Earthman Jack vs. The Ghost Planet (16 page)

Jack decided to gain speed by going into a dive.  He angled
the ship downward, heading toward the ocean.  The ship alerted him to incoming
enemy fire as streaks of red plasma blasts shot by wildly.  Jack glanced at the
holoscreen and saw the shards firing from the tips on the front of their
vessels, but they were still too far away to have much accuracy.  That didn’t
keep their blasts from being uncomfortably close, though.

“Uh, shields?” said Jack as more blasts streaked by. 
“Shields would be nice!”

“Powering up the generator now!” replied Anna.

Jack heard a hum kick in and felt static electricity ripple
through him.  Instantly he realized the ship’s shields had been raised and were
now active.  Not a moment too soon either, as a blast landed squarely on the
rear shield, right where one of their engines was.

The shield wasn’t like anything Jack had seen when Shepherd
was fighting the Deathlords.  It was an invisible barrier around the ship,
created by densely charged electrons that repelled all matter and absorbed
energy.  However, the shield could only be maintained as long as the generator
on the ship was able to achieve a certain output.  With each impact, the
generator would compensate by redistributing electrons to the impacted areas,
thus weakening the entire shield array, at least until it had a chance to power
back up and generate more electrons to reinforce the shield.

Jack eased the ship up as it reached the bottom of its
descent and skimmed the surface of the ocean.  He had an idea and punched up
the speed as much as he could, hoping it would give him enough time to pull off
what he had planned.

“You ready with those weapons yet?” asked Jack, keeping his
eye on the steadily gaining shards.

“We have a rear plasma battery,” said Shepherd.  “Firing it
up now.”

“All right,” said Jack.  “Do we have a forward laser, too?”

“We have two of them,” said Shepherd.

“You’re going to want to get those ready, also.”

“Why?” asked Shepherd suspiciously.

“I’m gonna try something,” said Jack.  “Just be ready,
okay?”

Shepherd grumbled but didn’t argue.  He opened fire on the
incoming shards as they dove into position behind them.

“Hold on,” said Jack, as he suddenly cut the acceleration of
the ship.

The sudden drop in speed caused the shards to overshoot
their intended position on their tail.  Shepherd nailed one of them as it screamed
by overhead, causing it to explode in a puff of black dust and green fire.

No sooner had the shards made their pass than Jack kicked
the ship back into gear.  He felt the boom of the engines as the sudden burst
jacked up their acceleration, and they were now on the heels of the shards.

“NOW!” yelled Jack.

Shepherd let loose with the forward plasma cannons.  The two
shards tried to turn in opposite directions to avoid the blasts, but one of
them wasn’t fast enough, and it got caught in Shepherd’s crosshairs and exploded.

Jack turned the ship in pursuit of the last shard.  It
banked and weaved as Shepherd kept firing at it, but Jack kept on its tail.

“Yeah, not so much fun when you’re the one getting shot at,
huh?” mumbled Jack as he tried to keep pace with the smaller vessel.  For a
rather big ship, Jack was surprised he was able to maneuver as well as he was.

The shard pulled up into a climb and began flying toward the
sun.  Jack followed, pushing the thrusters to keep his prey from escaping him. 
The direct sunlight from the viewscreen blinded him, and he lost sight of his
target.

Jack glanced back at his radar display.  A red dot signified
the remaining shard was still there, but it was quickly moving out of range. 
Just as Jack was going to try another burst of speed to keep up, three new dots
emerged in front of him, and the radar beeped a warning about new enemy
contacts.

“Crap!” exclaimed Jack as he banked the ship hard to the
right.  No sooner had he done so then more enemy blaster fire shot by on the
trajectory of their previous course.  The sun had blinded him to the arrival of
enemy backup, and that last shard had tried to lure him into an ambush.

As the three newcomers shot by, the original shard had come
around and was now on Jack’s tail.  Plasma fire began to assault the rear
shields, and the ship complained to Jack in protest.

Jack tried to bank and weave the ship, but he could not
shake the shard, even with Shepherd firing at it.  It was just too small and
maneuverable.  And once his Deathlord friends came back around, they were all
going to be in trouble.

