Lanoe was calling her. “If the two of you are done showing off,” he said, “you might want to look at the destroyer and see what it’s doing. Then maybe one of you can explain it to me, because I haven’t got a clue.”
Lanoe’s display showed the twisted horn of the destroyer at a high level of detail now, the imagery built out of a composite of different views from various microdrones and his FA.2’s own sensors. He could make out the ragged scar near its nose quite clearly, enough so that he could tell it wasn’t a rupture in the destroyer’s hull. There was no sign of actual damage, no visible scorch marks or stress fractures. It was as if the ragged gap were part of the destroyer’s design, a normal feature of its shape.
Which just made it stranger that a cloud of debris was twisting away from the gap like a billowing pillar of smoke.
“Maybe we were right after all,” Zhang said. “Maybe it did get hit by a meteor or something and now it’s breaking up.”
“Maybe,” Lanoe said. He couldn’t get past the overwhelming feeling of dread he felt, though. The feeling that the enemy was surprising them once again.
Especially when a second burst of debris erupted from farther back along the destroyer’s flank, a whole new cloud billowing from its side.
“No,” he said, because suddenly he knew exactly what he was looking at. “No, it can’t be…”
He tapped at a virtual keyboard and magnified the view until it grew rough and pixilated, until he could just make out individual pieces of the debris cloud. And saw exactly what he expected to see.
“Fellows,” Maggs called, “not be an alarmist, but is that smoke plume…turning? Rather heading in our direction, I think.”
Lanoe shared the magnified view with the other two pilots. “That isn’t debris,” he said. “Those aren’t chunks of the destroyer falling off. Those are scouts being launched.”
A third column of them came boiling off the destroyer, a jet of tiny ships pushing toward them. Every single piece of “debris” was a scout breaking away from its perch on the destroyer.
Which wasn’t, in fact, a destroyer at all. It was a carrier. The entire skin of the enemy ship was covered in scouts and interceptors and now all of them were deploying, headed straight for the three human fighters.
“Spread out!” Lanoe said. “We’ve got incoming!”
Dead ahead, along an arc fifty kilometers wide, the entire sky was full of enemy craft. Every single one of them accelerating in Lanoe’s direction.
Zhang played her hand over her tactical display again and again, trying to get a grasp on what they faced. There was just too much information to process there.
Her eyes might be artificial but they showed her it was all true. Hundreds of enemy ships, maybe thousands.
Maggs had made short work of fifteen of the scouts, but she doubted he could handle these kinds of numbers. She knew she couldn’t. The only smart thing to do now, the only course of action that made any sense, was to turn around and burn for safety. Get as far as possible from this cloud of ships and keep going.
“We can swing around behind Garuda, put the ice giant between us and them,” Maggs said. “Buy ourselves some time. Those scouts can’t have a very long range. If we can just get out ahead of them, we can make it out of here.”
“There are interceptors in there, too,” Zhang pointed out. “It looks like maybe as many as one in sixteen. We know the interceptors are capable of interplanetary distances. But I’d rather fight a running battle with those than take on all these scouts.”
“I concur,” Maggs told her. “Perhaps our redoubtable commander will be kind enough to give the order to break contact.”
There was no response. Zhang could hear her heart beating in her throat.
“In your own good time, Commander,” Maggs said.
Lanoe was still there. Zhang’s communications panel said as much.
“Negative,” he said, finally.
“Please confirm that last communication,” Maggs asked.
“I said negative. We are not going to cut and run. If we can’t handle this, there’s no point in heading back to Niraya—that just amounts to giving up. You want to be the one who tells Elder McRae ‘sorry, we tried to save your planet but it was just too hard’?”
“Actually? I’d be happy to,” Maggs said.
“No,” Zhang said. It was her job to back Lanoe up. As his wingman she had to enforce his orders; that was just part of the job. Plenty of times before she’d done so even when she disagreed with him, because when you were in the Navy, it wasn’t your job to debate orders.
This time, though, she did it because he was right.
“No,” she said again. “We stand and fight. He’s right, Maggs. If we give up now we’ll never have the nerve to try again. I don’t like the odds here, three against…who knows how many ships. But we didn’t come out here on a pleasure cruise.”
“Spread out,” Lanoe said. “Stack ’em up. We all know the drill.”
And they did. Zhang had been in bad scrapes before. The 94th squadron under Lanoe’s command had taken on plenty of fights where they were outnumbered. Lanoe had always gotten them through. These odds might be an order of magnitude worse than usual, sure. But she would fight and die by Lanoe’s side if that was what he wanted.
On the plus side the destroyer—she didn’t know what else to call it—didn’t appear to have any heavy guns. And the scouts and interceptors didn’t have vector fields.
Which was a little comfort, though not much, as the volume around her started filling up with kinetic impactors and plasma bursts.
In a massive battle like this all the rules went out the window. Should you go in screaming, at full throttle? It made you a moving target, which made you harder to hit. It also meant you were more likely to run headlong into an impactor or a piece of debris, which could end your fight right there. Did you take your time lining up shots, so you didn’t waste ammunition? Then again, there were so many targets that even wild shots had a chance of hitting something.
