“In the meantime, they’re going to make you go through this sham.
“They need you to fly. To fight. They think that if you knew the truth, it would send you into a nasty depression. You might even get suicidal. They say that would ‘harm your effectiveness as a propaganda tool.’ So I have to program you to believe the lie. That you survived the fire.
“I told them—I wrote up a whole report on it—that you would be in constant pain. That you would have phantom limb syndrome all over your entire body. I was told that was perfect. The pilot who fought on, despite constant pain. The bastards! I’m even supposed to tease you. Put painkillers in your suit, painkillers that would do absolutely nothing since you don’t have veins anymore. I’m also supposed to include a stubborn streak. A psychological barrier to keep you from ever using those painkillers.
“But the pain—it might get to be too much, someday. I can’t bear the thought of you suffering like that. So when it happens, when you can’t take it anymore, maybe you’ll take the white pearl after all. If you do, you’ll see this message. You’ll know the truth.
“If they find out I recorded this, if they find out I let you in on the joke, I’ll be court-martialed. I might be executed for treason. But I had to give you a chance to know. You have rights, Tannis. You’re a human being.
“At least…you used to be.”
She disappeared again, but only for a second.
“If you never see this, well, maybe that’s for the best. They tell me the war will be over in a few months, one way or the other. So you won’t have to suffer very long.
“But if you do see this…I don’t know. I hope you can forgive me. I know what kind of man you were. I think maybe you’re capable of that. I really hope so.
“Even if you can’t, even if you hate me right now, I want to give you one last gift. Here.”
A black pearl appeared in the center of his vision. Much bigger than the white pearl had been. It obscured most of her face. It rotated slowly, a string of endless zeroes scrolling across its surface.
“This is a bomb, Tannis. It’s a data bomb. Accept it, and every scrap of data in your memory will be deleted. Right down to root. You’ll…I won’t say you’ll die, because that doesn’t mean anything; you can’t die twice. But you’ll cease to exist.
“All you have to do is flick your eyes across the black pearl.
“If that’s what you want.”
Chapter Thirty-One
Thom twisted his head around right, then left, trying to see all the scouts that were chasing him. A whole formation back there and while his displays could show him where they were he needed to see them. He had to look.
He wished he hadn’t.
“Lanoe,” he called.
“I know,” the old pilot sent back. “Keep moving, Thom. It’s your best bet.”
The enemy fleet had gotten itself organized. Its drone ships had established deep formations, squadrons lined up to provide support for each other, whole wings of drones moving as pincers. The enemy would gladly sacrifice a few dozen scouts just to push a human pilot into a trap full of interceptors.
A fireball of plasma erupted just to one side of Thom’s canopy and the flowglas reacted by going black, polarizing itself so he wasn’t blinded. It made him feel like he was trapped in a coffin. For a second he could only fly by instruments, veering out of the way of a whole line of scouts that were readying themselves to blast him with more fire, corkscrewing down through a space where the battle area was a little thinner, knowing it had to be a trap. When his canopy cleared he saw three interceptors ahead of him, spread out so they wouldn’t hit each other with their guns.
“Hellfire,” he had time to breathe, before those guns opened fire and kinetic impactors were all around him, a blizzard of iron. His BR.9 shook violently as one of them skidded off his fuselage. His vector field positively crackled as it shrugged off two more.
Lanoe was halfway across the battle area—too far away to help.
Behind him, the scouts he’d evaded were coming around for another pass.
Zhang couldn’t close her cybernetic eyes. She could close her eyelids but she could still see right through them. So she did the next-best thing: One by one, she shut down every display, every board, every panel in her cockpit.
She needed to focus, now.
Ahead and below a squad of drones circled around the expanding cone of orbiters that were headed for Aruna. Six interceptors and nine scouts, maneuvering around each other so elegantly they looked like they were dancing. If she wanted the orbiters, she was going to have to get through that formation.
She couldn’t worry about Lanoe. Or Thom, for that matter. She couldn’t think about Valk’s death. She couldn’t even think about Ehta, down on the ground. This was going to take some very fancy flying and shooting. She needed to get into that headspace where it was all just angles and lines, mathematically simple and pure.
It would help if she weren’t so terrified.
She worked her controls with both hands, firing her positioning and maneuvering jets in rapid sequence, at the same time shoving her stick forward with her knee. Once she had a hand free she grabbed the stick and dropped into a steep dive while swinging left and right, a hyperfast variation on a very old maneuver called the falling leaf. It wasn’t supposed to work outside of an atmosphere, but you could fake it if you were a good enough pilot.
Zhang was a very, very good pilot.
The squadron below her opened up a little, the scouts spreading out to try to envelop her. They left an enticing opening where she could have just shot straight down and attacked the orbiters directly, but she wasn’t falling for it. The six interceptors were still clumped tight around the prize and she couldn’t take them on all at once.
A scout twisted around until its eyeball was pointed right at her. There was no time to bring up a virtual sight and actually aim at the thing, so she opened up with her PBWs and hoped for the best. Another scout banked around to try to get on her tail, while a third rushed her from the side.
