CROSSFIRE - Atlantis DSV - New Cape Quest

“Shit. Dark Angel One, I‟ve just hit the first marker. I‟m committing to the Folly.”
“Hitman, don‟t you even dare. You won‟t make it at that speed.”
Harker barked as he pressed his throttles up. “I‟m counting on the fact that they won‟t
either, Bouncer. Now get your ass down here!”
Above him, the walls of the ravine seem to shrink away. Barely half a mile to go and
his throttles were now answering a speed of over two hundred and forty knots. No pilot had
ever done the Folly at more than two hundred and ten, yet the Chaodai pilot either didn‟t
know it, or simply didn‟t care as they brazenly matched Harker for every turn.
“Cocky bastard,” he muttered to himself.
“Hitman, this is Bouncer, I‟ve just entered the Folly. I‟m dead ahead of your position. I
hope you‟re on your way through, because this is about to get real tight...”
Harker looked up to see the last of what little light made it to the canyon disappear as
the rock walls closed up. The walls on either side of him seemed a blur, and every touch of
the stick seemed to send the Raptor off wildly towards oblivion. This was Swordsman‟s Folly.
“Bouncer, I‟m in. Going high.”
“Understood. I‟ll pass right under you. Weapons are free...”
Harker‟s chest wanted to explode as he flipped the Raptor up ninety-degrees and
entered the inescapable chasm. Proximity warnings blared from every alarm, but he dared
not take his hands off the throttle or stick to silence them as the world continued to spin
around him. Time seemed to slow down in the final seconds of his run, with every detail
coming to him in near-perfect clarity.
“Three...”
The blue contact ahead of him turned red and lit up his sonar as a collision warning,
but he didn‟t blink as Coyle audibly counted down the seconds until his pass. Harker was in
such a trance that they didn‟t even register in his mind. Seconds seemed like minutes as
more shots flew past his fighter, missing it by inches as the Chaodai pilot was forced to
divert his attention on simply flying his fighter, lest he crash in to solid rock walls at speeds
so fast that he wouldn‟t even register his own demise.
“Two...” Coyle said, his voice a distant blur in Harker‟s mind.
In the end, no one would ever know how fast Harker‟s Raptor was actually travelling
when it did the infamous run. Not even Harker, who hadn‟t adjusted his throttles since he set
them, seemed to register it as every ounce of his concentration went in to guiding the Raptor
through the ill-formed, would-be tunnel.
“One...”
Coyle‟s fighter appeared under Harker‟s fighter as a black, shapeless blur, its guns
blazing the entire way as it ripped up the walls of the Folly, sending flying rock and debris in
to the path of the pursuing Xiao-Yu.
A large chunk of granite slammed in to the enemy subfighter, as its wingman
struggled to make it through the gap. It didn‟t, and Coyle pulled high over the wreckage as
the second fighter careened out of control and slammed in to the walls of the trench, littering
itself over the seabed like a shattered egg shell. Coyle however, wasn‟t done.
“Mark!”
A single torpedo left Coyle‟s Raptor and shot away down the approach of the folly.
The Chaodai fighters that were still using the channel to mask their approach were
completely unaware of what waited for them as the six-hundred-pound plasma warhead
impacted the wall and detonated, vaporising tonnes of rock and causing hundreds more to
collapse from the high-vaulted ceilings.
The Dark Angels‟ Raptor snap-rolled and pulled out of the trench at break-neck
speed as the Folly‟s entrance collapsed behind him. The Chaodai fighters that continued to
shoot past him realised what the UEO pilot had done and one by one, began to pull out of
the trench, increasing speed to make their final run on the Commonwealth.
The distance to the UEO battlecruiser was now less than three miles.
Harker laughed euphorically as his fighter burst out of the Folly‟s end and accelerated
through the final straight. The seconds it took him to recover were all the Chaodai fighters –
now above him and having left the submarine canyon – needed to seize their moment.
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