“Steady on, Kris.”
Her pent breath escaped in an explosive rush. “It’s a medical team, Huron! You know what Quillan’s gonna do the moment they get me on that fuckin’ boat!”
“You don’t know that. This may not change things as much as you think.”
“How the fuck would you know what I think!”
She slammed the locker shut in his face and stalked out.
Chapter Four
Recon Flight Viper Tango, in transit
Asylum, Cygnus Sector
The first jump went on schedule. The destroyer LSS Vindicator escorted them to the jump point and gave them a boost out—the fighter’s drives didn’t mass enough for the repeated jumps this trip called for. They popped into Asylum space on target. N’Komo took point, followed by Kristin Tschosik’s and Stefanie Halvorson’s squadrons, while Huron’s group, with Kris in it, took station between them and Asylum’s miserable little brown sun. Then they began the real-time sprint to the next jump point.
Kris had pulled the end post position—what they called “Tail-gunner Charlie” or, more charitably, “Dancing Last”—and was supposed to keep the formation tight and prevent straggling. But that meant there was no one to prevent her from straggling. Either Mertone hadn’t bothered to specify the flight order or someone—Huron maybe?—had changed it. She cycled the T-Synth to the nav screen and brought up the preprogrammed trajectory. Sometimes, data got a little scrambled during a jump.
Everything looked fine. Boosting at 0.6 max—the most they could make without lighting up Halith’s deep-radar screens—the transit would take just over nine hours, just as Mertone had estimated. That was a long time to hide in the rocks. Her eyes wandered back to the T-Synth.
Let’s see what’s out there, why don’t we.
She brought up the tactical overlay and downloaded the last available data. There it was: a bright orange icon orbiting Asylum’s largest planet. Asylum Station. With a big, fat, juicy pocket dreadnought attached. And a high-level staff officer—maybe two?
Then Kris noted that Asylum Fleet was clumped in a tight formation on the far side of the little brown star. Odd, but convenient. Idly, she tapped up some numbers on her console. Asylum Station was four hours away, at half-boost. With so much crap in this system, it couldn’t be that hard to sneak past the deep-radar fences. After all, who’d expect a single fighter? Especially one loaded with eight torpedoes.
Yes, she thought eight torpedoes just might do. Stations like Asylum didn’t have shields because of their sheer size. Shield power requirements increased as the square of the area increased, so the largest ships—fleet carriers and dreadnoughts, at around five hundred meters long—had to implement them in zones, which left seams in the overall protection. The more zones, the worse the problem, which put a practical limit on the maximum size of a structure that could be shielded. That limit was roughly a kilometer in diameter for a space station, and Asylum was four times that size.
Nor did it make much sense to fit a station like Asylum with enough point-defense systems to provide effective coverage over its entire area, and ECM and decoys were of no use to a target so large that weapons didn’t need to be terminally guided to hit. The only real defense for large stations was the fleet assigned to them, and if she could find a way in, Kris thought with a grin, with the Asylum Fleet where it was, that would be next to no defense at all.
Assuming she could launch the torps. She brought up fire control. If that bastard Mertone had had them disable it . . .
He hadn’t. Fire control worked normally. She hit select. Four torps came up on the weapons control panel. She frowned.
Was that right? After thinking a moment, she decided it was. These fighters usually carried only two torps, mounted on the in-board pylons. At most, they carried four, so the autoselect software was programmed to look only for four. Besides, fire control probably knew it was slightly loony to fly with more than four loaded—as she was finding out.
But would autoselect recognize the other four, once the first salvo was gone? Four torps might hurt a station, but not that seriously. Eight would, and if she were very lucky, it was just possible they might take it down. And, it occurred to her, she didn’t have to actually launch the last four . . .
Nah, save that thought for later.
She had one way to find out. She manually deselected the in-board pylons and watched the weapons control panel. After some cycling and chewing, the other four torps showed up.
Abruptly, her comm-link crackled with a burst transmission at the very lowest power. Somebody breaking comms-silence so soon?
