Chimera Company - Deep Cover 4 Read online

  SEASON-2: DEEP COVER

  ISSUE-4

  Copyright © Tim C. Taylor 2019

  Artwork by Vincent Sammy

  Published by Human Legion Publications

  All Rights Reserved

  For a free Tim C. Taylor starter library, join the Legion at HumanLegion.com

  Welcome to Chimera Company

  Welcome to Issue #4 of Chimera Company Season 2. That's Catkins, the Gliesan chief mechanic of the Phantom on this issue's cover, and it's the crew of the Phantom who must tunnel through space to escape the shadowy forces of Department 9. And as some step out of the shadows, it's time for others to withdraw into deep cover.

  It's time to strap into your acceleration couch and accelerate into Issue #4.

  — Tim C. Taylor, October 2019

  ISSUE 4

  GREEN FISH

  She woke.

  Gasping.

  Screaming.

  Where was she?

  And why was the world in motion?

  Panting, she opened her eyes and found herself carried in Sybutu’s arms as he jogged along a space station corridor.

  Now that he’d discarded his disguise, she recognized the fake doctor alongside as Bronze.

  ‘Piers 15-17’ said a sign on the wall beneath a flashing light.

  There were a lot of flashing lights.

  And alarms.

  Sybutu slowed.

  “Whaaaa…?” she started to say, but then she saw the reason he had slackened the pace.

  Vol was waiting for them up ahead.

  She cried out in pain as the vise relinquished a little of its grip on her chest.

  She must have blacked out for a moment because the next thing she knew, Sybutu had picked up the pace again with Vol running alongside.

  He didn’t say anything, but she could feel his relief and joy at seeing her. His sexual hunger too, which he was trying to hide, but she reveled in. Nothing announced to the universe more clearly that she was back with the living than the heat of Vol’s desire.

  “Later,” she whispered, blowing Vol a weak kiss. “You’ll have to wait till I’m not nearly dying.”

  “How do you feel?” he asked in that weirdly crystalline alien voice.

  “Not dead. I think. But only just.”

  She reached out to touch one of the strange growths on his head.

  But the exertion was too much.

  And she fell back into darkness.

  IZZA ZAN FEY

  With the injured trooper secured with Zavage in med-bay, and with Bronze dispatched to the dorsal turret, Izza raced for the flight cockpit along deck plating throbbing with the urgency of spooling engines.

  She arrived to be met by Fitz swiveling his flight seat around to grin at her. “Mighty convenient time for an invasion fleet to show up, don’t you think, my lady?”

  Incredibly, he managed to act as if nothing had changed between them.

  But it had.

  “You think this is fake? A distraction?” asked Sybutu. He looked at her uncomfortably, unsure why Fitz had brought him to the flight deck.

  But Izza knew why.

  You’re here as a witness, she thought bitterly. Welcome to the team, Sybutu.

  “What’s he doing here?” Izza demanded, playing along with Fitz’s damned game.

  “Sybutu? He’s our new marine commander. Thought it would do him good to ride up front for a bit.”

  “Are you sure you’re in the right place?” she demanded. “All Legion personnel are to report to battle stations. Aren’t you still Legion?”

  “I am, ma’am,” Sybutu responded. “But I believe my duty places me here with you.”

  “I wasn’t talking to you, Sybutu.” She glared at her husband. “You never left the Legion Navy, Fitz. You made that clear back there. The Phantom and all who fly in her are just a vacation jaunt for you.”

  “Now is not the time,” Fitz protested, hunched over the controls as he lifted Phantom off the hangar deck with a growl of her thrusters.

  Izza threw herself into her navigator’s station and strapped in just in time. She was shoved back against her chair as Fitz punched the Phantom out of the bay, and threaded her through the piers that bristled from the space station’s spine like an ancient multi-array antenna.

  Fitz’s version of careful maneuvering would be a headlong charge for most pilots. It didn’t take long until they had blasted away from JSHC and pushed into the black.

