Emergence: Chaper 12

“Olaf?” Strom slapped his face but Olaf could not respond. Ilisa floated next to Strom now and was cradling her brother's head in her hands, stroking his hair with shaking hands. “No.” Strom breathed the word as he ran his scanner over Olaf's body once more; still no pulse.

“Help me get him to my ship,” Ilisa's voice seemed thicker than normal, all vitality drained from it. “I have a reviver pack there.”

In the anti-gravity of space, Olaf weighed nothing, but the logistics of moving a limp object in three dimensions was never simple. Eventually, they carefully placed Olaf in Ilisa's cockpit; for a moment he looked peaceful, like he was sleeping. Ilisa sealed the cockpit and removed her helmet, before heading to the back of the small craft, taking care not to lean on Olaf; difficult in the small space of the Stinger. Strom took his helmet off too, and looked upon Olaf properly. His face was deathly pale and, as Strom put his ungloved hand to his cheek, cold as ice. Moving to Olaf's stomach, he slowly and carefully eased Olaf's shirt off. The shirt itself was stained with blood, but as Strom removed it, he saw that only traces of blood had made it on to the stomach. And as he moved the shirt up past the chest, he retched; even though the hole seemed clinically placed (a small cylinder carved into the chest), it was coated in dry blood; not much of it was liquid now.

“Found it.” Ilisa sounded desperate and breathless as she interrupted Strom's trance, before she let out an involuntary wail when she saw Olaf's wound; almost as if subconsciously accepting his fate. But her conscious was not going to give up yet. She attached nodes to Olaf's chest, just over where his heart would be. These nodes were connected to the box that she held in her hand, and were designed to administer an electrical pulse each to get the heart started again. Strom looked at the wound; even if the bullet had missed his heart, he knew Olaf wouldn't live. He knew it. But even if there was a slim chance, even if it was just time to say goodbye...

The machine beeped and Olaf's body jerked a little, but Strom's scanner showed no pulse. Ilisa looked at him expectantly, but Strom's eyes must have told her all she needed to know. She tried again and again, the body just jerking up each time, with the finger slamming the reviver harder and harder before she dropped the box and fell to her knees beside her fallen brother.

The ship jolted suddenly and a Reaper flew past. Strom looked out of the cockpit and saw burn marks across the side of the ship; bullets had grazed Ilisa's Stinger. Strom clipped his helmet back on. “The Reapers are back!” he called to Ilisa, who was clipping her helmet on too. Strom's breathing became irregular and rapid as something welled up inside him, replacing his grief. “I'm gonna make them pay.”

“Strom, no!” Ilisa made to grab him, but he had already opened the cockpit and pushed away from her ship.

As he floated through space towards his Stinger, he forgot his previous fears and latched onto the right wing before dragging himself into the cockpit, closing the canopy and starting the ship up abruptly, not even bothering to strap in as he followed the trail of the Reaper. “Strom. Strom, come back!” Ilisa yelled over the com, but he ignored her, turning the com off completely; no need for distractions: he was a thruster down and chasing after a skilled pilot.

The pilot must have known Strom was after him now, because the Reaper suddenly went into a nosedive straight down to the planet. Strom followed, trying to get lock a missile onto the bastard, but failing every time. The Reaper was easily outpacing him as it entered the atmosphere; Strom's ship hissed as he too entered the atmosphere: the airlock unlocked to save on the Stinger's oxygen supply. The Reaper straightened out once more, flying at a standard level above a small town. Strom struggled to follow and found himself flying through the town. This town seemed relatively unscathed by the conflict; only a few buildings seemed to have scored hits and the residents were outside trying to help those who had been hurt. That behaviour would never be seen in Tapal, but Raanian life was very different if you lived in a town. Now, all these people stared up at the out of control Stinger as it stormed between the buildings. Some people ducked as it went past, the slipstream ruffling their hair. The left wing caught on a building, tearing a chunk out of both wing and window, and sent the Stinger spiralling further, Strom slamming the Stinger into the opposite direction while focusing intently on the escaping Reaper. The Stinger gradually came back to his control as he barely managed to avoid hitting the buildings on the main street, but a violent swerve sent him heading down a tight side road. Knowing he couldn't make it, he angled the ship by ninety degrees, so that the wings were aligned vertically. The cockpit scraped along one of the buildings, throwing brick dust in small splatters across the canopy, obscuring Strom's vision. He emerged from the side road and into another main street, before pulling up and rising higher and higher until he found the Reaper again.

