But one look at Ettian tells me that Archon leaders aren’t supposed to think like that. Even if he desperately wishes it were otherwise, everyone on this bridge expects to go down with this ship.
I’m weighing my options for how best to drag him to the shuttles when someone in the outer rings of the bridge screams “Hull breach on deck 42!”
“Rut me sideways,” I mutter, bending low over my workstation. That’s Wen’s deck. That’s—
“What is it?” Ettian asks when he realizes I’ve gone still.
I pull up the airlock cameras to confirm it, then release my hold on the inner door’s locking mechanism, quieting the breach alarm in an instant. A hit didn’t put a hole in the ship. The outer door of the airlock has been hacked to messy pieces with a lethally sharp edge, leaving a gaping hole in the Torrent’s hull that’s roughly the size of a suited knight.
“She’s loose.”
CHAPTER 26
Wen streaks for the thick of the fighting like boltfire unleashed. I fumble as I pull up her suit’s data, which only confirms that she’s maxing out the burn on her boot thrusters. “Wen,” I beg her through the mic. “Get back here right now, before someone sees you.”
She ignores me. Ruttin’ typical.
I spin up her suit’s sensors, mapping them against the battlefield layout I’ve pulled down from the Torrent’s information. So far, nothing’s deviated from its flight path to meet her, but it’s only a matter of time before someone notices the small, human-shaped bogey flinging herself headlong into the fray.
“Patch me through to her,” Ettian says, his fingers flying through similar motions a half second slower than mine.
“Like that’s going to do anything,” I snap. “She ignored you the first time. What’s going to make now any—”
“She’s going to need all the help she can get,” he retorts.
Which I don’t understand for a second. But then my attention snags on an Umber gunship veering suddenly off its course chasing a pack of our Cygnets—an action that would be welcome in any other circumstance but spells certain calamity when its vector abruptly pivots to sight Wen’s infinitesimally small form.
She’s spotted.
And she doesn’t know it yet.
“Wen, above and behind on your left,” I mutter. Watch as her helmet cams swing around to clock her new friend. Hiss through my teeth as she fires her palm thrusters, sending her spiraling not away from the gunship but straight toward it. So much for subtlety.
“Patch me through,” Ettian snaps.
“All right, all right.” I do it with a flick of my fingers, then shift my full attention back to the inevitable collision of Wen and the gunship. They’re still several miles away from each other but traveling at speeds making them basically negligible.
“Wen,” Ettian whispers.
“Don’t you do it. Don’t you tell me to stop,” she pleads. I spare a glance to note the servos in her hands tightening on her vibrosword’s grip.
He shakes his head. “I’ve only got one thing to say. If you’re going to make me watch this, you’d better make it worth my while.”
On Wen’s end, there’s a short pulse of breath that carries with it the shape of a smile. She brings her vibrosword up, poised to strike, and holds a pose I’ve seen in so much wartime propaganda that the sight of it feels like she’s just taken that goddamn sword and run me through.
The tide of the battle has suddenly shifted, but not in Archon’s favor. The sight of Wen charging the gunship sends ripples through the field as the Umber craft loops its fellows in on the fascinating new development in Archon strategy. Oh look, I can almost imagine every captain saying, Archon’s sent out a suited knight for us to kill.
But they’re not the only ones who’ve realized that the Flame Knight has joined the party. A familiar rudiment has slipped into the war drums’ cadences—the same pattern they beat when we took Wen out for her first spin in a powersuit. News spreads across the field like wildfire, buoyed by the drums’ chaotic clamor. For the first time in a decade, a knight has come to call.
Next to me, Ettian is marshaling Archon’s answer. “I need a fast roster of all captains who’ve flown knight escort before,” he murmurs urgently into his mic. On his screen, he organizes the affirmative hails by proximity to Wen’s location on the battlefield, then handpicks a squad of the most agile ships. The competency does something for me, I’m loath to admit, but I can’t spare the distraction when the gunship’s weapons are starting to lock onto their target.