  The sensors showed no sign of a Muryani fleet so far, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t there. Even a naval armada was but a tiny mote in the vastness of space, and Phantom was not tied into the military sensor grid. All she could detect nearby was the Legion Navy’s 4th Fleet.

  “Is this attack real?” she asked, initiating a long-range sensor scan for where a Muryani fleet might be, but expecting little chance of success.

  “The Navy thinks it is,” said Fitz. “Combat-ready ships are releasing tethers to the hulks they like to tow around the place. They’re moving into battle formations.”

  “Timing is too damned convenient,” said Sybutu.

  “Phantom, this is Jericho-Charlie Control. Return to bay 17/12B immediately.”

  “Negative, Jericho-Charlie Control,” Fitz responded. “We have an urgent appointment in another system. We’ll try to make it back in time for the battle.”

  “Listen, pal, there’s a war on. Haven’t you heard? My finger’s hovering over the button to mark you as hostile. The instant I do, the entire 4th Fleet will flag you in their threat bubbles and automatically target and destroy you. Turn around instantly or–”

  Fitz switched off the comm.

  “What a nasty man,” he told his flight deck audience. “I don’t think we need to listen to him anymore.”

  Fitz punched in a boost of acceleration from the main engines.

  But he wasn’t grinning. Not this time.

  Because simultaneously with the faint kick Izza felt through her chair back – the engine thrust must have been ferocious for her to be feeling anything – half of her flight console switched from navigation to battle mode in order to tell her that a lot of bad things were about to happen.

  Izza reported the tactical alert, even though Fitz knew damned well what he’d gotten them into. “Missiles! Missiles! 23 inbound.”

  “Relax,” Fitz called over his shoulder as he readied pre-programmed maneuver options. “They’re playing games. And chase is a game I play to win.”

  The flight deck fizzed with silent tension as the Legion missiles closed on them. Fast.

  “Phantom. Phantom,” came a voice over comms. “This is Diamond-7–”

  “Ceasefire! Ceasefire!” Izza shouted at whoever the hell Diamond-7 was.

  “Phantom, I am not firing upon you. You are being–”

  Izza cut the channel. “Then you’re no use to me,” she murmured.

  Fitz pushed Phantom forward, sending them headlong toward a battlecruiser thrusting hard to form up along its escorts, and only a few hundred klicks away. Even though she knew what Fitz was hoping to do, Izza flinched as she imagined the point defense cannons opening up.

  But they stayed silent.

  Fitz might be a gambler, but he rarely bet hard without cheating first. He kept their flight path level so that any Navy gun team with Phantom in their sights also had the JSHC space station in their line of fire.

  “How accurate is your shooting?” he taunted the battlecruiser.

  They didn’t trust themselves to fire.

  But they didn’t need to.

  As Phantom accelerated hard toward the battlecruiser, the missiles accelerated harder toward them.

  Izza glanced at their new marine leader
. Sybutu had his jaw clamped so tightly that the next time he opened his mouth, she expected shattered teeth to spill out.

  He was keeping quiet, though. That showed promise. She hated talkers when the shit started flying.

  She turned her attention back to the cockpit window and watched it fill up with the blocky lines of the battlecruiser.

  Her body tingled with excitement, and she fell in love with the Phantom all over again.

  Normal spaceships didn’t have cockpits. You sat in a metal and ceramalloy box at the heart of the vessel, letting banks of screens be your window on the galaxy.

  Not Phantom. One of the many modifications Nyluga-Ree had added when she’d owned her was an honest-to-goodness transparent cockpit bubble, a few inches of theoretically self-cleaning window, on the other side of which was hard vacuum.

  And, in the present case, several thousand tons of heavily armored warship.

  They were so close now that she could see with her own eyes the stubby barrels in individual gun ports tracking them. She saw two hatches open on the warship to reveal crew-served infantry support guns. A miniature humanoid figure – growing fast – swept their arm down and the guns opened up, spitting angry lines of tracer mixed with something much deadlier.