“Kennakris, what the hell’s going on? I’m getting weird emissions off your bird.” Tole’s voice.
Dammit! He must have picked up her cycling the fire control. Time to choose . . .
She keyed her comm-link to match his burst. “Ah—I’ve got a little problem here.” She popped her faceplate and tapped the lip-mic with a gloved finger to get a little realistic noise on the line. “I think the jump scrammed something on this overloaded bucket—”
“Come again? You’re breaking up.”
“Repeat,” Kris said, muffling her voice and groping under the console. Now where was that damn coupler? Ah, there— “I gotta problem here. I’m shuttin’ it down.” She wiggled the coupler as she talked and was gratified to hear Tole’s perplexed voice.
“—shutting what down? Dammit, Kris, I’m losing—”
She cut her power back to 0.3 boost. “Losing power,” she mumbled, wiggling for all she was worth. “Don’t know wha—” She cut the mic with a dramatic click. And grinned. Tole’s voice came again, fainter.
“Kris? Kris!”
“Cut the chatter!” That was Huron’s voice on the override circuit. “Lock it down, Tole.”
“But sir! We’ve got a—”
“Can it before I put a burst up your ass!”
The comms went dead. Kris grinned wider as the little blue dots of her friends receded from her on the T-Synth. She cut back power again. Time to check the opposition. The Halith had expanded their search radii about thirty percent, according to Mertone’s briefing. That should leave some nice fighter-sized holes. She added the passive sensor data to the tactical overlay, looking for the outer-system patrols. There they were, a bunch of little red dots. Nicely spread out too. The lightspeed data were an hour old by now, but she didn’t dare bring up scanners to go fishing for anything newer. As long as nothing spooked them, things looked just fine.
She had the T-Synth run a prediction. It came up even more spread out. Better and better. She tapped away on the console. The T-Synth plotted a trajectory that should avoid both patrols and deep-radar sweeps—leaving a surprising amount of leeway.
Lookin’ good, Kris commented to herself. She changed course, upped the boost to 0.4 and plotted a helical transit through the outer asteroid belts and the wide, dust-filled zone they called Junkland. Crossing the last belt would be trickier. She’d have to get beyond it before she could be sure of getting a good torpedo lock. The T-Synth couldn’t find any holes in the radar fence at that range, and she would be within the envelope of the innermost patrols—to say nothing of Ilya Turabian. But if she caught them by surprise, they shouldn’t be able to get a firing solution that quickly. Getting into position for the second launch could be tight, but if they were a little slow, and she got lucky—
The maser tight-beam alert wailed, startling her. Reflexively, she keyed the burst link. “Who—”
“Shut that off!” Huron’s voice, brittle and furious.
“Huh? What?”
“I said, shut that fucking thing off!”
She did, gloved fingers trembling. The vehemence of his tone astounded her. She’d only heard Huron actually angry once before. And that time—
The maser alert sounded again. This time she keyed up the maser link. Huron’s voice blasted over her helmet set. “I wish I had time to tell you what I think of this little stunt of yours—”
“Bullshit!” he shot back. “You asked the moment you decided to fuck me over with this tantrum you’re having. And right now you don’t stand a snowflake’s chance in hell of getting within launch range of that station.”
Kris ground her teeth on the lip mic. “Y’know, you can be a real asshole at times.”
“Well, you’ve known that since Nedaema. Now shut up and listen.”
“Don’t ever tell me to shut up, asshole.”
“Alright, Kris.” She could tell the effort he was putting into making his voice sound almost normal. “Dial it back a notch. In about two and a half minutes this link is going to be too dangerous to talk on. You’re committed now, so I’ve gotta tell you how this thing is going to work.”
She wasn’t mollified. “I know how this is gonna work.”
“C’mon, Kris. Gimme a chance here.”
She sighed. Well, alright. Since you asked nicely. “Roger that.”
“Thanks. First thing—shut down fire control and turn off your shields.”
