Escape From Asylonia, page 8
part #1 of The New War Series
Hours turned into days, and days into weeks, as David worked solidly on his plan. He slept when tired and ate when hungry. At all other times of the day and night, he worked.
Waking with the sun, he set to work on his health. Running only a few feet, and lifting just a meager few pounds at first, he gradually built up his strength and stamina while at the same time chipping away at his excess weight to reveal a svelte figure with a hint of muscle definition. Drenched in sweat following his morning workouts, David showered, changed, and headed out to work his day shift as a United Earth Force engineer. Hacking away at mechanical surgery in the cold, damp environs of the UEF hangars, David went to great pains not to get caught when stealing an array of essential tools and components. In the evenings, he combined his loot with the remains of both the F-19 and the salvage ship to create one fully functioning spacecraft.
When the ship was complete, David would bring it out after dark and teach himself to fly it with the same kind of skill he employed in Jetfighter 2. After a few hiccups, always necessitating a return to the shed and more welding, screwing and repairing, he got the hang of it. He was eventually able to race through silent streets and over fields, and with each session he would accelerate a little higher until at least he was trawling the outer-perimeters of space.
In any spare time he could find, David would study. He studied the cause and effects of electrical storms, the habitats and inhabitants of Asylonia, and the coordinates needed to reach the unreachable New World.
Even when he felt tired and his brain throbbed, David gave his downtime over to the Jet Fighter II game, hoping it would improve his reflexes in the throes of fatigue.
He talked regularly to the photographs of his late father which overran the house, and he sought counsel in the image of General Noah Fallon, speaking with a confidence that grew as each day passed towards the point where any further preparations would have been little more than excuses to delay the inevitable.
Bounding out of bed before daybreak on a cold Saturday morning, David felt his nerves swell with fear and excitement. He had reached the point of no return. Either he did it today, or else he would never do it. Slipping into a UEF jumpsuit now several sizes too big for him, he looked up at the poster of Wing Commander Attreus.
I’m with you, son. The unmovable lips of his father seemed to say. Every stepping stone from here to The New World, I’m with you. I have faith in you.
Nodding somberly at the poster, David turned away to make his final preparations.
The ship was ready and armed with supplies, weapons and ammunition. His father's space suit had been adjusted, and on the sides of his helmet he had painted reminders of his mission. The left bore the initials NF / AA / SA, the right had the words 'One Earth' tattooed over a crudely drawn globe.
He checked the fuel and water supplies, ran tests of the onboard computers, and double-checked his space suit. When all that was complete and there was nothing more to be done, David Attreus retired to his bed and slept a long, easy sleep. On the stroke of midnight, sirens infiltrated his dream. He woke, thumped the alarm clock, and drew a deep breath.
XIV.
The midnight air lingered, hot and calm. United Earth Force Engineer David Attreus stepped from the back door of his family’s farm house wearing an orange and silver space suit which had seen more missions than he could ever hope to. He paced slowly towards the work shed, the helmet tucked under his arm reflecting the glow of distant stars he would soon pass. Walking around the perimeter of the ship he had christened Attreus One, David felt a rumbling in his gut. His mind had been made up. There was no going back. Even if he should never return to Earth, even if he crashed, or was captured, or killed, it would be worth it.
If he tried and failed, he could fail with the knowledge that he had done everything he could. If he turned back, nobody would ever know. Nobody except himself, and he would live out the rest of his days knowing that he turned his back on his one opportunity. Where so many let their dreams and ambitions fester in a great big bubbling pot marked If Only, where so many did nothing more with their ideas than occasionally write them down and curse the universe for making them unachievable, he had done things differently. He had found a way despite everything, including his own limitations. Yes, even if he failed, it would be worth every single moment of disaster if, somewhere out there, Sherri Attreus would feel a sense of pride in hearing that her son had at least tried. David swallowed anxiously as he slipped on his helmet and promised himself, his mother, and his father, that he would not fail.
XV.