The hardest part was keeping an eye on your squadmates, to make sure you didn’t shoot one of them by mistake. Or collide with them at ten thousand kilometers a second.
Zhang twisted around in space, not so much corkscrewing as maneuvering by instinct, dashing into the cloud of scouts, banking hard as their engines lit up, as they tried to track her. She swiped away her targeting board—it couldn’t keep up with all the things she needed to shoot. She held down the trigger on her stick and spat particle fire at anything that moved.
All around her scouts fell apart in pieces, or burst into flame as their fuel supplies caught. She saw one jink around to get a shot at her, only to fly right into a kinetic impactor. She didn’t bother to laugh—she didn’t have time.
High above her Maggs dipped in and out of the cloud, refusing to let the scouts surround him. A good strategy, one she wished she’d thought of. Where was Lanoe? There—she recognized the thermal signature of his FA.2’s main thruster. He was plunging straight through the cloud, barely bothering to waggle back and forth. She saw his vector field sparkle with heat as an impactor grazed off his canopy, and couldn’t help herself—she gasped a little.
“Boss,” she said, “you have a plan here?”
“Give me cover, if you can,” he said.
She swung around to follow him, blasting apart a scout almost as an afterthought.
There were no pilots in those scouts or interceptors, Lanoe knew. It made it easy to shoot at them. It also made them disposable. The enemy didn’t care how many of its ships were lost here. All it cared about was killing humans.
Even in the darkest days of the Century War, when Earth had fought Mars and Ganymede for control of the solar system—when it seemed like the entire human race was at war with itself—even then, there had been a certain fellow-feeling among pilots. You hated it when you saw an enemy get hit by antivehicle fire, because you knew what an ugly death that meant. If somebody ran out of ammunition or fue
l maybe you just let them go, a weird kind of professional courtesy offered to someone who’d had you locked in their sights a moment before.
This wasn’t that kind of fight.
Lanoe kept his PBWs blazing. He swatted away the enemy scouts like flies, not caring if he cut them to pieces or blasted them into slag. He didn’t so much as pause to make sure they were out of the action before moving on to the next enemy. Interceptors wheeled around to face him, their spiky guns belching out an impactor every second. He didn’t waste disruptor rounds on them, just hosed them down with particle beams and rushed past them, deeper into the cloud.
It grew thicker the farther he went. Scouts crowded his view. He stopped trying to aim. He was more interested in punching his way through. Getting closer to the destroyer, the big prize.
He didn’t have time to analyze imagery and sensor data, but he could see the mass of the big ship up ahead and he could see how it had changed. From a distance it had looked almost smooth, like a thing with a real hull. Now it looked like it was dissolving in acid, its edges rough and chipped, any kind of real shape lost until it was just a formless blob of metal in the dark. Each scout or interceptor that leapt from its back left it smaller and less threatening, but he had to know.
The engineer, Derrow, had said there needed to be a living, thinking commander nearby in case the enemy drones went off-program. Maybe they were on the destroyer, coordinating the whole battle. If he could get through, if he could strike down the enemy commander, maybe Zhang and Maggs didn’t have to die here today.
Maybe.
For his own life he gave little thought. That was the only way he’d survived so long, gotten so many medals. If you went into a battle expecting to live through it, you made bad decisions, you gave up opportunities. On the other hand, if you went in expecting to die you probably would. The key was to put yourself aside, to think of yourself only as part of a squad.
Some days he was better at that mental shift than others. This time he was ready. This time he would achieve the impossible middle state of grace. Or so he told himself.
Zhang dove after Lanoe, weaving back and forth to avoid debris, ignoring impactors unless they were right in front of her. She carved up scouts as they raced after Lanoe or as they came tearing through space right after her. She took bad chances.
Still she couldn’t keep up with Lanoe. He barely veered aside from a head-on collision with an interceptor. His maneuvering jets stuttered as if he was trying to conserve fuel, probably the dumbest thing you could do in a battle like this.
She knew he wasn’t dumb. He was headed for the destroyer and he wouldn’t be turned away from his goal, that was all.
Don’t get yourself killed for nothing, she begged him, the words getting no farther than her head. She wouldn’t say them aloud, certainly wouldn’t message him with such trivial sentiments. She couldn’t help but think them, though. Not now, please. Not when we’re so close to starting over.
She did her best to keep the cloud from all falling on him at once. She blazed her way around him, keeping his tail clear, shouting in defiance as the enemy ships ganged up on them and came pouring down in formation from on high. She waggled her stick, let her PBWs play over the enemy ships as if she could paint the bastards with her guns. They burst apart or went spinning away or just fell silent and drifted off by the dozen, but still more of them came at her, more of them flocked toward Lanoe.
An impactor struck the side of her thruster unit, hard enough to press right through her vector field. Her bones were wrenched around inside her flesh as her inertial sink tried and failed to absorb the shock. Her engine board started screaming at her, warning her that she was about to lose all her secondary thrusters.
