Nebulae and Cosmic Filaments - A Second Anthology of SF SD Shorts

Part 4 - Atmospheric Burn

Mram'met was about to fire the Dragonsong's engines up for the flight back to the cruiser group when the comm system came to life.

"You are cleared to continue your mission, Dragonsong," the voice from the Khe'mek indicated.  "Admiral Trantos is attempting to clear the Tah'ren cruisers now."

The space above the city of Varnor'krel was now a furious storm of fiery exchange as a quartet of battered-looking Vorhanese battleships engaged the smaller, but more powerful Tah'ren vessels.  Even as Mram'met and Gar'kano caught sight of the battle when the Dragonsong climbed out of the ice ring, one of the Vorhanese ships took several energy beams to its forward shields, causing them to collapse and let through a hail of missiles.  

Which, as they impacted, instantly turned the battleship's forward section into so much scrap metal.  Mram'met winced as the battleship's primary power grid overloaded, causing its beleaguered forward section to explode.  And, in turn, the massive craft twisted to the side as the explosion pushed the craft off-course.

"Scratch one Vorhanese battleship," Gar'kano said with a grim twitch of his whiskers.

"They're doing their part," Mram'met fatalistically pointed out.  "So we can do ours."  Then his fingers were dancing once more across the control surfaces and the Dragonsong shot forward at full sub-light speed.

With the cruisers taken care of, at least for the moment, and the slavers nowhere in sight, the Dragonsong slipped into the atmosphere and made hard for their targeted landing point just outside the city.  There, according to the brief, was a small village where their quarry was said to live.  Hopefully the Tah'ren occupiers were so busy with Trantos' assault, they wouldn't notice a handful of scoutships invading their territory and making planetfall.  With luck they'd all meet up at the village, secure the asset and get offworld before the Tah'rens were done destroying Trantos' Eleventh Fleet.

Then the Dragonsong bucked and began to shift with their entry into the deeper layers of the atmosphere.

"We're in the flux," Gar'kano reported, his hands moving quickly over the controls as images shifted and slipped across their monitors.  "Scans of the target area show heavy storm activity and precipitation."

"Good."  Mram'met sent the Dragonsong angling directly towards the vortex of dark clouds now visible over the city.  "We can use it as cover."  He looked over at his co-pilot.  "Angle the forward shields to soak up any released kinetic energy the storm throws at us.  The less noise we make, the better."

"Acknowledged."  Gar'kano's hands were a blur as he adjusted the heavy-particle field giving their vessel a measure of protection, to better absorb the surge of energy the storm was presenting them.

Then they were in the clouds and the scoutship's bucking became more pronounced as she began fighting her way through the winds and rain.  Deftly Mram'met guided their craft through the worst of it until, with a shimmer of light from the city below, they broke through the cloud cover.

Immediately the big cat grimaced at what he saw.  The last time he had been on Nesset Four some ten years before, it was a sparkling jewel of harmony with nature, the cities graceful, the land green with life.

Now the surrounding forests had been razed to make room for strip mines that were methodically ravaging the land in a determined quest to steal the planet's mineral riches.  The air, once crystal clear and pure, was filled with smoke and particulates from the machines that ripped apart the ground.  And Varnor'krel, once a white, gleaming sculpture of towers and parks, was now a squalor of rubble and ruin, with nearly half the city unlit because of a collapse infrastructure.

"These Tah'ren are beasts," Gar'kano growled from his co-pilot's chair, speaking out loud what Mram'met was thinking.  "They even do violence to nature herself in their greedy quest for more."