This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
- T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men
Five winged, silver streaks plummeted straight downwards at hypersonic speeds, tearing apart the pristine, blue skies of the gas giant Txamsem like an exquisite tapestry being savagely rent by beastly claws. The five pursuers were hot on the heels of a sixth, smaller, roughly spherical object of decidedly sinister aspect. As it tumbled downwards, a crudely-painted skull-and-crossbones could sometimes be seen.
"Detonation in thirty seconds!" called Lee Carter, pilot of the lead silver streak and Wing Commander of the Banshee Squadron. Ahead and below her, already several miles deeper into the atmosphere, the object of their pursuit could barely be discerned as a tiny black dot against the picturesque, orange and umber storm clouds of the giant planet's middle upper layers. In another twenty-five seconds, the device would reach crushing depth and detonate.
"Anybody got a plan?" yelled Max Vasser, fighting to be heard above the growing wind noise outside the cockpit of her starfighter.
"The nova bomb goes off and we all die instantly as this entire planet is turned into a miniature star, destroying all life in this solar system, halting Federation expansion in this sector for the foreseeable future?" suggested Alex Dalton, the squadron rookie, across the comm-link.
"Thanks for the plot exposition," growled Max, thoroughly unamused by Alex's flippancy in the face of certain death. "Anybody got a different plan?"
"We can't shoot it because that'll just set it off," offered Sam Beckett unhelpfully.
"I have a plan," said Jo Schmidt, the squad's egghead, "but you won't like it."
"Just do it!" yelled Carter. "We've got ten seconds to save the universe!"
"Everyone follow me in!" shouted Jo to her four wingmates across the comm-link. Opening her throttle all the way, her starfighter shot ahead of the pack, still on its suicidal, downward trajectory, but the others quickly caught up. Below, the nova bomb was no longer quite so distant; in fact the extra burst of speed the Banshees were putting on put them right alongside the diabolical device in a matter of seconds. The extreme air velocity was taking its toll on the planes however, which were designed primarily for deep space operations, not atmospheric racing above a gas giant. Leading wing edges and nosecones were starting to glow a dull orange working their way steadily to white-hot, and wouldn't hold out for more than another couple of minutes.
"Everyone, lock your tractor beams onto the bomb. The combined envelope'll shunt the graviton pulse from the detonation and keep the planet from blowing up!" shouted Jo above the still-escalating din of the firestorm outside.
"We'll be killed!" cried Kim, no longer feeling quite so flippant.
"Better us than the millions living in this system!" replied Carter. "Are we together on this?"
Four grim affirmatives answered Carter's query, and with only seconds to spare, the five starfighters of Banshee Squadron surrounded the free-falling nova bomb and enveloped it in a smothering embrace of tractor beams.
What was designed to have been a blinding flash of X- and Gamma-rays followed by the formation of a micro-singularity and the subsequent compaction and ignition of the gas giant planet into a fledgling star was reduced by the quick action of the Banshees to a more traditional and mundane large fiery explosion. Txamsem was spared, as was the entire Serenity solar system, but of the five planes of the brave Banshee Squadron there was no sign....
back to TOC