’s standard settings. With the press of a button drops began falling from the lid and slicking her hair down with pure water as a series of pressure jets underneath the waterline began scouring her body in a rhythmic fashion that doubled as both a scrubber and a masseuse.

  She stayed inside for a good ten minutes before she killed the sequence and climbed out using footholds imbedded in the far side of the tube. She straddled the opening, letting excess liquid fall back inside as she rung out her hair before grabbing a nearby towel and stepping aside, only to slide the lid back in place with her left foot before walking down the steps and over to her closet.

  Once dressed she left the Human complex and snagged the nearest transit elevator on the circuit of ceiling corridors and headed over to the main hangout for all the pilots on base. When she arrived on the promenade she found Boen and several dozen others already there hanging out in small clusters while the rest of the races did the same with little mixing…save for the bar which was where she was headed to.

  “Water and a niktat,” she told the nearest server on the long countertop. With a precise throw the Calavari tossed her a bottle, then a sealed package, both of which she caught with ease.

  “Thanks Sala,” she said, retreating back over to one of the tables with half the seats filled with Archons and regular pilots. “What’d I miss?”