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Writer
Join Date: Aug 2007
Location: Pennsylvania
Gender: Male
Posts: 47
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Raven's Wings (Sci-Fi; 2,000 words)
This is a short story I entered for a sci-fi contest on another site. The theme of the contest was to write a fantasy/sci-fi story about a Phoenix that was 2,000 words or less. I thought I'd post it here for some entertainment/feedback. Enjoy!
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Raven Fairhurst didn't bother to pray as her FireHawk shot out of the Champlain's launch bay. She had long given up on divine intervention. Punching a button on the control panel, the sleek ship steered itself into a perfect formation with the other fighters swarming around the huge starship. There, she waited like a reluctant raptor, hunting for prey that she hoped she would never find.
"This sucks," she complained to the cockpit. Shadowing the lone star-cruiser was the most stressful part of her job as a fighter pilot. A lot of responsibility lay in the belly of the giant spacecraft. Raven's heart jumped at every stray asteroid or wandering bit of space junk that crossed into their sensor field.
She leered out the starboard window at the giant nebula, a radiant smear on the black canvas of space. To the Champlain's passengers, it was a beautiful display of the magnificence of outer space. To Raven, it was a celestial headache. Their journey to Aereus took them too near to the cloud of rampant electromagnetic energy for their tactical sensors work properly. They had to rely on shorter-range proximity detectors. In terms of the vastness of open space, they could have been flying with their eyes shut.
Their course had been changed out of necessity. Damaged life support systems would only sustain the Champlain for another two years. So, the safe path had been abandoned for the short one.
She recounted the green specks of her fellow United Republic fighters on her IFF display. Her eye caught the holo-pic taped to the console; the image was of a younger, happier Raven, surrounded by her family. It had been taken on Terra, at a time when her biggest problem was getting caught topless with a cute guy in the hydroponics fields.
The image of her older sister, Katherine, seemed to smile at her. Though they shared similar physiology, including long auburn hair, Raven had inherited her mother's huge, brown eyes while Katie had gotten Dad's narrow baby-blues. Katie had always joked that, if Mom was going to name her sister after a bird, she should have called her Owl. Raven had always thought her Mom was a flake for saddling her with a name that had garnered more sophomoric jokes than she could count.
"Stop it. Don't think ill of the dead." Raven turned back to her heads-up. All clear.
Before Terra had succumbed to disease and the devastation of war, healthy survivors had been divided by genetic fitness and herded into seed-ships, which were little more than glorified interstellar fuel tanks. They were blasted into space towards the planet, Aereus, to fortify the only remaining human colony in existence. People, full of hopes and dreams, had been corralled like cattle, segregated by pertinent nucleotide sequences to ensure the survival of the race. Raven lamented the fact that, in humanity's effort to save itself, it had become less human, reducing its value to that of viable genetic material.
Her family, so separated, had been sent on different ships. Perhaps, it was simply the girls' eye colors that had landed them on the same craft. Within months of launch, all five of the other seed ships had been systematically destroyed. Raven, Katie, and her sister's unborn baby were all that remained of the Fairhurst family. And, that ship was humanity's last hope.
Of the Fairhurst girls, Katie had always been the sensible, grounded one. Raven, the hot-headed, emotional one. The war had switched their roles. Raven remained strong while Katie had fallen to pieces, having lost not only her parents, but also her husband. The younger sister had taken on the brunt of Katie's grief. Half a year of pain and hopelessness had left Raven bitter and empty.
"Maybe…it's not even worth—"
An electronic trill sounded in her headphones. A red blip streaked onto Raven's IFF display, cutting an ardent streak towards the Champlain. Another appeared. Then, dozens more. From all sides, unidentified objects raced towards them. Raven flipped a switch.
"All positions! Incoming fighters! Alert the Champlain, it's a freakin' ambush!"
Kimanu fighters descended upon the Champlain like agitated wasps, cutting angry paths through the vacuum of space. The human seed ship responded, its halo of escort fighters stripping off to engage the threat. A stream of small ships trickled out of the Champlain's tail bay to join them.
As a species, the Kimanu were energetic creatures; agile brains inside serpentine heads acted like organic computers. They owed their remarkable reflexes to, among other factors, their phylogeny on the jungle-planet of Airan-Kur, which boasted an atmosphere that was over four-fifths oxygen. Ozone, pumped directly into the Kimanu space suits, was to them like cocaine was to humans.
Years before, human and Kimanu had clashed outside the Terran solar system. The United Republic fleet had been trounced; the silicone processors of the old droid fighters were no match for the vibrant, living computers inside the skulls of the Kimanu.
But, despite their remarkable minds, Kimanu combat tactics were simple and single-minded. Raven had once flown against a rogue Kimanu fighter pilot, and knew how human creativity and sneakiness could overcome their preternatural dexterity. However, the view on her IFF display showed that they were outnumbered four-to-one.
"This is gonna be ugly," she predicted as plasma blasts cut into the Republic sorties. A FireHawk disintegrated silently outside her port view. Raven urged hers into a sharp diagonal descent, cutting across the path of oncoming fighters. Flying in a wide arc, she cut her way behind them. She was not concerned with pretty, predictable formations; she knew time was on the enemy's side.
Kimanu engineers, masters of electromagnetic projection, had refined the art of direct heat-to-energy conversion. Their fighters bore no messy fuel; instead they were powered by banks of closed, superconductive coils that acted like massive capacitors. They recharged their fighter craft simply by flying them through an energy field projected between two power-generating ships. In this way, Kimanu fighters could recharge in full flight, fighting as long as the main reactors could pump out power.