“What?”
“Do it. I’ll explain.”
She did it.
“Fine. These aren’t recon fighters, Kris. Fire control leaks more signal than you’d think on these birds. You might as well be babbling in the clear as running it all the time. I’ll tell you when to bring it up. Shields go down because if they’ve got an ultra-wideband scanner, they’ll light it up all over the place. At weapon frequencies, shields are just big damn mirrors. I don’t know if the station has one, but that dreadnought sure as hell does. They spared no expense on that baby.”
“What’s two?” Kris asked, impatiently aware of the diminishing minutes.
“Two is”—Huron sounded almost pleasant now—“you’ve never mixed it up with real torpedoes before. Those torps will need about eleven to fourteen seconds to lock up.”
That shocked her. “I thought it was only six.”
“In the manual, it’s six,” Huron corrected. “In the simulator, it’s six. But with all this crap around, you’re looking at eleven to fourteen. And if Ilya has a phase-conjugate canceller on board, and somebody thinks to bring it up, it gets worse. A lot worse.”
“How much worse?”
“Torps may not lock at all.”
“That’s worse,” she agreed.
“Yeah. Then it’s your T-Synth against their BMC. Guess who wins.”
“Great—”
Huron stepped on what was about to be a pretty good piece of freelance invective. “You’ve probably figured out by now that you can only launch four at once.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. Your first run should be almost free. Surprise and all that. That’s a nice approach you’ve got planned.”
“How in hell—”
“Nav-Comp bleeds signal, too—I peeked.” Huron sounded pleased with himself, even over a tight-beam link.
“Oh.”
“Right. A couple of last-minute things.”
Kris curled her upper lip sardonically. Oh, now for the good news?
“As we go in, you’ll have to bring up fire control. When you do, all hell’s gonna break loose. They’ll launch immediately. Don’t bring shields up—the new anti-rads live on that stuff. Keep the shields down until they’ve got at least four or five out the tube—”
“Four or five?”
“Yeah. Make ’em hunt around and sometimes they get in each other’s way. The boost wake on those things generates clutter for the ones behind. Don’t give ’em a bright target until you have to.”
“Jeezus, and I got you once?”
“In playtime, Kris. Playtime’s over.”
I guess so.
“Last. You’ll have noticed that thing handles like a pig and you’ve only got one gun.”
“Right.”
“You can’t use it until you drop those torps.”
“Oh—”
“Yeah. Having eight torps loaded confuses the hell out of the software. Once you dump the torps, it’ll find the gun. But not until then. Guess what that means.”
“When the fighters arrive, it’s game-over.”
“The lady wins a star.”
Keep that smart-ass tone out of your voice, asshole. Well, on second thought, don’t. It wouldn’t be you, otherwise . . .
“—keep them off your back as long as I can, Kris. Time’s up. Go to wig-wag if you need to talk. When they launch, you can mic up and scream like hell. It won’t matter then. Huron out.”
“Kennakris out.” Over and out—very much over and out.
The run-in started out easy. They ghosted in on Kris’s chosen trajectory, as dark and silent as could be. As they approached the outermost asteroid belt, Kris automatically keyed up the collision avoidance system. Huron immediately wig-wagged Off.
Alright, but only if you go first, Kris snarled silently and took it down. Without shields, it wouldn’t take anything much bigger than the end of her little finger to ruin her whole day.
Huron couldn’t have possibly heard her—could he?—but he pulled over the top and took station in front of her. She turned up the gain on her forward view screen as high as it would go. Her reward was a nice view of his running lights, blue and red, about fifty klicks up ahead. Follow the leader . . . She did, passing easily through the outer asteroid belt and the broad, dust-filled Junkland. She began to hope. No pulses yet . . .
Just outside the innermost asteroid belt, the sensor warning receiver blipped once. The hair stood up on the back of Kris’s neck, a feeling amplified by the flight helmet. Just a sidelobe? Please? Then there was a spatter of noise on the tight-beam link. “—of a bitch. We got trouble, Kris.”