“Evasive,” I bark into the comm, and Wen obliges with a flip of one wrist, the pulse of her thruster throwing her into a corkscrew. Boltfire follows her like a magnet, and she dodges it by hairbreadths. I’d be shitting myself after a maneuver like that, but Wen’s vitals are pilot-steady as she continues to weave through the fire, her movements just unpredictable enough to keep them from anticipating her with a deadly shot.
Agility can only get her so far with her distance to target closing. My palms are slick on my screens as I do my damnedest to track the threats converging on her. It’s the most alive I’ve felt in months.
Three seconds to impact.
Two.
On one, she throws down her boots, swerving abruptly up from her former vector and arcing over the gunship’s bulk. Her vibrosword flashes out, fully extended, glimmering red against Dasun’s murderous glare. It dips down to carve across the ship’s main turret like a gentle caress.
The turret cleaves into an explosion of untargeted boltfire in her wake.
“Yes!” I yelp, just as Ettian throws a fist in the air. The drums triple in intensity. The gunship sails on, belching flares of escaping plasma, trying to swivel its rear mounts around for a strike as Wen swings wide around it, too flushed with victory to realize she’s about to get backhanded into atomic dust.
My stomach drops.
But before the rear guns can get a shot off, a barrage of boltfire puts the gunship out of its misery. Wen flips onto her back and retargets her cameras, letting out a surprised scoff, to find the reckoning Ettian’s marshaled for her forming up on her tail.
They’re a tight squad of ten, all of them fast enough to keep pace with a suited knight and all of them helmed by a veteran of the War of Expansion—someone who’s flown with a knight before and knows exactly how to cover her. They let her take the point of a comfortably compact arrowhead, adjusting their vectors to match hers and waiting to see where she leads them next.
“Wen, Flame Squadron. Flame Squadron, your knight,” Ettian says through a savage, triumphant grin.
I’m a little bit less surprised than I should be to find myself matching it. There’s no time to bury myself in a spiral of conflicting emotions. There’s only time to enjoy the unparalleled sight of Wen veering onto a new vector straight for a battle cruiser doing its damnedest to defang one of Archon’s dreadnoughts. Flame Squadron follows like a loyal pack.
“Form up on the knight in a Dijkstra shield,” Ettian says, a boyish sparkle in his eyes. The ships on my readouts shift effortlessly from an arrowhead into a sphere, some of them pulling ahead of Wen to place her squarely at their center. They hold the formation even as some of them spin their gyros to shift their guns to the most effective defensive position.
Not a second too soon. “Vipers, inbound, headed for your belly,” I snap. Wen glances down, clocks them, and shifts her flight path to put a Flame Squadron ship between her and the incoming fire. The ships on the opposite side of her shell pivot what guns they have to lend their support as the void between the two squadrons comes alive with boltfire.
Wen holds her vector through the hellish barrage. She wants that cruiser—which, like most Umber ships on the field, has decided that the glory of taking out a suited knight is more important than the entire remainder of the Archon forces. Horror floods me as I watch it wrench its
elf off the vector it had been sailing on to strafe our dreadnought and swing its glorious bulk around to face Wen with the full coverage of its massive forward batteries.
“Ettian, we’ve got a big fellow out here looking like he wants a bite.”
“I see him,” the emperor growls between gritted teeth. Flame Squadron’s doing its best to beat back the Viper flock, twisting in a defensive net, but the fighters are fast, persistent, and determined as hell to sneak a shot at Wen. Ettian’s not quite as steady on the comm as I’d prefer, but now’s not the time for criticism, and I certainly couldn’t step into his shoes even if I tried. Where he fumbles for speed, he makes up for it with the unwavering trust for the soldiers he marshals and an encyclopedic knowledge of knight-based squad maneuvers I’ve never even heard of.
Something about the brightness in his eyes and the way he seems to have forgotten his injury entirely tells me he’s been dreaming of calling these commands his entire life.
The brightness dims, but only by a hair, when we lose the first member of Flame Squadron to a direct hit from the cruiser. The silent burst is barely visible out of the corner of Wen’s cameras, but her reaction tells me the rest. She veers abruptly sideways, her vector thrown into an unsteady squiggle as she tries to master herself again. “Rust, that was close,” she hisses.
