Finding Darkness

Chapter 62 End of the beginning

"Claw, where is the nearest fighter bay?" Malachi asked.

He'd been running for only a few seconds when he realized he had no idea where he was, or where he was going.

"Bay four six three is three miles from our current position." An arrow appeared in his line of sight. "This will lead you to it."

Following the dancing arrow, Malachi arrived at the launch bay in no more than thirty seconds. Once he entered the bay itself, he saw that it was without power. With a thought, the overhead lights came on and the atmospheric shield sprang up.

Leaping into the closest Talon, he went through preflight in record time. When the engine took more time, than he thought it should to spool up, he gripped the control stick and pumped energy from his suit into the systems. The engine whined high for a second, then settled into its deafening roar.

Interfacing his suit into every system the craft had, he brought up the communication channels. Selecting the fighter to fighter channel.

"This is Hawk one to all Hawk flight. I will be weightless in a few seconds. Does anyone have eyes on the targets?"

"Nice to have you with us, sir." Malachi recognized the voice of Jeremy, "Hooter" Nickles, one of his flight leaders.

"Nice to be back, Jer. What have we got?"

"We have nearly ninety bogies inbound. They're in four groups of twenty and they're coming in straight as an arrow. I've got sixty Talons as top cover, while sixteen of us go straight in and try to disrupt their formation."

"Switch it, have the sixty go in, keep sixteen for top cover. These things want nothing more than to bleed us dry and are more than willing to lose ninety some of their pilots to do it." Malachi's Talon shot out of the launch bay. Pulling hard on the stick, he hugged the surface of the nest until he broke over its northern pole and his radar could give him a clear picture of the battle.

He'd always distrusted computers. Sure, they could give him a three-dimensional picture of the battle, complete with moving images. He, on the other hand, felt that he needed to see the battle, to feel what was going on. The computer would give you all the information, sure, but in a very antiseptic way. In order to fight a battle, a man had to feel it, touch it, be in the middle of it. Only then could he fight it with the best odds of bringing the most of his forces home alive.

Pushing his fighter to the knifes edge of light speed, he covered the three hundred thousand miles in a under ten seconds. At that speed, his gravity wake was thrown out behind him like the wake of a speed boat on a flat pond. Throttling back, he took his gravity drive offline and drifted into position, taking station at the head of the sixteen fighters flying high cover. Switching from gravity drive to main propulsion his ion drive flared to life.

"Falcon one, this is Hawk one. What is your status?" He asked, his suit automatically routing his voice to his wanted recipient.

"We're holding station, thirty degrees relative of your position. The cloaks are holding. I don't think they've spotted us as of yet."

Malachi took a second to look at the display overlaid on his HUD. The Falcons were his ace in the hole. As long as the Rougarian pilots don't see them, they should be able to catch them between two forces and wipe them out.

Watching out his cockpit canopy, he saw the first volley of missiles streak from the wave of Talons, followed seconds later by another, and then still another. Missiles had to be launched while still a considerable distance from the enemy. Even at ranges that could be measured in the hundreds of thousands to millions of miles, when your missiles moved at close to the speed of light, there was no way to fire one once the range closed to cannon range.