The Tronik Gambit

Short Story Press Presents The Tronik Gambit by Salim Farhat

The Tronik Gambit is the story of a rag-tag group of air pirates. Like their older, sea-borne brethren, they spent years terrorizing aerial shipping, raiding ships on the seas with float-planes, and robbing towns and remote outposts on land, and using their machines to make the fastest getaways imaginable and were a huge thorn in the side of the authorities. Operating from a massive flying aircraft carrier, and using clouds, mist, and forbidding terrain to hide their presence and move around with impunity. Their weapons and machines are makeshift, and purchased from corrupt industrialists, and created entirely from scratch with nothing but stolen parts and material, or outright stolen from the legitimate governments of the world.

Amid all this, there is a massive war going on between the Drakameer and the Ukarin, two nations with a history of bitterness that runs so deeps that neither side has any qualms against using criminals, madmen, or psychopaths against each other. While they’re still officially wanted, air pirates were used to do thing that would be too difficult for them to explain to their own citizens.

For all their success, most of the gang has grown weary of their life on the edge and yearn to go back to the society that they had turned their backs on, so long ago. So they use their connections with some shady individuals in the Ukarin military, men who have no qualms selling their country’s secrets for a fistful of cash and some favors. Discovering that the ruthless General Tronik, a psychopath with a pathological need to undertake military ventures that border on the suicidal, they realize they not only have their ticket to securing their pardon, but to ending their careers with the biggest bang imaginable. All while taking on the most monstrous war machine they had ever produced: the flying battleship Briesmonis.