The Dogs of War (SkyLine 3)

“See you out there, Cap’,” Kalus winked. Demi only nodded in return. He plopped in his ship, sealed the door, and patched himself through to the radio line the five shared.

“Dogs of War. This is why we’re here. Bark loud. Bite harder.”

The day the Dragons attacked Nimbus was the first day of combat in Corporal Chrispin’s ten-year military career. The second he felt the first shockwave under his feet, he’d looked to his elder, superior Officers. They looked right back at him with the same confused horror as Chrysum fire climbed the buildings outside their barracks windows. When they saw scales rise up from the deep of the clouds beneath the city, trails of fire blaze across bridges, many of those who held command over Chrispin fled. Whether or not they planned to head to their stations he couldn’t know, as no one announced their intent like they were supposed to. Years of drills and refining practice vanished at the sight of the beasts from below. Even some amongst Jupiter’s WCC Protectorate had never seen them. Dragons… They’re real. Chrispin wasn’t the only one to think it. He was, however, the only one to raise a coherent cry over the chaos.

“Any of you who run - you best be running to get your gun and armor!” Chrispin screamed, “If you’re frightened, think how the engineers and miners out there feel! We’re the shield, so let’s get between our people and the monsters!” A few disembodied hiccups that might have been cheers popped across the frazzled room. “Hey! Who’s going to be a Dragon Slayer by the end of the day?” He rallied again, despite the cold blood in his own veins. To that, a few more yelps awakened the men and women of the Protectorate to their fighting spirit. “With me!”

Chrispin led a unit of thirty knee-rattling soldiers out to the Central City Bridge. He spread his Fusion-rifle army in formation like they’d practiced, and led the charge out onto the smokey connection between the barracks and the rest of Nimbus. When a dark shape blurred by over their heads, Chrispin was the first to fire. He was also the first to miss. A purple Dragon hocked a burst of Chrysum from its throat, straight into the bridge. Ten bodies disintegrated instantly. By the time the survivors thought to flee, the Dragon had vanished, leaving behind only the six-limbed creature that had leaped from its back.

Chrispin’s remaining support scattered across the bridge, firing wildly. Some actually struck Dragons that had begun to circle them. The bigger aerial assist, however, came from the unexpected contingent of tiny fighters that screeched out from the roof of the Protectorate office behind them. Half the men Chrispin thought had fled had actually leapt straight into the cockpits of fighters. A flying V format

ion of ships sliced through the looming flock of Dragons over the bridge. The beasts fluttered out wide to flank the ships, Chrysum bursts flinging wild. Fire shot in one side of the fighters silver and burst from the other, red. Survivors of the initial clash spiraled up, above the Dragons.

The fleet volleyed back a storm of high-impact Chrysum shells. Dragon’s blood spattered the towers of bobbing windows. Flaming scraps flung out from counter-bursts of Chrysum fire. Bursts of smoky chaos unfolded over the Central City Bridge while Chrispin and his men focused on more immediate, six-legged threats.

They took backpedaling aim at the charging Fader. A Chrysum bolt struck it in the shoulder. Chrispin watched it fall from the barrel of his smoking rifle. He allowed himself the briefest moment of triumph, just before an entire crowd of them rose from a rolling screen of smoke. He let down his rifle, just an inch, just enough to lose all hope.

Just then, a tiny ship, no bigger than a mining pod, shot across the bridge. The things that set it apart were its sleek, multifaceted viewing screen and the giant halberd blades attached to the bottom of it. The ship plowed straight through four Faders before it slowed to spin a full three-hundred-sixty degrees. Its halberds deployed to cleave two ranks of three plate-skinned creatures. Blood splattered up in a spiral as the ship rose away, only for another to swoop down in its place. The second ship was identical to the first, but for its miniature Chrysum turrets in place of halberds. It hovered over the bridge to unleash a shining downpour on the Faders.

“The hell are these guys?” Chrispin wondered aloud, rifle hanging loose in his hands.

“The Dogs of War!” a voice came down from the halberd ship as it came around for a second pass. “Arms up, lads and ladies! We’re not here to steal all the glory!” Chrispin stared down at the trembling finger laced around his trigger. He thought of his brother in the Launch Station on the other side of Nimbus while he counted scorching white torches rising from the wreckage of the floating city between them.

“You heard him, all of you! Arms up!” Chrispin screamed back to his shaken contingent of first-timers.

“Give me some cover! We’ll break up the Faders and get you across the bridge!” the man in the halberd-ship cried down. He didn’t give Chrispin or anyone else on the ground a chance to answer. He only spiraled down into a dive through three more Faders. Those behind him trotted and fired at once. Between the hail of Chrysum bolts from above and the fire of the soldiers on the bridge, their foes struggled to make any headway. In seconds, they were forced to pedal backward toward the city. Then the Dragons arrived.