The small, pebble-shaped, hand-held computer he had prized from the butchered corpse of a Temüjin warrior lay tucked into David's work belt. Unable to translate its actual name, he had begun to refer to it as Ganesha; Remover of Obstacles, Lord of Beings, Patron Saint of Kicking Ass. He had rigged the device to compliment its original features with a host of new functions, ranging from the absurdly complex to the mind-numbingly mundane, like opening the hatch of Attreus One and firing her up.
A nimble thumb brushed against a round, raised button. A wicked snapping noise whacked against the walls of the barn as the bow of the ship prized open like the toothless jaws of some great beast, its tongue unravelling against the bottom lip to reveal a flight of corrugated steel steps. The top lip quivered with the dull amber of a stand-by light. David stepped into the mouth of his creation, and lowered himself into a snug pilot's chair covered in a crude patchwork of leather scraps.
With another gentle caress of Ganesha, the jaws of Attreus One snapped shut. A trail of lights flashed, each one dim enough to help him penetrate deep space undetected, and yet strong enough, when working in unison, to help him see around the cockpit. He adjusted his helmet securely to the valves which lined his space suit, and settled Ganesha down into her holding place on the outer-rim of Attreus One's yoke. Reaching overhead, David flipped several switches; air supply, fuel supply, monitors, navigation, autopilot, all in good working order and ready for take off.
A wall of visiscreens, like a scaled-down version of the ones in his bedroom, surrounded the cockpit. They flashed into action as he dug the tips of his gloves into a row of controls, breathing life into the ship.
The fire roared in David's stomach. His heart yammered unremittingly and his nerves stood on end, pushing goosebumps up through his cold skin. Steadying his twitching fingers on the yoke, his knuckles turning white beneath black gloves, David lowered his head in prayer. His slow breathing made a muffled scratching sound against the inside of his helmet as he spoke in a low, hushed tone.
'One world. One planet. All nations in a United Earth. In the name of mankind, may we return to this planet safely. Amen,' his lips curled into the slightest of smiles. 'Alright, Dad, let's do this.'
Attreus One leapt six feet into the air, slamming David back into his chair. The bulge of the headrest jammed at the edge of his skull. His nerves vibrated from head to toe. Timidly teasing the yoke, David made out of the yard and cruised several miles through town along a wide, curving road. Gradually, he picked up speed, tugging on the yoke as the smooth, torpedo-shaped ship growled into the black of night.
Eighty miles from his home and moving at around one hundred and fifty miles per hour, David made a graceful hundred and eighty degree turn, then, with his heart in his throat and a dull ache tugging at his stomach muscles, headed back the way he had just come. Attreus One gained in both speed and momentum with each passing second, taking David high above the houses, the military towers, the clouds, the planet, until the jaws of his ship gnashed at the barrier of space.
The thunder in his guts gave way to a piercing emptiness. Calm crept in through relaxed veins. He reached for Ganesha and softly caressed another dimple upon her delicate cheek. The silence of space was troubled by a deep, booming sigh as Attreus One vacated the Earth’s atmosphere.
David rested his neck against the back of the chair and eased his grip on the yoke. With a lazy swipe of his gloved palm, he toggled the autopilot settings and set a course for The New World of Asylonia.
XVI.
Two days and two nights passed with barely an incident. When he sensed Temüjin or UEF ships on his radar, David dropped low among the flotsam and jetsam of space like a child playing Hide and Seek, eventually emerging again into a clear stretch, and engaging the autopilot.
By the second day, fatigue began to make its presence felt. Razor-sharp pain formed an upturned semi-circle above his eyes, pushing down on the eyelids and spreading out at both sides, saturating his muscles with a blunt ache and making them heavy. The pain moved on through his stomach, spreading its darkness, and coating his lungs with some invisible substance which forced his breathing to slow down. Then it moved up further, along his throat, and prized his jaws open into loud, elongated yawns that he no longer bothered to cover up. As much as he had prepared for fatigue, two days and two nights without sleep proved too much for the inexperienced pilot.