  “Front shields holding,” she reported. “Looks like anti-armor rounds with–”

  “Never mind them,” Fitz interrupted gleefully. “Watch this…”

  A whimper escaped the legionary from the seat behind her.

  Izza was too excited to be scared. Besides, what Sybutu didn’t realize yet was that this wasn’t the really dangerous part.

  With Phantom screaming for impact, any outcome other than a spectacular collision seemed impossible, even to Izza. Even the missiles just off their tail began self-destructing to avoid damaging the warship.

  The battlecruiser’s commander, though, thought otherwise. Close-in weapons systems came online and threw a hail of fire at Phantom, hoping to obliterate it with sheer weight of firepower. Outside the cockpit, the battlecruiser vanished, replaced with a curtain of green-tinged fire as Phantom’s shields weathered the battering.

  Most of the incoming energy was being deflected out of sight into the dimensions of the Klein-Manifold Region. Izza wondered whether there was anything alive in the KM-R to witness the hellfire they were pouring into their dimensions.

  If there had been, it probably wasn’t alive anymore.

  Neither would Phantom’s crew if they took this punishment much longer. Front shields were already below 50% and falling fast.

  Suddenly, her stomach lurched.

  Sybutu gave a sweet little scream.

  And Fitz, naturally, whooped for joy.

  The fire outside the cockpit had burned away.

  The battlecruiser too was gone, reappearing in the rear monitors, although the space in front of them was rich with the thrust tails of its deadly escort ships.

  Above them, five lines of fire flew overhead like a ceremonial flypast: the remaining missiles still pursuing Phantom. She dismissed them as a threat. Their confused computer minds would soon reacquire the location of the target that had somehow outmaneuvered them. And when they did, they would realize they no longer had the fuel to turn around and would self-destruct.

  “Phantom, Phantom. Don’t turn off your sodding comms. This is Diamond-7.”

  “Did we just fly over the top of that ship?” asked Sybutu in a daze. “Or did we tunnel through it?”

  Izza didn’t blame him. Both explanations were equally impossible for regular ships. Izza expected the missile brains were experiencing a similar form of shock.

  “Izza!” snapped Fitz “You’re on shields!”

  “Sorry,” she muttered. “Re-routing power to aft shields. Front shields at 20%. Inertia dump pipe at half power.”

  “KM horns are holding,” Catkins informed them from Engineering. “Whoever refitted them knew what they were doing. KM-R heating fast, though.”

  “Phantom! Stop showing off and answer!”

  “Don’t sweat your sweet ass, Catkins,” Fitz reassured the chief mechanic. “We’re skedaddling to cooler climes.”

  Phantom set off again, heading for the middle of the escort formation.

  The battlecruiser disappeared from the rear view, replaced by a sheet of energy as the aft shields took a pounding from the warship.

  “Escorts firing missiles,” Izza warned. “Aft shields good for another… ten seconds.”

  “Izza,” said Fitz. His voice was almost calm, but she could sense the excitement coursing through him. Sense it and feel it feed her own exhilaration. Flying with her human man would always be the ultimate thrill. “I assume that’s Kanha Wei on the blower. Would you kindly allow her to speak without cutting her off, please?”

  “Wei…” she muttered as Fitz put on a thrust burn that would have smeared the crews of normal ships into paste. The voice hailing them was clear but distorted beyond any way to guess species and gender.

  She might have agreed to ally with the human woman for now.

  But that didn’t mean she liked her.

  And she certainly didn’t trust her.

  “Our ship just… stopped!” said Sybutu.

  The jack would come around to the experience of Fitz’s acrobatics. In time.

  Izza accepted the hail. “Diamond-7, this is Phantom. What the hell is so important that it’s worth disturbing us now?”

  Having brought the ship to a complete stop, Fitz spun through 90 degrees, and sprinted away. The missiles pursing them tried in vain to match their turn.

  “I need to know first,” said Wei, “did you retrieve the rest of your team?”