“Jack,” yelled Anna.  “We need to get out of Earth’s
atmosphere!  We can maneuver better in space!”

“Are you serious?” asked Jack.

“The ship is too big to out-fly the shards in the
atmosphere,” said Anna.  “Without the wind resistance and gravity, we should be
maneuverable enough to escape their fire.”

“No, I mean… I’ve like, never
been
in space before…”
said Jack.

“Have you ever been obliterated into a million pieces
before?” asked Shepherd.  “Because that’s what’s going to happen if our shields
keep taking this pounding!”

“Space it is,” said Jack meekly.

Jack banked the ship, took it into a climb, and felt his
breath catch in his throat.  In the sky was a hazy image of a massive
monstrosity he had not noticed in the commotion of the dogfight.  It was still
far away, but even from this distance, Jack could tell it was gigantic,
possibly the size of a city one would see when flying over in an airplane.

At its center was a round disk-shaped vessel, with six humongous,
long, curled spikes jutting from its sides, making it look like a massive,
hideous spider of some type, ready to descend upon the planet.  The outer
casing was a dark, shining obsidian, littered with veins of green and purple
light, and at the bottom of the disk was a large circle which glowed white hot
with energy, like a soulless eye gazing out from beneath it.

Jack felt the pit of his stomach curl in on itself.  He
could only assume that thing was the Deathlord mothership, and if that were indeed
the case, heading toward it was probably not the best idea.

Then, in the instant it took him to wonder about where he
should adjust course to, the ship responded with a long-range sensor reading of
their immediate area.  What Jack saw chilled him to his core.  There wasn’t
just one Deathlord mothership in orbit above Earth; there were literally
hundreds of them.  In his mind’s eye, the ship fed him the location of the
entire enemy fleet.  He saw how they’d encircled the planet, each one staring
down at the surface with its horrible white eye, blazing ever hotter and brighter
with each passing second.

The reality of their situation suddenly settled in on Jack. 
The ordeals at the Burger Shack and in the temple were scary, but they all
seemed like something isolated, as though once the military found out about it,
they could send in troops and tanks and airplanes to the rescue.  But now Jack
could see that aliens hadn’t just invaded River Heights; they had surrounded
the entire planet with ships full of an army that couldn’t die.

The ship was rocked again as more plasma fire assaulted its
shields.  The radar in front of Jack whined with alarm as more contacts
appeared on it – ten more shards, all coming from the mothership in the
distance.  If the shards closing in from behind didn’t get them, those surely
would.

“Shepherd…” Jack said.  “We’ve got incoming!”

Jack heard Shepherd curse under his breath as he checked his
console and saw the newly approaching shards.  More thuds echoed in Jack’s mind
as the rear shields were hit again.  He pulled up a rear image from the ship on
the holoscreen and saw the four shards had locked onto his tail.  Suddenly,
Jack found himself wishing he could fire the forward plasma cannons while
Shepherd focused his attention on their tag-alongs.

The ship responded instantly by materializing a new
holoscreen in front of Jack with targeting reticules and energy readouts.  The display
looked just like it did on
Nova Commander IV
, and Jack inherently knew
he now had control over the forward cannons.

“I’m taking control of the forward lasers,” Jack told
Shepherd.  “You focus on the guys behind us.”

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” said Shepherd.

“Me, too,” mumbled Jack.

The new Deathlord shards were closing the distance quickly
from the front.  Jack’s ship was still climbing.  If he could exit the Earth’s
atmosphere before they were in firing range, he might be able to pull something
off.

Jack wondered if he could take control of the shields as
easily as he did the plasma cannons.  Sure enough, the computer granted him
access.  He quickly lowered the forward shields and used some of that energy to
reinforce the rear shields, while diverting the rest to his engines to give him
a boost of speed.

“We’ve lost forward shields!” shrieked Anna.  “It won’t let
me raise them!”

“Don’t worry,” said Jack.  “I did that.”

“You lowered our shields?” yelled Shepherd.

“Trust me, I know what I’m doing!” Jack yelled back.  “Anna,
get me all the power you can to the engines!”

Anna and Shepherd exchanged worried looks, but Anna did as
she was told, and Shepherd went back to trying to keep the fighters off their
tail.

