It was a chance, even though it would be more difficult for the squadron to concentrate their fire on one spot. Spiculum fighters dropped away to port and starboard. Jaime swung his own Spiculum in a broad, flat curve, vectoring toward the Cingulum's port side, the target reticules on his HUD centered on the corvette's turret.
Blossoms of living flame enshrouded Jaime's shields as mass-driver projectiles slammed home. One projectile penetrated his shield and scored a deep, ragged slash across his starboard pontoon. Red lights danced across his console display. His starboard hard point was smashed. He muttered a silent prayer of thanks that the fragment had caught his empty missile rack. He still had two missiles left, both operational, according to his weapons status readouts.
Closer.. .closer.. .He activated his target lock and was rewarded by a green light flashing on his weapons board. Steady...Fire!
The second silhouette-scanner missile streaked from his fighter, arrowing in toward the fleeing corvette. It caught the TOG vessel just forward of its drive Venturis, on its port side. The explosion momentarily shrouded the corvette from view. A second and third missile streaked in from Jaime's left as another Gold Squadron Spiculum angled in for a rear deflection shot, triggering both of its missiles. The corvette's shield fielded one, but the second missile sank into the damage scored by Jaime's shot and exploded.
"Gold Squadron, this is Gold Leader! Target has heavy damage, portside aft and high, close by the drive Venturis! Concentrate your fire there, if you can!"
Laser fire scored across his ship's belly, and a mass-driver projectile smashed his hull somewhere just under Jaime's feet with a jolt that rattled his teeth. The corvette's turret was tracking him, continuing to lire as he twisted his fighter into a flat, curving maneuver toward the enemy ship. His Spiculum flashed beneath the Cingulum as Jaime sought to use the corvette itself as a shield from the enemy's turret.
"Gold Leader, this is Gold Two! I've got a line on him from high port!"
"Watch that turret, Davie!"
"Don't worry, Boss! I see him."
"Gold Leader, this is Gold Five! I'm covering Two on his pass!"
Jaime's ship cleared the corvette's hull. Something hit his Spiculum hard from behind, sending the little fighter into a tight roll. In his helmet phones, he heard a long, whooping shriek of victory as Davie sent three more missiles in a tight cluster into the corvette's damaged flank.
The battle yells of the combatants filled Jaime's helmet phones.
"Got him!"
"Gold Two, this is Five! I'm hit!"
"Hold her, Five! I'll cover..."
A long, tearing crash of static chopped through the shouts and warnings. White light erupted from the Cingulum s flank as Gold Five, damaged and out of control, failed to clear the corvette's flat hull.
Cursing, Jaime pulled his ship back into control, guiding her around in a broad, arcing sweep to line up for another shot. The
Cingulum was holding to her original course, still accelerating. The TOG vessel could jump at any moment. Her Captain must be waiting in hopes of gaining a bit more speed. As it was, it would take him two days or more to get back to Gamma Sacculus. If he could boost faster, he'd be able to make better time, summon help faster...
No! Jaime had one remaining missile loaded into the hard point mount under his bow. He brought his fighter around for another pass at the Cingulum's port side aft. From over two hundred kilometers out, he locked onto his target, then rode in closer and closer, watching the target grow on his screens. One display set for magnification showed the corvette's turret swiveling about as he bore in. Laser fire flickered off his screen.
Hit!
Red lights flared and flashed across his console. His starboard laser was dead, shorted out. He stabbed at the controls that would initiate his ship's automatic damage control sequences. The ship's condition was not good. His power plant was damaged, his acceleration dampers down. Short circuits were ravaging his sublight drive as he fought to steady the Spiculum's erratic tumbling.
Another hit! His port-side pontoon crumpled like tinfoil. His craft tumbled wildly for three hard rolls before he could bring the ship back under control.
Another hit! Hull armor peeled back alongside his cockpit as though flayed open by an enormous knife. His cockpit had been breached by that one. Air was spilling into space. Red lights dancing on the board warned of transponder failure, of ejection systems failure, of auxiliary weapon control failure.
Was his missile still locked on? Yes! He triggered its release, then struggled to pull his fighter out of the corvette's line of fire.