She bit her tongue to keep from shouting for help. Maggs was still out at the edge of the cloud, picking off enemy ships. Lanoe was surging ahead of her, getting farther and farther away. Neither of them could afford to turn aside and come to her aid.
So she let herself fall back, let her engines rest and cool as their autorepair systems came online and tried desperately to prevent any further damage.
Still the enemy came at her, relentless, never-ending. Her weapons still worked just fine. She never stopped shooting.
Lanoe was nearly through.
Plasma fire washed over his FA.2 and his cockpit turned into a sauna. Then a furnace. Impactors bounced off his vector field left and right, throwing him back and forth like a toy boat in the middle of a flash flood. He kept his touch on his stick very light, just compensating for the battering, just maneuvering enough to keep from colliding with anything big and hard.
His eyeballs dried out in the heat and his eyelashes started to curl up and singe but he refused to blink. The skin of his hands cracked and bled as the heat mounted, but he kept them on his controls.
The destroyer lay right ahead of him, only seconds away. He expected the scouts and interceptors to come flocking after him, to throw everything they had at him to keep him clear of their mother ship, to defend it at any cost.
But then the other thing happened. The thing he hadn’t expected.
Which was exactly how every battle went, but it surprised him every time.
It was like he’d been flying through clouds and suddenly they’d parted, dumping him out into clear air. The scouts and interceptors pulled back, spinning around to face Zhang and Maggs instead. He’d thought they would defend the destroyer to the last—instead, they let him through as if he’d crossed some imaginary finish line, as if he’d already won the race and he wasn’t worth chasing anymore.
A single interceptor launched from the side of the destroyer, burning past him like he didn’t exist. He fired a disruptor into its hull at point-blank range and it didn’t even react, just kept to its preordained trajectory even as its stocks of fuel and ammunition cooked off and blasted it into pieces.
He let it die unwatched, his interest in it voided by what lay ahead of him.
The destroyer, half the size it used to be. Practically undefended.
If they were going to let him have his prize, if they didn’t feel it was worth protecting, so be it. He was still going to blast the hell out of it.
Zhang’s engine board chimed to tell her she still had power in her main thruster. Chimed again to say her maneuvering jets still functioned. Then it blared a warning Klaxon and she knew she was in trouble.
All of her secondary thrusters were down, and heat was building up in her fusion reactor. Not so fast that she was about to turn into a giant, glorious fireball. But if that heat level rose unchecked, it would eventually melt right through the insulating layer of shielding that separated her cockpit from the reactor. She wouldn’t need enemy fire then to burn her to a crisp.
It wasn’t an immediate problem, but every time she used her main thrusters, the heat would rise exponentially. Her main method of avoiding the worst of the enemy fire—maneuvering at speed—would be the thing that killed her.
If she didn’t keep moving, the enemy would swarm all over her and they would finish her off with plasma fire. Either way she would die in agony.
Her only chance was to conserve her thrust, to fly smart instead of fast. She brought her engine board around in front of her and studied her options, all while keeping her eyes on the enemy scouts that wheeled and darted around her. She still had her maneuvering and positioning jets, the tiny thrusters in the sides and nose of the BR.9 that allowed her to turn and brake. She could use those as much as she liked—except they ran on their own fuel reservoirs and those were limited. You weren’t supposed to use maneuvering jets as your main source of thrust.
For a few minutes, though, they might be enough. As a scout dove down toward her from on high, she punched for a hard burn that sent her spinning away. The scout rushed past her and she blasted it apart with PBW fire as it passed. Up ahead an interceptor had filled the local volume with hurtling impactors. She twisted around on her positioning jets and watched as one of the deadly rounds zoom
ed past her canopy. She cut a hole in the side of the interceptor, then fired one of her few remaining disruptors into the cavity she’d made. It was gratifying to watch the interceptor burst apart from within like a rotten fruit, but she had little time to congratulate herself—three more scouts were headed her way on different trajectories, all of them headed to intersect right with her position.
Come on, Lanoe, she thought. Give us a miracle here.
Her communications board chimed at her, telling her she had an incoming message. It wasn’t from Lanoe, though—it was from Maggs.
“Not to be a wet blanket,” he said, “but I think I’m rather desperately in need of help out here. Anyone?”
She had no idea what to tell him. She had her hands full already.
Chapter Eighteen
Nothing. No response at all.
It looked like Maggs was on his own.
At the start of the fight, when he’d come screaming in on a high-power corkscrew and laid waste to his first fifteen scouts, he’d felt iron-bound and invincible, an angel of destruction bent toward hell on a trajectory of pain. He’d forgotten, in the years since he’d been on active duty, how splendid it felt, just how fun, to sweep through one’s enemies with a truly graceful attack run.
Then the sheer magnitude of the battle had overwhelmed him, and he’d very quickly stopped enjoying himself. As he wove and darted through the outer limit of the cloud of enemies, racking up kills, he’d avoided the worst of the enemy’s attacks but by sheer law of probability some of them had gotten through. One impactor after another had clanged off his hull. Sprays of plasma fire had washed across his canopy, blinding him with their incredible, dazzling light.
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