She keyed the mic. “Maybe it’s just a sidelobe?”
“No. Deep-radar track pulse. Main beam.”
Shit! “How’d they—”
“Someone on Ilya is a hell of an operator. We’re gonna see a launch warning in about . . . yep, there it is. Max boost, Kris.”
Kris saw the red warning indicator even as he said the words. No lock indication? What’s going on? Running to catch a missile? What sort of lunacy was this?
Huron was boosting away, and she jammed it to catch up. Weight down squashed on her, but not hard enough. Damn, this thing accelerated slowly . . .
“What’s going on?” she breathed into the mic, unconsciously lowering her voice. “Why are we maxing to—”
“Barrage missile launch.” Huron’s voice held a lingering secret—how did he get in those inflections over a tight-beam link? “Looks like they’ll drop it long.”
So what’s the punch line?
With a grin she could hear, he supplied it. “I think they think we’re a capital ship—or ships. Check the spread.”
She turned on the scanners. It showed the approaching missiles as a heavy fan of orange lines.
Just great, they’re trying to take out two lousy fighters with enough fire power to slag a cruiser. I hope they bust somebody for conspicuous waste.
“Boost higher, Kris,” the comm-link crackled.
“I’m running plus-eight.”
“Run plus-ten. The engines probably won’t blow till eleven.”
Stellar, she thought as she nudged it up, now I can get ionized even sooner.
“Good,” Huron’s voice came again. “If they’ve given themselves a normal interval, we’ll be inside it in about ten seconds.”
Hope you’re right, thought Kris. Barrage missiles detonated outwards, setting up a plasma wave that obliterated everything in front of them.
“Should give us a real nice background for about two minutes,” he punctuated her thought. “Start an impact minus-twenty counter now.”
“Why?” she muttered, setting the timer. “Goddamned doomsday cuckoo clock?”
“Shield timer,” Huron answered. “Might do some good if I’m wrong.”
Yeah, right. Kris flicked her eye
s up to check the ugly orange spray radiating lethally towards them. The blood in her ears got thunderously loud as the counter ticked down with a heartbeat’s slowness—except that her heart was going about two hundred beats a minute. Two hundred long beats . . .
Then she noticed something funny. “Huron, where in hell’s the fleet?”
“What? What are you talking—oh.” Yeah, Kris thought, oh. The Asylum Fleet, which had been on the opposite side of the orbit from them, wasn’t showing up on the scanner at all. “Where’d they go?” she asked again.
“Can’t say I care,” Huron replied, sounding piqued. “I’d watch that barrage, if I were you.”
She checked on it. The orange fan got closer and closer; the scanner could pick out the individual missiles now. The counter ticked down: ten seconds, seven, five. She reached for the shield controls—
“Piece o’ cake!” Huron exulted suddenly. “Don’t look back!”
It didn’t matter, the sunscreens had already darkened. Her fighter rocked a little in the shock wave of the back-blast.
“Punched a hole right through the asteroid belt,” Huron commented wickedly. “That ought to give them some nice hot dust to look at for a while. Lieutenant, you may commence your run.”
“Yessir!”
Kris engaged fire control, brought up the torpedoes, and plotted an in-bound course at Asylum Station. She dropped the boost back a bit, picking an aperiodic oscillating approach. The T-Synth digested her inputs, beeped approvingly, and drew the attack run on her screen, complete with preferred launch ranges, estimated detection times, and missile fly-out times. In its electronic opinion, she could launch with a seventy-percent solution twenty-three seconds before the anti-rads blew her into superheated plasma.
Three out of four. Not so good. Better to make these four count; the second run was going to be very iffy. If she held on another six seconds, she could get a ninety-percent solution. With six fewer seconds to ditch the missiles in a logy ship. Hmmm . . . Yeah, go for it. It might be her only chance.
The Loralynn Kennakris series Boxed Set Page 114