The pilot had got pretty far, and it hadn't become complacent in Strom's absence, putting a lot of distance between the two. Strom looked on the radar and followed the rough trajectory of the Reaper: it was heading to Tapal. Even after Xaos had doomed the coastal towns to burn, he still wanted to smash Raan's capital. Strom fired at the Reaper; he was sure to hit it eventually. He had to: life for a life.

And they would have hit, if the pilot hadn't retracted the wings; they appeared to fold up into the body of the Reaper, causing the missiles, not being locked on to anything, to fly past. Strom cursed; he'd never seen that before. Perhaps this wasn't a standard Reaper after all. The Reaper, without its wings, seemed to be going faster and faster, gaining speed as it went. The engines whined as Strom pushed them to their limits and still barely keeping up. He couldn't believe the speed on this Reaper, it was faster than any small vessel he had seen before. He turned the com on again. “Ilisa, are you seeing this?”. He sounded more curious than angered now.

She sounded flustered when she spoke again. “Is that the bastard who killed Olaf?”

“Yes.” Strom's voice was level and resolute.

“Then it doesn't matter what sort of ship it is, we'll take it down!” Ilisa's Stinger drew up level with Strom's now, he could see Olaf's head behind Ilisa's; obviously the body was behind the pilot's seat now.

“And then we can bury Olaf.”

Ilisa's voice faltered. “No, Strom. Cremate; that's how my parents went.”

Strom bowed his head; Ilisa's parents had been killed years ago in one of the first Northern riots in Tapal. Hundreds were killed, both Northerners and Southerners, in the riot, one of the bloodiest that the city had ever seen. Since then, the riots seemed only like aftershocks after a quake.

Strom engaged thrusters again, and tore after the modified Reaper, Ilisa at his side. The Reaper was moving left and right in a lazy attempt to avoid Strom's target lock. Strom concentrated, tweaking the Stinger's path until finally the target screen beeped, and Strom launched two missiles.

But no missiles launched.

He pushed the button again, in case it was stuck. Nothing. A wave came over him, and he roared in a mixture of fury and anguish, before he punched the target screen, cracking the glass. He buried his head in his hands and muttered to himself. As his hands grew slick with tears, he mumbled “Failed you...” quietly, before he heard Ilisa.

“Strom!” She sounded urgent. “The Reaper's turned back around!”

Strom looked up and saw the streamlined Reaper, wings still folded in, coming straight at him. Frantically manoeuvring, his Stinger barrel-rolled to the left, narrowly avoiding the kamikaze assault. “Take it down, Ilisa!”

“I can't get a lock! And if I miss, I'll hit you; it's too close!”

Strom saw the Reaper open fire on his craft, but the Stinger couldn't move out of the way quick enough and an explosion threw Strom to the side, out of his seat. Checking another screen, he realised that the Reaper had just destroyed his other thrusters. With a sudden dullness in his heart, he came to the conclusion that he could go nowhere but down. He watched as Ilisa fired upon the Reaper and felt satisfied as it exploded, further and further away.

In a plume of smoke and fire, the Stinger screamed its way through a skyscraper, before burying itself in the atrium of another. The wreckage opened and Strom fell out, barely alive. Just in sight, rimmed with red, he could see Ilisa's Stinger land, and she leapt out of it and ran over to him.

“Strom!”

She was safe. Strom relaxed.

As his eyes closed, Strom looked past her and saw Olaf, standing straight with an open hand; beckoning.

Darkness.