Laser fire tracked across space. Jaime's power plant was limping along at one-quarter power, his sublight drive was almost gone. Vibration was building in his ship as competing forces threatened to shred it. Then it was as though a giant's hand smashed into the side of Jaime's fighter, sending it into a rolling, end-for-end tumble.
His last conscious thought was that he still had one 7.5/4 laser left, if he could just stop the mad spinning of stars and corvette past his face...
BOOK
IV
i
Hello? Hello? This is Gael Warrior Interceptor, Green Two, Gamma Flight, Green Two, requesting assistance. Can anybody hear me? Gamma Green Two, request assistance. Engines gone. Cockpit systems damaged. Hey! Wake up, you bastards! /' m dying out here and nobody's listening!
—Intercepted Radio Transmission, Deep Space, Vicinity of Gamma Sacculus, 6 Nov 6830
The battle ended with the arrival of the Aichbheil and the Gaidheal. Compared to the TOG squadron, the total firepower of one destroyer and one corvette was almost negligible. By the time they entered the battle, however, the Gael Warrior and the Reannruadh together had totally disabled both heavy cruisers with blast after blast from their main batteries and their spinal mount mass drivers. One TOG destroyer exploded as Gamma Flight pressed home an attack at point-blank range. The other two destroyers were turning away just at the moment the Aichbheil and the Gaidheal appeared on their combat range scanners. In a moment of confused maneuvering, the two destroyers collided with one another, suffering massive damage. Minutes later, the Gaidheal and the Gael Warrior were closing from opposite sides, sealing the TOG squadron's doom.
The lolaire and the Reannruadh took care of the handful of frigates and corvettes almost as an afterthought. Working together, they laid down salvo after multimegaton-salvo at long range, disabling drives, smashing armor, spilling atmosphere into space with hammer blows that left the smaller ships crumpled and disabled, leaking air and radiation, or dying in the raging heat of internal fires. One of them also caught the corvette fleeing toward Gamma Sacculus with a single scanner-seeker missile that penetrated a gaping hole in the vessel's armor and detonated just off of the TOG ship's power plant. The gravitic bottles containing the starcore pressures and temperatures of the corvette's fusion plant failed in the blast. What remained afterward was not identifiable as a warship, or even as fragments of a manmade object. Few of the fragments were more than a few microns in diameter.
"My God, Captain! You beat them!" There was awe in Morganen's voice. "You beat them! You destroyed every last one of those TOG bastards!"
"We haven't beaten them, Lenard. We've just stopped them—for now." He let his gaze rest on the tactical display of the main viewer. Ambient space was crowded with relics of the battle. The hulks of the two cruisers were motionless relative to the Gael Squadron. Smaller pieces—dead fighters, huge chunks of the two TOG destroyers that had collided and exploded, fragments of broken ships and shattered armor plate—drifted out in all directions, a ragged, growing sphere of tumbling debris.
"Ops. Are we sure they didn' t get anything away to warn their main fleet?"
"As sure as we can be, Captain. We only saw that one corvette vectoring for Gamma Sacculus. Gold Squadron reported the corvette destroyed."
Morganen's voice came on the line, joining the conversation. "Who gets the credit for the kill?"
"It
was Commander Douglass's missile that took the corvette out," MacCandless said. "From the description, it sounds as though the corvette's power plant blew. I should imagine credit will be shared with the entire squadron, though."
"Lenard," Kendric said. "Put your mind to work on some sort of decoration we can manufacture here aboard the Warrior to present to our people for special acts. Gold Squadron ought to get a unit citation of some sort, and I'd like to single out Jaime Douglass for a special award."
"It would be good for morale," Morganen agreed.
"That's what I thought."
"Just one problem," MacCandless added. "The medal to Douglass will be posthumous."
"What? No!"
"Sorry, Skipper. His ship was badly hit just as he fired his last missile. His fighter was last seen tumbling out of control, away from the battle, a few moments before the corvette blew."
The news closed in on Kendric like a grey wall. He had grown to like the fiery young fighter pilot. It was hard to imagine him dead.
"His fighter was tumbling, you said? It didn't explode?"
"It didn't explode, sir, no. But our chances of finding him are..."