The energy field also caused Republic fighter controls to go haywire if they dared to venture between the heavily-shielded power ships. Defeating the Kimanu force was a matter of destroying their fighters quickly, before one's fuel and firepower ran low. Raven winced at the number of red dots on her tactical screen as a frightened lump grew in her throat.
"This sucks," she growled, skirting in behind the Kimanu lines. Their formation did not change. "One fighter's not a threat to your computer-brained tactics, eh?" She flung a barrage of missiles and laser blasts into their midst, sending several enemy craft into oblivion. Their manicured flocks scattered, throwing the battle space into chaos. Raven smiled; pandemonium was her playground.
Her FireHawk swerved and swooped around excited swarms of Kimanu, zig-zagging a harebrained path through their ranks. She fired almost without discrimination. Two more enemy ships fell to her reckless blaster shots. Raven checked her display again. Too many green dots were missing.
"Damn it!" Raven veered towards a tight cluster of enemies, spraying them with rapid fire pulses of deadly light. Some veered away. Some disintegrated. Damaged or destroyed did not matter to her, as long as they could do no harm to the Champlain.
Raven's fighter jolted with a deafening bang, the metal hull groaning in protest. She checked her status display. Her rear shields were bleeding energy like a wounded animal.
"Crap! This is bad!" She dove into a tight turn. Flicking a switch, she cut hard to starboard and up, curling into the path of the Kimanu formation that had gotten behind her.
She pressed a trigger and launched a missile at the head of the pack. The fighter exploded, a chunk of its fuselage smashing into a second spacecraft. The damaged Kimanu fighter careened towards one of the power ships. Instead of smashing on the stout shields, the fighter craft passed through them, crashing into the ship itself. A black gap in the iridescent shield yawned open for a moment before seeping shut.
"Their shields open for one of their own! That's good!" An angry alarm flashed red on her console. "That's bad!" Her FireHawk shook. The shield power was nearly gone. Wisps of smoke trickled into the cockpit. Raven had but one missile left. "Oh, crap...." The gravity of her fate pinned her to the seat. Returning to the Champlain was impossible. Ejection would be fatal. "I'm already dead."
An enemy fighter streaked by, heading for the power field. Raven throttled forward, racing in behind it. One by one she flipped switches. Communications. Life support. Even shields. Everything went off. All power was spent for speed alone.
"What would great-grandpa call this? A 'drag race?'" she asked the dead display, her voice quavering with fear and the shuddering of her spacecraft.
She unsheathed her service blaster from the holster on her belt as her quarry steered for the glowing veil of energy. Raven launched her last missile into the rear pulsor of the Kimanu fighter. It lurched, tumbling impotently in flight.
Tears smeared on the cheek pads of her helmet as she aimed her blaster forward. Raven fired four times, shooting into the FireHawk's control panel, which replied with a plume of sparks. With no avionics to go awry in the energy field, her spaceship had become a giant missile.
The crippled Kimanu fighter passed through the sheet of energy, and then through the shields, crashing into the power ship.
"I love you, Katie!" Raven howled as her craft threaded the shrinking hole in the shields and stabbed into the hull of the power ship. The Republic fighter's burning fuel collided with the oxygen-rich atmosphere inside the Kimanu vessel. The detonation tore the massive spacecraft apart.
Time had changed hands. The United Republic ships flew in wide arcs as the enemy fighters steadily lost power. FireHawks swept the space around the Champlain of the helpless Kimanu.
* * *
The Champlain descended to the platform, its tired hull creaking under its own weight. Air hissed from landing pad pistons as it settled low to the ground. Crowds of Aereus colonists thronged the platform to greet their salvation, delivered from Terra.
A boarding ramp telescoped down to the platform. Space-wearied passengers lumbered down it, wincing in the bright sun. For the first time in years, they breathed a real atmosphere and tested their legs under the pull of natural gravity. Smiles and tears abounded. Some bent and kissed the platform in deference.
At the top of the ramp stood a little girl in a sunny yellow dress, twisting a knot of her auburn hair with a nervous finger. In her other hand, she clutched a toy FireHawk starfighter. She surveyed the ground suspiciously with big, brown eyes. An older, blue-eyed version of her stepped out of the crowd.
"Come on, sweetie." The woman nudged the resistant toddler.
"No." The girl scowled.
"We have to go."
The child stomped a foot, crossing her arms. "No!"
Katie Fairhurst kneeled, looking into her daughter's wide, petulant eyes. "This is our new home, honey. We have to get off."
"I don't wanna!"
Katie sighed. "Raven, come." She guided the grudging toddler down the ramp. People waved and saluted them. Everybody knew of her sister, and of her sacrifice. And, although the official call-sign of the ship had remained unchanged, Republic pilots had rechristened her, the Raven.
At the bottom of the ramp, the girl crouched, poking at the ground and inspecting the dirty stain it had left on her finger.
"Wass dat?" she pointed the soiled digit at her mother.
"It's dirt."
"Eww," Raven said, wiping her finger on her dress.
"Yeah, your aunt wasn't very fond of the ground, either." Katie looked up into the brilliant blue skies that had long been but a dream. Tears swelled in her eyes. "Just promise me you'll stay out of the hydroponics fields, okay?"
"Okay, Mommy," came Raven's reply. Katie laughed.
__________________
Ted
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Mathematics are well and good but nature keeps dragging us around by the nose. ~Albert Einstein
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