“Not a problem, sir.”
Baek turned and left, closed the office door on the way out.
Chapter Twenty
Capellan Marine Pilot Michael Stovall took up a light jog as he made his way down the flight line to his Interceptor. The sun had just come up and the solar flares were clipping the atmosphere. He didn’t feel any excessive solar radiation but he didn’t want to be exposed any longer than necessary. Mandarin’s orbit would soon bring it right under the solar flares. Going outside unprotected would soon be harmful or fatal. Today, it was just enough interference to make sensors and targeting systems unreliable at standoff ranges.
This mission was basic. Flight Control’s ground-based sensors had detected a Mosh drone but were unable to engage it. The drone flew in before sunrise and was on station at high altitude to scan the area around Mandarin City, the capitol city of Mandarin. It had to be on its own, pre-programmed to get on station and likely programmed to fly back to its base after sunset, loaded with useful information for Mosh tactical planners. Stovall would fly up, get a visual, shoot it down and then come on back to base and then take the rest of the day off.
His ground crew stuffed him in his plane and the crew chief gave him a thumb up. Stovall taxied to the end of the runway, saw the light on the control tower turn green, then accelerated along the runway and angled his nose up to eight hundred mils and shot into the sky at three times the speed of sound. He stayed on vector and leveled off and saw the drone to his left, twelve hundred meters away. The lights of his comms gear showed red and amber status indicators, so he didn’t bother with trying to report. He’d do that later, in person.
He made a wide turn and came back toward the drone and gave it three good blasts with his dual medium lasers. One blast was sufficient but he wanted to slice up the debris as well. Out of habit, he nosed up a bit to get over where the target had been and then went into a shallow dive, looking back over each shoulder, back and forth, head on a swivel. To his high left rear he saw a bright streak, a trail like a tiny meteor might make. But it changed direction and vectored toward him. Stovall climbed and rolled so he could get a better look at the object. Looking straight up through his transparent canopy he identified a boxy, awkward Mosh space fighter.
It fired its lasers at him, narrowly missing. Stovall then swung around behind it, to follow the Mosh space fighter in its shallow dive. Easy money, the Mosh spacecraft had no atmospheric control surfaces, just flat surfaces causing immense drag. The space fighter was sluggish here, this deep in the planet’s gravity well. Stovall judged that the Mosh fighter couldn’t get out of its dive, and its dive was steepening; it was doomed to crash.
Stovall matched its mach 3.2 speed and casually lined up his rail gun’s visual sights. He said, “Dumbass,” and fired a two second burst square into the Mosh fighter’s flat rear panel. The space fighter disintegrated. The debris passed under Stovall’s Interceptor but the ejection pod which contained the Mosh pilot in his detached cockpit managed to clip the tip of Stovall’s left stabilizer. He slowed to under Mach 1 and felt the aerospacecraft’s new flight characteristics. He then looked down at the terrain and realized he was vectored toward Mosh territory.
A warning light flashed. Stovall looked and saw that he’d lost a great deal of atmospheric thruster fuel, an entire two blocks jettisoned by the Interceptor’s computer when it thought a collision was imminent. Sensors, unreliable because of the solar flares, caused the computer to make that mistake. Stovall did some quick mental calculations and realized he couldn’t make it back to base. He looked for a place to land, or ditch.
Ground fire greeted him, some Mosh anti-aircraft guns near their front line of advance. Stovall accelerated and climbed, avoided the attack easily. But he was now over Mosh territory. Better to ditch in the rear area, far away from front-line troops who’d have the good sense to kill first and think later. Stovall found a soybean field with a wooded area at its far end. He flew low, fifty meters off the ground, and when he was over the field he punched out of his Interceptor. The cockpit separated, detected the atmosphere and deployed its parachute. It set him down in the woods, the landing hard enough to stun him but not hard enough to injure him. Stovall shook his head and listened for the explosive sound of the Interceptor self-destructing. Too late to hear that, some time had passed while he was blacked out. He then raised his canopy and took off his harness, assed the detached cockpit.
He stood on his seat and looked around, grateful for the woods that screened his position, gave him shade from the sun and its flares. He grabbed the survival pack and hung it on his back, removed his flight helmet and put on his ground-troop brain bucket, checked the load of his sidearm and climbed down to the ground. He used his feet to scuff aside some leaves to clear a patch of dirt and knelt and drew some lines, figured he was forty klicks inside Mosh territory. He could cover that distance in a couple of nights, moving at night to avoid those damned solar rays. He knew that after three or four more days, the flares would be bad enough to fry him at night unless he found a rat hole to hide in…for the next two weeks. Too long.
He stood and ate an energy bar and then started walking. Better to get out of here now, risk today’s negligible exposure to the radiation in order to cover some ground. He’d just left the tree line and stepped between rows of soy beans when he heard a loud pop and felt shoved from the left, hard. He fell on his right side and rolled, entangled in a net. Two Mosh warriors smiled down at him. One held his sword at the ready, the other held a large-mouthed shotgun-like weapon. The second Mosh opened his weapon’s breach and inserted a cartridge that looked more lethal than a net-capture round. He pointed the weapon at Stovall while the first Mosh used his sword to cut away the netting. He then sheathed his sword and removed Stovall’s pack, gun belt and helmet, and then lifted Stovall to his feet.
The Mosh then drew a shock stick and prodded Stovall to get moving toward the road at the edge of the field. Stovall said, “You guys speak Standard?”
The Mosh Warrior said, “Yes,” and poked Stovall with the shock stick again. “Shut up.”
They walked a hundred meters along the road and had Stovall climb up into the back of a light duty truck. After a few minutes, four more Mosh warriors came and got in the truck and it carried them back to a Brigade-sized headquarters camp. There, Stovall was bound and gagged and blindfolded and tossed into the back of another truck that carried him and a squad of wounded Mosh warriors through the night, arriving at the outskirts of the ruined city of Cherry Fork just as the sun was rising.
Stovall was unloaded and untied, his blindfold and gag removed. He stood for a moment and then an older Mosh warrior walked up and said, “Follow me,” and then turned and walked away. Stovall gave it some thought, shrugged, followed the old warrior into a tent. The Mosh pointed at a fold-up chair by a field table and said, “Sit.”
Stovall sat. A tall, young, full-figured blonde woman in a leather bodice and knee-length red skirt came forward and put a glass of water and a field ration on the table and said, “Eat,” and stared at Stovall. He took a sip of water and reached for the ration. She turned and left.
The old Mosh warrior said, “I am Olaf, second son of Hallgarth, the High Chief of the Five Clans of Mandarin.” He pointed at Stovall. “You are my bondsman.”
Stovall’s face scrunched, confused.
The High Chief said, “You are not familiar with our customs. You have proven yourself worthy, you and your Interceptor pilots. You have fought well and with honor and have killed many of my warriors. You are now my bondsman for one year and during that year you will make up for those losses.”