  “We did,” Izza lied. “I have legionaries and Militia on board.”

  “All of them?”

  “All that I require.”

  “I knew Phantom was special.” said Sybutu to no one in particular. What was it with humans that made them talk for no reason? “But I didn’t know she could just… stop. Problem is, now the rest of the galaxy knows too.”

  “Will you shut that dumb jack up,” snapped Wei. “The core team requires Sybutu, Zavage, ‘Bronze’ Zy Pel, Arunsen, Hjon, and the Muryani. Plus you two space jocks and Phantom. The rest are superfluous.”

  What? That was… news.

  “None of my crew is superfluous,” Fitz snarled as he repeated the missile-evasion trick of spinning on a dime and streaking away on a completely different vector. “Wait…” he said, mulling over something. “No, none of them. Not even the pipe smoker. Not even Bronze.”

  “Stop ignoring me,” said Sybutu. “I get you well enough by now Fitzwilliam, to know you’re showing off. Stop it. We do not want to advertise any more of Phantom’s capabilities.”

  “The old girl was practically rebuilt from the inner frame out,” Fitz replied. “And they did a good job. They clearly already know how this ship works.”

  “They?” Sybutu laughed. “Has everyone forgotten pointing out to me that the Legion is not acting as one. That fleet you’re toying with doesn’t know what we can do, or why would they waste missiles on us? I bet your murdered admiral friend didn’t either, which meant it was someone else who refitted this ship.”

  After a moment’s reflection, Fitz shrugged and sent Phantom running from the fleet. “Fair point,” he acknowledged, and gave a gentle laugh.

  Izza breathed in the flight deck atmosphere so richly imbued with Fitz’s cockiness.

  Be like Fitz, she told herself, though she would never tell him that. He was overconfident enough as it was.

  But she needed him. Without borrowing a little of his arrogance, her body’s hydraulics would harden with fear until she could no longer play her part in flying the ship.

  Because she knew: now came the dangerous part.

  As Phantom moved away from close range, she moved into the effective focus range for the beam weapons of the warships.

  The shields flared as multiple gun batteries caught Phantom in their beams.
<
br />   They couldn’t juke and run out of this kind of fire. They’d be glowing slag long before they got out of range.

  “Jump solution ready,” Izza announced.

  “Better make it snappy, Diamond-7.” Fitz switched heading again, but the fire slackened only momentarily. “We’ll be dead or out of here in moments.”

  “Department 9 has left trackers on Phantom. If you jump, they will follow.”

  “Thanks for the warning,” Fitz said.

  “No! Don’t leave the system. They’ll learn too much from your extended jump signature. I need you, Fitz. Without you and your–”

  “Activating jump,” said Izza and squeezed them into a rift tunnel.

  “Was that really necessary?” Fitz sighed loudly. “I do so love it when people say they need me.”

  ——

  Am I jealous of Kanha Wei?

  Under her breath, Izza cursed herself for asking the wrong question while she readied for emergence from their brief jump.

  It’s not ‘am I’, but ‘why’ am I so jealous? Why should I fear her?

  She was beautiful.

  That was probably a part of it.

  Izza found Wei attractive, and it was obvious Fitz felt the same way. But they had encountered many beautiful people, often exotically so from Fitz’s point of view. The two of them sometimes talked into the night about the erotic adventures they would pursue one day – rewarding themselves for their labors by taking an extended vacation of a lifetime together. But they both knew it would never happen in real life. Beneath the aura of a great lover that Fitz liked to project, and the secret of his open marriage that he might ‘accidentally’ allow to spill out after a lengthy bout of drinking, the truth was that he was as monogamous as you could get. And the fact she was not had become an awkward topic they both avoided.

  But Kanha was more than elastic human skin, pretty rounded hips, and all those other human characteristics Izza could never possess, she was also an audacious adventurer who could make the impossible happen and – Izza guessed – knew when to jump headlong into the nearest risk, and when to hold back and find a better way.