Attreus One cruised over fields of light and dust, sailed, unharmed and undetected, beneath plasma storms, and around the perimeter of several dry, uninhabited rocks. All the while, David lay in the fetal position and drifted into the soft, comfortable doze that rests on the edge of sleep’s cocoon. In a dream, he saw himself landing on Asylonia, and finding Noah Fallon there, all ready and waiting for him, as though fate had everything mapped out for them and this was just the way things were supposed to go. He could almost hear the General’s words of thanks as he helped him aboard the ship, and he could definitely feel the lump in his gut as an angry blast rocked the starboard bow and snapped him out of half-sleep.
David clambered to his hands and knees as a second blow pounded the port side like an iron-gloved boxer pummeling the ribs of an outmatched sparring partner. The ship reeled, tumbling down on a collision course with a hot-tempered asteroid, tearing through the cosmos, taking out anything in its path, destined for destruction. David dived at the yoke and wrestled the ship out of free fall. He nudged the flat of his black-gloved thumb into a switch on the control panel, powering up the visiscreen to get a better view of his aggressor.
Three Temüjin ships had surrounded the area and were racing along with him, one each at either side of him, the third bringing up the rear, breathing fire, herding Attreus One into the waiting jaws of the asteroid.
The initial blast from the Temüjin had caught every bit of him at once, but apart from a streak of heat across the back of the neck, it did its worst damage to his joints. Swaths of pain spread across his elbows and knees, drowning them with an acute aching sensation that ran deep into the core of his muscles and squeezed the bile from his stomach up into the pit of his chest.
Pained grunts vibrated across the roof of his mouth, sputtering through clenched teeth like the clamorous snores of some giant, dozing creature. His hands seized the yoke tightly, the pressure sending gulfs of adrenaline through him, numbing the pain. An extreme clarity consumed him. Time decelerated into an almost serene lag, as though the ship were being drawn into a vacuum. The blasts and shots outside the ship were muffled and low, dying on the outer edge of the vacuum and popping out of existence as David sent Attreus One sailing under the hostile asteroid. Swiftly looping back over it, the asteroid raced on in search of a less agile foe.
Hovering millions of miles into space, he faced the Temüjin in a Mexican standoff. A second later, the three enemy ships fired, and a flock of heat-seeking missiles gave chase.
David saw the warnings before him, and withdrew into his own mind. The slow-moving vacuum, that had previously burst at the sight of the missiles, grew large again. David felt it consume him whole. In its empty silence, the voice of Wing Commander Atteus loomed large.
You’ve got to keep your head, son. Keep your head. Keep it slow, make it calm. A moment of panic and you’re a gonner, but you don’t need to panic, David, not you. Not now. Make it calm. Everything you need is within you, it’s always been within you. Always. All you have to do is channel it, David. Channel it now. It’s now or never...now or never...
'Now,' David groaned. ‘Show time, slimeballs.’
The missiles cut away at the void between the taupe coating of their coned tips, and the blank brim of Attreus One’s dented stern. They circumnavigated the Temüjin triad, the three ships bobbing in space like cackling hyena with death lust in their bellies, and raced through the jet-black nothingness at speeds which made them visible only by the wispy contrails they left in their wake.
Ignoring the needle-like stabbing at his elbows, and rolling his neck around to loosen the streak of stiffening pain that had rusted over it, David steadied his command of the ship. His nerves settled into a low buzz in his stomach. His hands rested, confident and unshakable, on the controls. The deadly missiles chased after him, baying for blood. The Temüjin scattered, firing shots as they did so. Each shot plopped into the abyss as David steered out of their path and fired back, surrounding himself in a blanket of gunfire, swooping below the underside of the ship closest to him, and setting off in pursuit of the asteroid.
Still the missiles gained on him, tracing intricate lines through the atmosphere, looping and threading about themselves in a way which David would have thought kind of beautiful in their randomness, if he had not known that their course was deliberate, and designed to end with his demise. He was sure he could feel them, breathing fire on the back of his neck, and clawing at his cold spine.
