In this running barrage, mountains were disappearing, dry riverbeds were being blown to dust, buttes and mesas reduced to piles of subatomic glass crystals. And it went on like this for what seemed like a very long time, even though the chase became more desperate for the Kongo with each passing second.
There was only so long the scout could keep zigzagging before the gunners on the big ship would find their mark or, more likely, collapse an entire mountain on top of them.
The heat of battle is a funny thing, a different mind-set takes over, whether the combatants are throwing stones at each other or trading blasts of vaporizing Z beams. The politics of the person shooting at you takes second preference over the desire of saving your own skin. Still, it was not lost on anyone aboard the tiny SF scout ship, as it careened its way through miles-deep river valleys and over titanic mountain ranges, that the people shooting at them — the same people who had just destroyed one of their capital ships — were not supposed to be their enemies. In fact, technically at least, they were supposed to be brothers. They all belonged to the same military, the Imperial Forces, and were sworn to the common goal of fighting against the enemies of the Empire and bringing the words and vision of the Emperor to every corner of the Galaxy.
But this, this was both alarming and unprecedented. The two services had been barking at each other for nearly three centuries — but there was no turning back from this. More than 8,000 were already dead in the internecine battle, and still it was less than a half hour old. So even as they were racing along at top speeds, knowing their lives could be lost at any moment, the crew of the SF scout ship knew that after this, no matter how it turned out, nothing in the Empire would ever be the same again.
Luck began running out for the KongoVox as the small scout ship approached an obscure mountain pass named, in the ancient language of the Galaxy, Mons d Sighs.
It was essentially a natural stone bridge that connected two forbidding mountain peaks. The strange formation came up fast on the Kongo's pilots. In a split second they had to decide whether to go over this thing — and risk providing a clear shot by the fast-pursuing SG warship — or turn sideways and go under it. Their flight computer told them their clearance from fuselage to either wall could be measured in inches. Still, going low was a risk they had to take.
The pilots punched in these desires, and the scout ship suddenly flipped over onto its side. At that same moment, the forward gunners on the SG ship let loose a barrage of Z beams from their nose-weapon array. These shots were fired too high. However, they hit the peak on one side of the stone bridge, instantly creating a rain of debris onto Mons d'Sighs. One huge boulder smashed into the ancient stone bridge, causing it to collapse onto the tail end of the fleeing KongoVox.
The impact of tons of burning rock was catastrophic. Suddenly the scout ship was missing about 100 feet off its left-side aft quarter. It streaked out from under the collapsing stone bridge trailing a long tail of black smoke and flaming debris. The control ddck was in chaos: blinking lights, Klaxons blaring. The ship's prop core had been mortally wounded. Any disruption in power flowing through this mysterious drive device could only have disastrous consequences. As with the SG ship shot down just minutes before, whenever a prop core went dry, it tended to blow up with the force of several nuclear bombs and then collapse in on itself as it devolved into a self-made singularity. It was simply impossible for anyone on board to survive such a conflagration.
But the crews of Space Forces scout ships were traditionally tough and resourceful. Their flight bubble was telling them their vessel would be airborne for just twenty-two seconds more, and then it would crash, with the prop core blowing up just eleven seconds later. Not a lot of time to think about anything but survival.
So the crew began bailing out. At battle stations each person on board was strapped into a boost seat that would be ejected in times just like this. Panels on top of the ship began blowing off now, and these individual survival capsules commenced bursting through the openings. Each capsule was equipped with an escape rocket that could cany its occupant as far as five miles away. These rockets left a vivid yellow wake, so the display now coming from the crippled KongoVox was mucho spectacular when the huge flames pouring out of the back combined with the cascade of escape capsules firing off from the front and midsection.
None of this stopped the SG gunners, though. They continued firing away, and some of their shots were hitting the escape capsules, vaporizing them instantly. The scout ship was losing speed as the prop core began dying in earnest, and thus the SG ship was gaining on it by the second. The two ships passed out of the vast Mons d'Sighs region and onto a flat, open terrain that stretched almost all the way to the dark section of the planet.
As predicted, the scout ship began tumbling about seventeen seconds after being hit, and it crashed five seconds later. All but the captain and the two main pilots made it out alive; they had decided to go down with the ship, insuring that the rest of the crew at least had the chance to eject. The scout ship impacted on the long, straight, flat valley floor and went end over end for a mile before the prop core blew up. There was an enormous explosion accompanied by a nightmarish mushroom cloud, which then began falling in on itself, as if it were an explosion in reverse motion. It sucked everything within a few hundred feet into a black hole that was created and then disappeared again, all in less than a heartbeat.
The entire planet shook once; the impact of the crash was that terrific.
The scout ship's survivors were now scattered along the route of its death plunge, many separated by a mile or more. The SG warship had pulled up violently so as not to get caught in the small holocaust resulting from the Kongo's crash.
The big ship did not boot into Supertime and leave the scene, though. In another devilish, seemingly inexplicable act, the ship turned around and slowed down to the lowest crank power, just a few knots of forward motion. Its gunners began searching the valley floor for survivors who had ejected from the dying SF scout ship. On spotting any member of the Kongo crew, the SG gunners opened up without mercy.
Unprotected and many of them injured from their quick ejection and violent landing, these hapless soldiers made easy pickings for the SG trigger men. Within a minute, two dozen had been blasted to bits.
Now scan lights were beamed out of the bottom of the slow-moving SG warship, further helping the gunners target the Space Forces soldiers who had no means of escape and few places to hide. A total massacre seemed to be inevitable. That's when the SF Starcrasher VogelVox finally arrived on the scene.
The SF warship had been following the outlandish, confusing, disturbing battle via its long-range viz scanners.
The commanders of the two-mile-long aerial battleship didn't believe at first that those responsible for shooting down the JunoVox were in fact Solar Guards. It didn't make sense. Sure, the blistering conflict had flared up deep within the SG's unilateral forbidden zone, and indications were that the JunoVox had violated the SG's order and had dashed into the verboten area for reasons that seemed even stranger, the summary execution of an SF intell officer. But now, open conflict between the two services? It didn't seem real somehow.
The No-Fly Zone was the talk of the Empire's military, of course. For the most part, it was viewed by the Space Forces as an example of butt covering by the SG after they had been bested by the mysterious invaders on the planet Megiddo and then apparently lied about destroying the enemy fleet. Perhaps the murdered intell officer had uncovered just that, and for whatever reason, the SG decided he had to die, never thinking that word of the outrageous execution would get out so fast. (In many ways then, a robot, not a human, was responsible for the fratricide that had already taken so many lives and was about to turn the Empire on its head.)