The sky was darkening as the ship kept climbing and the blue
mist of the atmosphere began to bleed away around them.  Jack wished he had
time to appreciate how cool it was that he was the first kid ever in the
history of River Heights – and probably the world – to actually make it into
outer space, but the oncoming Deathlord shards had just reached firing range.

Jack instantly dumped power into his forward shields and
rolled the ship, looping around in a corkscrew motion and firing as he did so.

The wall of shards heading his way scrambled, returning fire
as they swerved.  Jack caught two of them in his maneuver, signaled by a brief
flash of green flame.  One of the shards did not bank away fast enough and
rammed into one of the shards that had been chasing Jack’s ship. 
Another
two down; now just ten more to go.

“Great Scott!” exclaimed Professor Green.  “We made it past
them!”

“We’re not out of the woods yet,” said Jack glancing at his
radar readout.  “They’re coming back around.”

“Get us away from the fleet,” said Shepherd.  “Move us out
into open space as much as you can.  If we can take them down far enough away
from reinforcements, it might give us time to make the jump to hyperspace.”

“Sounds good to me,” said Jack as he increased
acceleration.  As they began to move away, he glanced out the viewscreen at the
massive Deathlord mothership to the side of them and marveled at it.  Jack
didn’t have much time to ponder the size of the enemy fleet before his
proximity alarm warned him that the shards were now back in range and quickly
gaining on him.

“The bad guys are back,” he warned everybody.

“You fly,” said Shepherd.  “I’ll take care of them.”

Unencumbered by gravity or wind
resistance, Jack banked the ship and took it in a wide arc, veering away as
Shepherd fired on the pursuers who had adjusted their course to follow.  Jack
immediately noticed a difference in the way the ship handled now that they were
out in space.  Indeed, it moved like a much smaller ship, able to turn much more
easily and more quickly than it had in the atmosphere.

Red bolts of death screamed by as Jack banked and weaved his
ship.  Some landed on the rear shields, but most were missing their mark. 
Shepherd was able to tag a few of the shards with return fire, causing some to
break off the ship’s tail.

Jack turned the ship and chased after some of the shards
that had broken off and opened fire with the forward plasma cannons.  Two more
shards exploded thanks to his efforts.

Jack glanced at the radar screen.  He saw six more dots
buzzing around on the readout.  Jack cut all power to the thrusters and brought
the ship to a standstill.

“What are you doing?” asked Shepherd with alarm.  “Why have
we stopped?”

“Just giving them a chance to regroup,” said Jack casually.

“You’re what?” said Shepherd, Anna, and Green in unison.

“I’ve noticed they tend to like to attack in formation,”
said Jack.

“Jack,” growled Shepherd.  “Get us
moving
again!”

“Relax,” said Jack.  “I spent most of my freshman year
perfecting this maneuver.”

Jack called up his holoscreen and sure enough, the remaining
six shards had joined up into a “V” formation and were turning in unison to
make a pass at Jack’s location.

Jack diverted all the power to the forward shields and
reversed the thrusters to start moving the ship backwards as the shards closed
in on them from the front, effectively slowing their approach.

The shards opened fire, their plasma bolts impacting the
forward shields rapidly.

“Blast it, Jack!” yelled Shepherd.  “Return fire!”

Jack ignored Shepherd and kept letting the shards close in,
keeping a careful eye on the strength of the forward shields, which were
getting hammered by the Deathlords’ blasts.

Then, just as the shards got close enough, Jack engaged the
ship’s side thrusters, jutting his craft horizontally away from the trajectory
of the Deathlord shards.  As he did so, he rotated the ship to keep in line
with the enemy formation and opened fire.  His first blast impacted the lead
shard, and the momentum of the formation allowed the other two shards on its
wing to fly into his blaster fire, destroying them both.

The remaining three shards scrambled, but not before Jack
re-engaged his thrusters and tagged one of them before he could get out of
range.

Now there were only two.

Jack redistributed his shields and punched the acceleration,
locking onto the tail of one of the remaining shards.  It was weaving about
evasively, but in space, Jack’s ship was able to keep up with it.  It was only
a matter of time before Jack got the fighter in his crosshairs and obliterated
it.