The Terran Gambit (Episode #1: The Pax Humana Saga) by Endi Webb

cover of the fighter. Another flight deck technician collapsed to the floor several meters away. The back of his head had been blown off.
    “What’s your name, Lieutenant?”
    “Po,” she murmured. “Megan Po.”
    “We’re going to get out of here, Po. We’ve just got to get over to my bird. She’s the one right over there.” He eyed the back door to the hangar, where Kit and a handful of flight deck technicians were holding back the onslaught.
    “Is he dead?” She didn’t take her eyes off the dead pilot splayed out on the floor a few feet away.
    “Yes. Look, We need to get moving. Once we’re up there we’ll be more help than as sitting ducks out here. Ready?”
    Her brow wrinkled, and she seemed to steel herself. Nodding slowly, she said, “Yeah. I’m ready.”
    “Run!” He jumped up, and, still holding her hand, made an all-out dash to his fighter. Once he was up inside, he could blast the rear doorway with suppressing fire and Kit could join them in the cockpit. One of the technicians by the door fell, clutching his bloody stomach just as Jake wrenched open the door to the fighter.
    “You good to shoot?” he yelled, jumping into his pilot’s seat.
    Her only answer was to sit in the gunner’s chair, and switch on the console, wrapping the comm set and targeting viewfinder over her head. Good. At least she seemed to be coming out of it.
    In spite of the continuing rat-a-tat of gunfire bursts, and seemingly constant shouts and screaming, his hands flew over the control board, initiating the gravitic drive and thrusters. “You’ve got power. Fire when you’ve got a clear shot.”
    “We’re clear now,” she said, staring out the front viewport. Glancing up to see what she meant, his heart nearly stopped.
    Kit lay propped up against the blood-smeared wall by the door, and it was clear by the gaping hole in his head that he was dead.
    No.
    “Shoot the bastards,” he muttered. Po thumbed the trigger, and red streaking gunfire erupted from the fighter’s quad guns, raking over the rear door even as a squad of enemy soldiers was running through it, blasting apart their bodies and spraying the walls with yet more blood and entrails.
    “Keep firing. We’ve got to give everyone time to get to their birds.” Jake could feel the wrath grow inside of him, and it was everything he could do to refrain from pounding the console with his fist. Crash perhaps was his best friend in the fleet, but Kit was like a brother—he’d been his co-pilot and gunner for over a year. They’d logged more time together than Jake had with anyone.
    Po kept her finger on the trigger, firing burst after burst through the door, while Jake glanced around the hangar bay. Now free of the strafing fire that had pinned them all down, the pilots and gunners left alive sprinted towards their fighters. Dozens of bodies littered the floor. After a minute or so, no one else seemed to be coming through the front entrance, and everyone alive appeared to be in their fighters.
    “All right. There’s no one manning the bay doors to open them, so just blast the back wall. Maybe we can even take out a bunch of those bastards.” Even before he finished the sentence, a torpedo shot out the bow and blasted almost the entire rear wall backwards, ripping it away from the hangar bay and into several dozen enemy soldiers. When the dust settled, Jake could see the enemy troop carrier in the debris, and a few soldiers huddled behind it.
    “Take out the carrier,” he said, and another torpedo leapt out from the ship into the other, which burst into a massive fiery explosion. He didn’t even see where the soldiers taking cover had been blasted to, and he didn’t care.
    He thumbed open the comm channel to his squad. “Viper Squad, Shotgun. Is Commander Dippen alive?” No one responded immediately.
    “I … I think I saw his body as I was running out here,” said Po, quietly.
    “Very well. Viper squad, Shotgun. Everyone on me, I’m assuming