“Focus,” I remind her, and in her interior helmet cam I catch her lips pursing with grim determination. “You’re faster than them. More agile. Now, go show the big fellow what happens when he messes with your friends.”
She obliges with an extra burst to her boot thrusters, ducking her head as if she’s in atmo and trying to squeeze herself into the most aerodynamic shape possible. Girl and missile and throwing knife all at once, she sets her sights on the cruiser’s main battery and lifts her sword.
And when she strikes true, I feel something inside me start to beat steady as an Archon drum. The sight of a knight tearing into a massive gun, rendering it useless with just a few hacks of her vibrosword, is supposed to fill me with terror. Or horror. Or nausea. The sight of Wen doing it should make me dread what she’s become. Instead I’m wracked by an emotion so unfamiliar, so absent from my captivity, that it takes me a few seconds to figure out exactly what it is.
It’s pride. Fierce, joyous pride as I watch her vault herself over to the next battery and plunge the furious heat of her boots against its side. Pride that I’m here in the Torrent’s bridge, running her comms. That I’m sitting next to Ettian, who’s marshaling an ever-expanding guard of ships escorting her streak of wrath across the battlefield, keeping her fire alive despite Umber’s desperate attempts to smother it.
It’s been a long time since I’ve felt like I’m right where I’m supposed to be.
Wen barely needs any guidance from me to take on the cruiser. She all but skips across its surface, warding off fire from the rest of the Umber forces with her proximity to the cruiser’s critical functions. And by operating within the cruiser’s firing radius herself, she’s invincible.
Worse, she knows exactly what she’s doing. Wen did most of her growing up in a mob boss’s chop shop, and she fearlessly applies her deep well of mechanical knowledge to terrifying effect against a ship that’s literally millions of times her size. Every time her sword comes down, the ship loses a function. She’s cutting her way back toward the engines with nothing to stand in her way.
“It’s not enough,” Ettian mutters next to me, shocking me from the glee of watching Wen wreck shit. I’ve drawn the easy lot, keeping an eye out for threats to Wen and Wen alone. In doing so, I’ve lost the scope of the battle, forgetting that we’ve been scrambling to match Umber’s already-deployed forces. And even though fielding a knight created a mad dash to kill her that wrenched a good portion of the Umber forces off their vectors, Archon’s still fighting to reclaim ground.
“Got a gun going hot on the Fulcrum!” Telemetry shouts from the other side of the room. “Targeting…that can’t be right.”
I glance down. Too late, I see it.
“Wen, run!” I bark into the comm.
And watch, helpless, as the dreadnought’s boltfire slams into the cruiser’s rear. The noise of the bridge is equal parts joy, confusion, and horror, but the only noise I care about is the gentle push-pull of Wen’s breath in the comm, telling me she made it clear of the shot. “Gods of all systems,” I mutter, clutching my chest.
“They fired on their own people,” Ettian murmurs, horrified.
“Of course he did,” I snap, pointing at the command hierarchy we’ve scraped from the Fulcrum’s communications. Berr sys-Tosa himself is at the helm. Of course the system governor, paragon of Umber philosophy, would carve out an entire ship full of lesser people just to destroy a suited knight. The damage Wen could do to his army far outweighs the cost of the cruiser. The decision would be instantaneous, and the weight of his bloodright ensured it was carried out in the same breath. “As long as Tosa helms the Fulcrum, he’ll dash as many people as he has to on the rocks until he’s got a safe path to trample us.”
There’s a sharp hiss in my ear, the sound of Wen catching her breath all at once. I pull up her vitals. She’s rattled, but coming back down from the shock, and she’s secured herself safely to the exterior of one of her Flame Squadron ships, the motors in her suit’s arm locked to spare her muscles the effort of maintaining her grip as it sets itself on an evasive vector. Through her helmet’s cameras, I spot the mangled wreckage of the cruiser. What’s left of it could barely be salvaged into enough scrap for a single Beamer. All that, just to kill her—but she didn’t die.
Wen’s cameras shift from the cruiser to the Fulcrum.