"I don't care about chances. Len. You arrange a search with Commander Jardine. We're going to need fighters out on extended patrol while we finish our repairs here. They can be searching for lost fighters, too. And not just Jaime. We've had...what, Ops? Fifteen fighters reported missing?"
"Twelve now, sir. Three have been located or managed to return to the fleet."
"Twelve, then. The more of those boys we can recover, the better the rest of our Interceptor pilots are going to feel about it."
"Yessir. Let them know that if they take damage, we'll be busting our tail to find them and bring them back."
"It won't always be possible." Kendric was thinking about iheAbu. "But we're going to do it when we can. Give the order."
"Yessir."
It took some time for Jaime to realize that he was still alive. For a long time, he had the impression of existing in a vague and formless sea of white light. Is this what it's like to die? he wondered, strangely detached. Then his legs began to hurt and it was not long before he became aware of a face...a woman's face.
"T.C." he said. "What are you doing here?"
She laughed softly. "Trying to decide if you're still alive."Thought we'd lost you for a while there."
"I thought I'd lost myself. What happened?"
"Your wingman found you. Said he wasn't going to dock until he found you and tagged you with a transmitter. Your transponder was out, and the chances of finding you were pretty slim, I gather."
"They were none too good, as I recall. So Davie tailed me?"
She nodded. "After that corvette you were after blew..."
"We got it!"
"I gather Gold Squadron is getting a unit citation for its part in stopping that corvette," she said. "And you'll be getting a medal besides."
He made a face.
"Well, whether you like the idea or not, medals will encourage the rest of the pilots. So you can just put up with it."
Another face appeared beside T.C.'s.
"Doctor Hutchison."
"Hello, Jaime. How do you feel?"
"Like an Imperial battleship used me for a landing field, thank you. My legs hurt. My head hurts. My face hurts..."
"To be expected. You took some shrapnel in your legs. Nothing serious, but it did open your suit while your cabin was decompressing. You were in a pretty bad way when they pulled you out."
"Sounds like it. I'll fly again?"
"You notice, T.C., that these idiots don't ask the expected question. Any sane person would ask something like, 'Will I live?' Jaime here asks if he'll fly again." Hutchison snorted, then turned back to his patient. "There's nothing wrong with you that a few weeks' rest won't cure. And we can probably enforce that rest, now that we're back in T-space..."
Jaime's eyes widened in horror. "T-space! No..."
He brought his hands up in front of his eyes, turning them this way and that, staring at them. He had been right at thirty days plus tau...
"Don't worry about your plus tau," Hutchison said. "You've been out of it for quite a while. After they brought you in, the squadron just sat for one full week while temporary repairs were made."
"A week...?"
"The Captain did it."T.C. shook her head as though she didn't quite believe it, even now. "By smashing every one of the TOG ships so that they couldn't alert the rest of the enemy fleet to where we were. We were able to complete our repairs—and, incidentally, find you— before choosing a new course, but under low acceleration."
That explained it, of course. The fleet had been too low on reaction mass to manage the usual hard boost at flank speed to make transition velocity and maneuver across several jumps. Long accelerations at low-G could accomplish the same thing, using the same fuel more efficiently.
"We made another jump after that," T.C. added. "The first was real short, to conserve mass. Ken explained to the crew that he was doing it so the TOG survivors we left in one of the cruisers wouldn't be able to put the TOG fleet on our tail again.
"Anyway, our second jump took us to another star system. An uninhabited one with a gas giant in it. He's had crews out mining ice from large planetoids in one of the giant's Trojan points for days now."
"Days? My God, how long have I been out?"Jaime demanded.
Hutchison shook his head. "Don't worry about it, son. We've kept you down while you healed." A sharp chirruping sound caught the CMO's attention. "Excuse me. They're calling for me."
T.C. laid a hand on Douglass's shoulder. "You hurry and get better."
He grinned. "I'll do that.. .if you'll promise to have dinner with me when I get out of here. I can't promise anything much fancier than the Officer's Mess, but..."
She laughed. "I would be most honored, sir!"
"Hey, that's better than a medal!" He felt a moment's twinge of guilt for Lorie Burns, frozen somewhere aboard one of the transports. The way things were going, neither he nor Lorie stood a very good chance of getting out of this anyway.
