The Impossible Future: Complete set by Frank Kennedy (mini ebook reader .txt) 📕

The other members of his earlier scout team raced alongside, plus four more he’d taken little time to know during the one-week hideaway.

“Three ships,” Rikard had told him as they packed their weapons. “If one or two of us go down, we’ll suffer heavy losses, but the other survivors will be together instead of splintered across the continent.” Rikard admitted he didn’t know which was the soundest strategy – split into as many groups as possible or consolidate. “I’m not a general, but I want to give us a real shot.”

“I don’t reckon they’ll listen to me after what happened,” Michael said. He blamed their predicament on himself. He screwed up by exposing his team to the exobiologist rather than maintaining cover. Rikard did not agree.

“They will follow you, Michael. You might not see it in yourself, but you are a born leader. Time to put away the comedian and take charge. Lead these people to safety. Kill the enemy until you can’t.”

“Copy that, dude.”

They shared a quiet few seconds amid the chaos. Michael remembered his first conversation with Rikard – two years ago in a parking bay in Rikard and Matthias’s New Stockholm landing.

The first ally he discovered on this side of the fold.

Michael hugged Rikard and organized his team. They fled into the mountain’s deep forests. Forty minutes later, an enemy Scramjet passed overhead.

The first explosions rifled through the pass in thunderous echoes, and an angry yellow glow mushroomed above the tree line where the outpost once stood. Michael hoped the bombardment lasted longer. He hoped the assassin team onboard would drop from the ship to search for and kill survivors. Every thirty seconds of stalling mattered.

“No. 1 asshole” whistled from his position on point and waved everyone forward to their ride. The escape vehicle was the smallest model Scram on the market, with room for twenty.

Michael had the codes for pixelating the bulkhead and triggering the flight cylinder. When he tapped his amp and dissolved the door, his team surged.

“Move it,” he ordered. “If we don’t haul ass in about two minutes, we’re gonna be a mess of crispy critters.”

He jumped onboard last, taking one final, horrified look at the fiery blossoms rising from the former outpost.

“Settle in,” he shouted as the bulkhead reconstituted. “This is gonna be a bumpy damn ride. Scrams ain’t my specialty.”

He tossed his rifle to Maya, who joined the other compatriots in stowing their heavy weapons and bolting themselves into still-seats. Michael jumped into the navigator’s chair. He tapped the positional control panel forward of the left armrest. The swivel pivoted then rose three feet. He double-tapped his amp, searching his admin stack for the catalyzer code to navigational controls. He threw out a cube and fingered it, entering an encrypted sequence.

The Scram became his, and Michael belonged to the Scram.

The ship’s features rained down from a dorsal port and wrapped him inside a holographic cylinder. Controls for everything beckoned his attention: Altitude, attitude, airspeed, pitch and yaw, Carbedyne stabilizers, nacelle fuel injection, meteorology, aerial topography, gravitational flux, directional sequencing, transponder configuration, orbital dynamics, and on it went. Michael had less than seven hours flying time in a Scram and never felt comfortable enough to add these ships to his professional services. He first trained on uplifts. Their flight ports were less imposing and required no cylinder.

Yet Michael needed only to remember Rikard’s challenge. Lead these people to safety.

He fingered the fuel injection sequence and pivoted to his fellow Solomon fighters.

“Everybody tucked in?”

Nods, thumbs up, no words.

“Hold on to your business,” he said as the Scram lurched. “And whatever you do, don’t throw up. I hate that shit.”

As the Scram rose, Michael tossed the rendezvous coordinates from his admin stack into the directional sequencing control. He took a long, deep breath. Once the Scram locked in its track and began forward acceleration, it would appear on the NAC’s stack grid. Visible. Trackable.

The next challenge: Hoping he understood how to pull off something he’d never tried before – blind flight. Only the real pros – Rikard and others like him – could do this in their sleep. The algorithm alone required ten steps and fifty program keys. The sequence had to be exact. His only hope rested in a stable, level flight pattern devoid of distractions from inside or out.

“What if I bust the algorithm?” He asked Rikard after receiving the navigation launch codes. “Will we be screwed?”

“You’ll be fine, Michael. Just keep your head about you and push the nacelles to their maximum. Ignore the warning sensors.”

“OK. Sounds like a plan. I reckon.”

He was not comforted.

Nothing that happened next made life any less terrifying.

A red beacon appeared on his aerial topography controls, which displayed a broad visual of the airspace fifty kilometers in any direction. This beacon showed an object five kilometers aft. It was accelerating. Transponder controls elevated to eye level.

Michael didn’t need to verify what he was seeing.

The Scramjet that blew the outpost to hell was racing on a new trajectory. It had locked on to Michael’s Scram, using the transponder as its guide. They were coming, armed with energy slews. Michael knew all about slews.

One close call was enough.

He pushed the nacelles to maximum.

“OK, God. I need a miracle. If you’re out there, how about doing me a bigtime solid? Just this once.”

Even as he said the words, Michael absorbed the truth his controls were revealing.

There would be no miracles today.

44

Marsche Compound

Ericsson Fjord, Scandinavian Consortium

C ELIA MARSCHE FOUND PRIVACY BEFORE anyone realized she disappeared. The binary communicator that linked her to Brother James began vibrating for the first time since their initial contact. The timing sent her into a fleeting panic, but she slunk into the shadows, leaving her guest behind. The household staff had