CROSSFIRE - Atlantis DSV - New Cape Quest

through the deep, drawing any manner of attention to their location – and by extension – any
ship that they were travelling in company with.
“Helm, status?”
“Steady on course three-one-five, speed sixty knots,” the helmsmen replied flatly.
“ETA four hours.”
Ainsley nodded, and then looked across to Banick. “Start the clock.”
He looked up to the top of the chart table and watched as the digital clock there
reset, and started counting down from “-03:59:00”. Drawing a breath, Ainsley sipped his
coffee again, and settled in for the long haul...
...Jane Roberts stuck close to the seafloor, the fighter skipping over embankments of
dead coral as it completed a long circuit around the battlegroup perimeter. Like sharks, the
twelve Raptors of her squadron circled Commonwealth, watching, waiting and looking for
trouble. She sighed as he stomach grumbled unhappily, and contemplated the chocolate bar
sitting in her jumpsuit‟s breast pocket. Before she had a chance to reach for it, the radio
cracked in her ear.
“Sword, this is Warseer. Orders from Actual – Proceed fifty miles north-west and
begin screening their approach vector. Roulette will provide local EW.”
“Wilco, Warseer. All flights - spread out... one mile separation. Proceed to Waypoint
Delta independently. Let‟s try not to give the Macs an easy target.”
“Agreed,” Warseer added. “Be advised – weapons are free. We cannot allow any
confirmed enemy contact with Actual under any circumstances. If they manage to get her
position, it‟s over. All targets are legal.”
Roberts nodded slowly. She‟d expected that when she‟d asked the deck chiefs for a
full weapons load. At that moment, her fighter was nearly a full tonne over its missionstandard
weight, sporting four ASF-8 “Cobra” torpedoes, and an additional two, heavier,
thousand-pound BM-9 “Harpoons”. This was in addition to a thousand rounds of 25mm
“DUSEX” explosive depleted uranium slugs. The rest of the squadron was much the same.
Pushing her throttles up, she cleared her wings left and right before finishing her
circuit to come around tight under the ventral hull of the massive Commonwealth. She
looked up at it as she passed, feeling the cold of darkness as its huge bulk cast a shadow
that blocked out the sunlight from the surface just a few hundred feet above. In waters this
shallow, any engagement was going to be tight...
The next two hours passed in total silence. Even the Rapiers dared not say a word,
fearful that any off-the-cuff radio chatter might and could well be heard from any number of
nearby bases. Roberts knew from the official board of inquiry that it had been that which
ultimately doomed the Atlantis – an innocuous remark from a Dark Angels pilot, picked up by
a hovering Alliance SEWACS that traced its origin, and with it, the identity of the pilots in
question. It hadn‟t taken long for them to put two and two together, and Atlantis was gone
just hours later.
Roberts never even saw the unit of fighters that shadowed her for the next eighty
three miles, watching, examining, and studying every move. The squadron commander
regarded the Rapiers carefully, instructing his own fighters to hold well back as they
shadowed them on their way to the Macaw Bank. The sleek, dark sea-blue hulls of their
strange, yet familiar subfighters blended perfectly in to the sea - once even managing to get
close enough to the Rapiers to make out the markings on their tails. They were all but
invisible to the UEO sonars, and if they had wanted to, they could have destroyed the entire
UEO squadron in seconds before departing without a trace they had ever been there.
Not a single marking was born on any of the shadowing craft – not squadron, number
or nation being discernable from even the closest of inspections. They simply didn‟t exist.
But this was not common even of mercenaries – that is, assuming they were.
Mercenaries, pirates and criminals typically bore falsified markings and paintwork to obscure
their origins and evade civil law enforcement. At the same time, the likelihood of a private
organization having such uniform craft was utterly unheard of.
- 127 -