“Makes sense,” she mutters to herself. “Cut off the head, the rest goes to chaos. They took Esperza and look at us now.”
“Wen,” I caution. I know where this line of thought goes. I know why her cameras are staying fixed on the Fulcrum, no matter how the craft she’s latched onto twists and turns.
“Cut off the head,” she repeats.
“It’s a ruttin’ dreadnought, Wen.”
Next to me, Ettian stiffens. He’s caught on too.
“You dodged one hit,” I mutter urgently. “You’re not immune to boltfire. None of these people we’ve marshaled can protect you, and all of them will die trying.”
I wish I could control her suit from out here. Wish I could lock her fingers permanently to that ship and force her to ride out the rest of the battle clinging to its safe harbor. All my life, my voice has been my greatest weapon. I’ve been notorious for being able to talk anyone into anything. But against the immovable object of Wen’s iron will, I’m helpless.
Helpless as I watch her fingers slowly uncurl, as I watch her kick her boot thrusters as hot as they’ll go and catapult herself onto a direct vector bound for the Fulcrum. The bridge’s noise goes distant around me. Ettian frantically coordinating Flame Squadron to fly defense for a knight who certainly isn’t waiting up for them. The now-familiar rhythm of the knight herald doubling in intensity as the rest of the bridge realizes what Wen’s doing. Even Deidra con-Silon’s sharp, decisive voice, trying to marshal the Torrent as part of the knight’s defense.
My universe has narrowed to Wen and Wen alone, to the inbound vectors of dozens of Umber ships coming to kill her, to the way her heart rate still hasn’t settled. Nothing I could possibly say can get her to act rationally right now, and nothing I could do will be enough to keep her alive. I told everyone this would happen, and it was all for nothing.
The maelstrom of the battle whips furiously around her, and Wen flies on in the stillness of its eye. I numbly call the guns targeting her, and she responds to that, at least, without complaint, weaving through the fire until one of her guard has a chance to drive the aggressor off her. In her helmet’s cameras, the Fulcrum looms ever larger.
Tosa’s flagship is a brute of a beast, twenty miles
from tip to tail. The sight of it catapults me back to the first time Ettian and I squared off against it, side by side in the Ruttin’ Hell, the Beamer we’d just stolen as we made our haphazard escape from the academy. It was the first time I’d ever looked at a dreadnought and felt anything other than vicious pride in the power a single ship could wield. The Fulcrum is a monster among monsters, and we only managed to escape it by fleeing to a foreign empire.
And Wen is offering herself wholeheartedly to its inevitability.
In perhaps the smallest mercy I’ve ever experienced, she’s being strategic about her approach, swinging wide around the dreadnought’s flank to avoid the Fulcrum’s forward battery. Most of the dreadnought’s guns move too slow to target her on her approach, but the ones at the fore are so massive that targeting hardly matters. And it would seem Tosa knows this too—because, slowly but surely, the dreadnought is starting to turn, trying to bring her into the sights of those devastating guns. Every degree the ship’s nose turns twists around my stomach in a viselike grip. Wen dances on the edge of their firing radius, dragging behind her what seems like the entire Umber host.
But right when I think she’s about to go in for the kill, she doubles back, brandishing her vibrosword as she sets her sights on one of the Vipers dogging her. I inhale sharply, ready to warn her of the starboard battery locking on, then save my breath when I realize she’s counting on it. My throat goes dry watching the maneuver—watching her basically sidestep a ruttin’ Viper and run the fighter cleanly into the Fulcrum’s shot.
Don’t, I find myself wishing I could beg her once again. Don’t make me believe.
The Fulcrum’s still turning. Inexorably closer to making the shot that will destroy her. Wen’s just barely fast enough to outpace its rotation, an effort that isn’t helped by her attempts to double back and swat down some of her pursuit—either with vicious strikes of her vibrosword or else by baiting the ships into the dogged fire still valiantly attempting to strike her from the Fulcrum’s starboard batteries. On my left, Ettian’s bent low over his station, trying his damnedest to keep his head up even as his ragtag squadron starts to dwindle in number.
Oaths of Legacy Page 26