She switched off her compensators and pulled a rotary turn, twisting her trajectory around ninety degrees in the space it took to draw a breath. Her inertial sink sat down on her hard, pinning her to her seat as the stick jumped in her hand like a snake. Suddenly the scout that had tried to flank her was right in front of her, so close she could see the weld marks on its plasma cannon. She must have surprised it because it didn’t even have a chance to build up heat—as her PBWs tore through its eyeball it didn’t explode, it just broke into pieces.
The other two scouts came at her then from opposite directions, ready to blast her, but she was already moving, pulling back hard on her stick and firing her maneuvering jets until she looped up over them.
She had kind of hoped the two of them would simply crash into each other in a head-on collision. Of course she’d never been that lucky. They flashed by each other, a good meter of space between them. In a second they were maneuvering to track her.
The damn things could corner; she had to give them that.
Meanwhile three more scouts had broken from the pack and were lining up high above her, ready to swoop down the second she lost her concentration.
She had no intention of giving them that opportunity.
“I’d forgotten how good she was,” Lanoe said, with a chuckle.
“Who are you talking about?” Thom demanded. “Zhang? I’m in trouble over here!” The interceptors wouldn’t let up. Every time he tried to maneuver to get away from their welter of impactors they would just shift position, drawing him deeper into their web. He flipped over on his back, hit his retros hard to get moving backward, away from the scrum, but there were scouts behind him, pulling together into a tight formation.
“Get out of there, kid,” Lanoe said. “Don’t let them pin you. I’m coming but I’m still ten seconds out. Hold on!”
But there was no way Thom was going to survive the next ten seconds. Not with those interceptors lo
cking him up.
Unless he found some way to get through them, without flying right into their impactors. Unless he—
There was a way.
“I’m sorry,” he said. Then he pulled up his weapons panel and armed his disruptors.
He wasn’t supposed to use them. He was supposed to save them for the queenship. Making a run at the asteroid seemed like a pipe dream now, though. And he was dead if he didn’t do something.
The interceptors knew they were all but immune to PBW fire. They didn’t even try to maneuver as Thom fired every disruptor he had. The heavy munitions made a nasty chunking noise as they launched from the belly of his BR.9, moving slowly enough that he could actually watch as they streaked toward their targets.
The first one struck an interceptor right between two of its guns. It melted its way right through the thickest of the drone’s armor and Thom saw light flash from the gun muzzles as it tore away at the interceptor from the inside.
The other disruptors didn’t hit quite so cleanly, but they found their targets. One after another they dug through the interceptors’ armor and blew them apart.
The impactors disappeared. The guns stopped firing.
Thom wasted no time. He opened his throttle wide and screamed through the formation, even as one of the interceptors exploded in a vast orange cloud of burning fuel and slag. Debris bounced off Thom’s vector field, a couple of pieces hitting him directly and smacking dents into his fuselage.
But in another second he was free, past the interceptors and into something resembling open space. He swiveled around to look back and saw a wave of scouts start to chase after him, then break off as they were pelted with debris.
“I’m sorry,” he said again.
“Kid—it’s all right. You did what you had to do,” Lanoe called. His voice belied his words. He didn’t sound angry that Thom had disobeyed orders. Instead he sounded almost sad about it. Disappointed, maybe?
“I know you said we needed to save our disruptors, but—”
“You did what you had to do,” Lanoe said again. “I just wish…ah, hell. Clearly this is not a day when I get to make a lot of wishes. Thom—I’m just glad you made it out of there.”
Zhang cut a scout to pieces, then wheeled around hard and took out another with a quick burst of particle fire. There were only a few of the scouts left, but all six interceptors remained intact. She couldn’t take them on all at once, and they refused to budge from their formation, a ring of steel around the orbiters. If she couldn’t trick them into peeling off there was no way she could isolate them.
She chewed on her lip, trying to think of some clever move. Some gambit that would break the formation open.
A scout crept up too close on her left. She spun around and gave it both barrels and it stopped being a problem.
Ahead of her lay the vast round disk of Garuda, the ice giant. Aruna, the moon, was obscured by the mass of orbiters and interceptors, but she knew it was getting close. She had at most a minute before the orbiters reached the moon and dropped their deadly cargo on the volunteers down there.
It was time to get drastic. She opened her comms panel and called Lanoe. “I’m out of clean options here,” she told him. “I need your permission for something. I’ve got to use my disruptors.”
Lanoe surprised her by laughing. “You too, huh?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Thom just used all of his. Zhang, do what you need to—we’re way past the original plan here.”
Zhang swerved away as a scout tried to get the drop on her. “Lanoe. Do we…do we have any…new plans?” she asked, choosing her words very carefully.
“Always,” he told her. “Just none anybody’s going to like.”
“Understood,” she said, because she didn’t want to ask any more questions.
The scout maneuvered to get a better shot at her, but it was like a fly buzzing around her head. She worked her thruster board until her BR.9 did a backflip, then cut the scout apart with two quick pulses of PBW fire.