With fear and adrenaline pounding in his heart, and his spacesuit clinging to his body with sweat, David caught up with the asteroid and again dived low, circling the beast from north to south, east to west. Attreus One gained speed until she was racing around the asteroid faster than she had ever moved in training, keeping up with the flaming rock as it ripped through space, spiralling around it, the way the moon circled Earth as Earth worked its way around twin suns. The missiles chased faster still.
Attreus One shuddered and bumped in the jets of ice trailing from the asteroid. The leather patches of the pilot’s seat began to tear away from their seems, exposing the rubble of its sponge cushioning, flapping at the seat of David’s pants as the ship’s insane, unstoppable speed bounced him around in the pilot’s chair, tossing him up so that the dome of his helmet crunched against the roof, and thrusting him back down into the bare sponge with equal force. The terrible idea that there would be no way out of this, that the trio of missiles marked with his name would pursue him to the end of infinity, began to surface in a subconscious that was no longer serene but frothing over with fear, and with the embryo of the one thing his father’s ghostly voice had told him to stay clear of. He would keep going, of course he would. He would make it calm, and he would keep going as long as he he had breath in his throbbing lungs, but what if that wasn’t enough? What if the missiles could keep it up longer than he was physically capable of doing?
Now or never, David. Now or never.
Blinking fiercely to exorcise the thought, David screamed an anguished scream and slammed the ship into reverse. The thrust plastered him to his seat. Attreus One went hurtling backwards, ducking under the missiles as their momentum carried them forward. Through hot, streaming eyes, David watched as they shot off, far beyond the malignant space rock, only to loop back on themselves and continue on in pursuit of their prey.
David lunged forward in front of the asteroid so that he was trapped, with the asteroid’s ferocious jaws chomping at his tale, and the unabated Temüjin missiles rushing headlong towards him. As the missiles came close to impact, he felt his nerves, all standing on end, threatening to burst through the icy rivets of his gooseflesh. His veins contracted, strangling tense muscles and making his heart boom, as he bombed low at the last possible second. The G-force pulled his stomach into his throat. His eyes widened, watching the asteroid intercept the blow of the missiles, both colliding together in a brilliant explosion of fire and ice, rock and metal, gas and liquid.
A shard of stone spiralled through space, striking the bow of Attreus One. A shower of bullets rained down from above. Rocked by the impact of both, David growled and groaned as his ship tossed him painfully from his seat.
He struggled for control, teeth grinding and eyes watering beneath his helmet, hands quivering at the yoke, steering the ship deeper into the chaos. The hail of bullets ricocheted against the ship. David fired back as hard as he could. A mighty roar rumbled in the back of his throat, drowned out by the deafening clamours of gunfire and explosion. He shot against the engine of the lead Temüjin ship and sent it spiralling to its end. A second chunk of asteroid beat against bow of Attreus One, pushing it towards the defeated Temüjin ship. Both sped towards each other. David’s lips smacked wildly against one another as his chin bounced from his stiff neck. His arms shook uselessly against the yoke. The ship hammered the Temüjin vessel, and a spike of pure pain rocketed along his spine. The awful scream that tore his jaws open was drowned out by the horrific noise of both ships locking together in one giant, tangled mass.
Further asteroid debris struck. The force sent them tumbling through the cosmos like unwilling dance partners, cutting up the sequined dance floor of space in an aggressive tango. David bounced around the free-falling ship with arms flailing and legs kicking. Still he fought, with a cold-hearted determination broiling beneath blistering eyes and cries of pain. The force of the fall ripped Ganesha from her perch and flung her towards him like a speeding bullet. The computer smashed into the skull of David Attreus and knocked him out cold.
XVII.
The siamese ships wheeled recklessly through the blackness, spinning an ugly, violent pirouette into the waiting mouth of a the electrical storm.
Attreus One passed the prone body of her pilot around from one side of the ship to the other with abandon. David pinballed from bow to stern, stern to bow, unwilling collecting cuts and bruises, and the seeds of a concussion, en route.