“Demi! Above!” the man in the halberd ship cried. His craft jerked to the side just before a white fireball blazed through the bridge where he’d been. The craft with the turrets flew out in a wide, rising arc to get better aim at the three beasts with their wings spread wide. Demi sprayed a wide wave of light, which launched boiling Dragon’s blood from the backs of two of them. The third fled for the endless, raging storm of Jupiter’s sky.

“There’s more out there,” Demi called down from above, “They’re coming up through the clouds with Faders. Sophia and I will keep them off you. Kalus. You and the others round up the civilians!” His turrets fired in pursuit of the fleeing Dragon while he zipped off.

“On it,” Kalus answered. When he tried to jerk his ship up, though, it fought with him. His proximity sensors blared a warning. Five Faders had dug their claws into the frame of the craft. The remaining contingent of the bridge-blocking army ripped into his thrusters and tore his halberds free. “Shit,” Kalus grumbled. He knew this might happen. The ship was designed for close combat, but the battlefield was too open to handle alone. Without Sophia covering him, he knew the risk. Kalus grabbed every weapon on hand inside his cockpit, and latched them to his belt. He popped the emergency escape hatch on the top of his ship.

Kalus leaped atop his wrecked ship with a steaming pistol in one hand and a flaming green blade in the other. He scorched holes through their beak-like mouths. He cleaved through reaching Fader arms. He deflected strikes with the arms and shoulders of his gold-tailed suit jacket. Limbs and blood cycloned around Kalus and flung out over the mounting crowd around him. He held his own for a whole minute before one of the Faders got a claw on his boot. Kalus readied his blade and poised to lunge. Suddenly the pressure relieved from his foot, with the separation of the Fader’s arm from its body. Chrispin had shot clean through it. He and his troops boxed in the crowd of creatures and closed a Chrysum-shot scissor on them. They fired until every last one lay in a mound, a pile of lifeless husks riddled with burn holes.

“He-hey, War Dog!” Chrispin called up to the young man dripping with blood on top of the halberd ship, “Can you get us to the other side of the city?” Kalus hopped down from his ship to the slumped shoulders of a Fader, to the bridge.

“Arms Master Kalus Delphi, at your service. Does the other side of the city have a nice, high tower to pick people up from?” Kalus countered.

“Corporal Chrispin. The new SkyLine Launch Station is over there. It’s huge,” said the leader of the Jupiter Protectorate.

“Then the question is: can you get me there?”

From so high above, Kalus became a distant ant to Demi. He wove and shot between bobbing skyscrapers to sear holes in the wings of rising Dragons. He rode close to the walls of buildings to confuse his foes with the afterimage of his ship in the zipping panels of glass. Chrysum fire blasts ripped through steel behind him. He rose and fell around the onslaught of gathering Dragons. His cannons rotated freely beneath him to fire back. But, for every beast he shot from the sky, two more popped through the cloud wall around the city.

“Lilia, find me a building with no life signatures,” Demi asked. From where she waited several hundred feet above the city in the Cerberus, she’d already scanned every single one for survivors. It was no trouble for her to send the data through the closed system between the Warbringer and its auxiliary ships. A golden haze overlapped Demi’s viewing screen to outline a building on his left. “Share the data with Sophia.”

“What do you have in mind?” Sophia tuned in. She zipped by over the rooftops of a nearby tower, launching Chrysum rays through Dragon scales.

“That building that just lit up on your screen? Hover over it. I’m bringing you a bunch of Dragons to burn,” Demi told her. He watched the corner of his screen for Sophia’s ship to take position.

“Ready,” she said.

“Pre-heat the oven,” her Captain commanded. The barrels of Sophia’s down-turned cannons filled with a flare of white light. Demi jerked his navigation bars to the side. His ship turned sharp, nose first at the windows of the empty building. He crashed through the glass. Cubicle walls, steel tables and ceiling tiles folded around the charging head of Demi’s ship. Wings beat and claws ripped in cramped cacophony in his wake.

Demi led the Dragons through the old office building from one wall to the other. He burst out a second ahead of them. Sophia’s finger twitched down on her trigger at the sight of him. She squeezed it tight the second Demi passed. The Dragons rushed straight into a dense beam of Chrysum light. Even the last ones in line couldn’t stop themselves in time - every one of them was reduced to dust. When her beam died to a thin thread, Sophia pulled up to join her Captain in his circle over the city.

Hundreds of feet below, Kalus, Chrispin and the others charged through legions of Faders. Chrysum flashed out before them to carve the masses apart. A swelling cloud of other bodies gathered behind them, civilians pouring from every tower they passed.