"It'll be good for me, too," T.C. added.
"Oh?"
"Sure! We'll put to rest all those rumors about me being the Captain's woman!"
CSC 76-9846-7439 was its catalogue designation, but they named the system Haven. Though Haven had no world within its ecosphere to attract would-be colonizers, it did have something else of value. Orbiting slowly in the outer system were a pair of massive gas giants. Between them were the bits and pieces of what might have become a world in its own right, had it not been for the gravitational tug-of-war played on those planetary building blocks when the Haven system was young.
Haven's asteroid belts were thickly strewn with rubble. In some places, dozens of individual chunks existed within a few kilometers of one another—much more densely packed than within the asteroid belts of Sol or other, more typical systems. There were many large asteroids, too, rocky bodies more than a thousand kilometers in diameter, most of which had attracted small clouds of smaller asteroids as close, temporary satellites. Of particular importance to the Gael Squadron was the high percentage of ice asteroids, drifting icebergs composed almost entirely of frozen water. A single such chunk of ice, a few hundred meters thick, would provide all the reaction mass the squadron's ships could carry, plus oxygen to recharge atmospheres growing stale despite the constant efforts of recycling gear, plus hydrogen to feed each ship's gravitic fusors.
Kendric was not sure which had been more valuable to his battered command here at Haven—the ice, or the opportunity for everyone in the fleet to get some rest.
"Hello, T.C. Where have you been keeping yourself?" Kendric smiled at her, trying to quiet the restless yearning inside. He had seen little of T.C. since their one-sided argument just before Gamma Sacculus. He had inquired—repeatedly—paging her through the ship's computerized intercom directory, but she had always been busy. Her former expertise in comp
uter systems had naturally led her to meet Lieutenant Commander Harvey Grierson, the Warrior's senior programmer in charge of the battleship's informational data banks. It wasn't long before she was standing informal watches on the battleship's computer archives deck.
"Filing, mostly," T.C. replied, avoiding Kendric's eyes. "Harve and I are crossindexing and cataloguing the Warrior's files."
"I know. I've seen Commander Grierson's reports. He says he couldn't get along without you."
"It was better than vegetating." A smile tugged at her lips. "My Imperial training is of some use, it seems, in sorting out what you have down there."
Kendric nodded. The Gael Warrior's computer banks had been programmed through the rather simple expedient of copying the recently updated memory banks of another Imperial Battleship and transferring the data en masse to the Warrior. That was the typical method of transferring Imperial ship files, there being far too much information in any one file to allow Humans to sort and process the trillions of bits of data one of these files represented. The only problem was that no one aboard the Gael Warrior was entirely certain just what information those files contained. Some of it was the kind of data that ships routinely needed—the statistics, schematics, and fighting characteristics of ships that might be encountered, for example, or the endless catalogues and descriptions of the millions of inhabited worlds known to Man in the Galaxy.
The Warrior's data base had a catalogue, naturally, but even the catalogue ran to thousands of pages of hardcopy text when it was printed out, and no one understood everything that was listed. What, for example, was "XPT00292-09 GAL:SAPSPEC"? Short of going through the memory banks file by file, there was no way to tell. The problem was insurmountable for the Gaels, most of whom had no training in Imperial computer systems and codings, outside of the relatively superficial instruction the TOG ship experts had given them
during the squadron's construction.
The Warrior's regular computer department personnel knew how to operate the ship's computers, knew how to troubleshoot, and how to call up specific, oft-requested files. With T.C. 's knowledge of Imperial programming techniques, her unexpected arrival was a godsend to the battleship's computer department. They'd recently compiled a long list of specific file subjects, everything from psychoprofiles of various nonhuman races—the "GAL:SAPSPEC" that had puzzled everyone for so long—to a list of TOG Imperial VLCA relays. Discovery of that last had already paid dividends, when Kendric had been able to check it against the list of local communication relay stations discovered aboard VLCA Alba before their departure. Knowing where TOG maintained the giant VLCA stations would be a big help in determining which star systems to avoid. Most systems with VLCAs had large fleet elements stationed in the same system, or very close by.
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