Only one scout remained, loitering on the far side of the ring of interceptors. Too far away to shoot at, too far for it to hurt her. She ignored it—right now she needed to break up those interceptors so she could hit the orbiters. Even with disruptors it was going to be a dicey proposition.
There was no time for fancy maneuvers, no room for error. She leaned forward on her stick and let go with her PBWs, just laying down fire to try to distract the enemy. Just as she’d expected, it had no effect. The interceptors were spaced perfectly, down to the millimeter, and they didn’t budge. They started firing long before she came within their range and she had to feather her controls to dodge around an increasingly thick storm of impactors. One touched the rear left quarter of her fighter but she ignored the damage—nothing chimed at her, which meant she was still functional.
The first interceptor swam toward her, growing huge as she buzzed it close enough to watch the impactors belching from its guns. She loaded a disruptor and fired it right through the armor on the thing’s nose. Without even waiting to see what happened she twisted around and shot through the gap between the interceptor and its nearest neighbor, right into the middle of their ring. Orbiters bobbed all around her and she spared a fraction of a second to lance as many as she could, their spidery cargo spilling into the void in a flurry of twitching limbs.
Next, she thought, and found an interceptor wheeling around to face her. She put a disruptor between two of its guns and moved on.
Number three. Impactors brushed against her canopy, less than a meter from her face. Nothing exploded or cracked. She launched her disruptor and looped up above the ring formation.
The fourth tried to pin her by flanking her while the fifth moved up to target her undercarriage. She raked its bow with PBWs mostly as an insult. It was moving too fast to get a clean hit so she put three disruptors into it and flew away.
The fifth loomed beneath her where she couldn’t see it. She rolled over onto her side as its guns let loose. An impactor tore through one of her airfoils but she didn’t need those. Her head spun as she twisted around and around, trying to get a good line on the bastard, but it was turning fast now—the interceptors were sluggish but once they got up to speed they could move. She spun around it in tighter and tighter circles, the blood pooling in one side of her head until she started to feel faint. Right before she would have blacked out she hit her trigger and sent four disruptors out in a fan pattern, two of which actually found their target.
The sixth interceptor nearly got her. It crept up on her right, low where she couldn’t see it without instruments, and its impactors thundered against her fuselage, her vector field throwing out enough sparks to blind someone with human eyes. She saw them as nothing but heat. She pulled up into a loop, then twisted out at the top and dove back down to launch the last of her disruptors right through the bastard’s heart.
She could hear nothing but her own breathing. Feel nothing but the blood throbbing in her veins. She felt like she was about to die.
With a shaking hand she reached for her sensor board.
Behind her, below her, the ring of interceptors exploded, one by one. Pieces of them went pinwheeling away into space, while their fuel cooked off in an ever-expanding cloud of high-energy gas. Half a dozen orbiters were caught in that blast and just shredded, reduced to unrecognizable debris that bounced and shook and spun away into nothingness.
She took a long, deep, gasping breath.
Twenty-one of the orbiters remained intact, still speeding toward their destination.
That was okay. They were unarmed and fragile. She could scoop them up at her leisure.
Above her a whole new squadron of scouts and interceptors was swooping down toward her position, backup sent just a little too late. She could safely ignore them—her mission now was just to cut up those orbiters. Save Aruna, and Ehta, and all the Nirayans down there, and that was easy. That was cake. That was—
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She had of course completely forgotten about the last little scout, the one that had been keeping its distance. The one that had been too far away to worry about.
The one that had crept up on her now when she was too busy to notice.
An impactor bounced off the side of Thom’s BR.9, knocking him sideways in his seat. He screamed a little, by reflex. Red lights flashed all around him but he ignored them long enough to swerve out of the way of another shot before checking his damage control board. Nothing vital had been hit—but now an interceptor was turning toward him, lining him up for a new volley of impactors and he had to—
The interceptor exploded into shrapnel while he watched, bits of it flying in every direction, some of them knocking a scout off course before it could blast him. He threw his fighter into a corkscrew maneuver, just as he’d been taught, and dove for the periphery of the battle area, still trying to figure out what had happened.
His tactical board came up and he saw it cut in half by an orange line that passed right through where the interceptor had been. A shot fired from the guns on Aruna. If he had been less than a kilometer to the left, it would have smashed him instead.
His teeth ground together. His head felt like it was being squeezed in a vise. He tried very hard to just breathe as he maneuvered around to where he could see Lanoe through his canopy.
He was a little heartened, at least, to see that the FA.2 wasn’t in great shape, either. It was missing most of its airfoils and the paint was gone from one whole flank.
“Keep it together,” Lanoe said. “We’re making progress.”
“We are?” Thom asked, and he heard the edge of panic in his own voice.
“Take a look at the queenship,” Lanoe told him. Then he spun away to face a group of scouts that Thom hadn’t even noticed. For a minute the two of them could only focus on holding off the little drones.
Forsaken Skies Page 51