"Captain," he said formally. "I make us forty-five minutes from target. The diversionary attack has commenced at the jump point. Get your people ready." He paused. "And . . . good luck, Jason."
Flight Wing Briefing Room, FRLS Mjollnir
Approaching Baka Kar, Baka Kar System
1140 hours (CST)
Bondarevsky shut off the intercom and turned back to the assembled squadron commanders. "It's time," he said quietly. "You have your orders . . . but you also have your wits. Use them out there today. Now assemble your squadrons!"
"Black Cats!" Etienne Montclair shouted, smiling like a wolf on the scent of prey. Some of the others took up the call as they rose and headed for the door.
A good team, Bondarevsky thought as he watched them go. Maybe not as good as Tarawa's old outfit, but a damned good team. Would any of them make it out alive? The odds were against it.
He saw Sparks and Harper leaning against the far wall, talking, and started toward them, but he never made it there. Alexandra Travis appeared at the door, her usual easy grace replaced by a stiff, awkward gait as she favored her injured side. He moved to meet her.
"What the devil are you doing out of sick bay?" he demanded. "Doctor Manning told me you'd be out of it for at least a week."
She nodded. Pale from her ordeal the day before, her wan complexion offset the dark helmet of her shortcut hair. "I . . . just wanted to come down and see you off," she said, her voice strained. Pain, or emotion? He wasn't sure. "Sorry I have to sit out this dance."
"Don't worry about it," he said. "I didn't want to have to ride out the whole battle in the command plane anyway." His original assignment for the attack had been to the Gratha Command and Control craft that would be coordinating the carrier's Alpha Strike. But with one of his best Strakha pilots wounded, he had changed his mind. He'd fly one of the stealth fighters today, taking personal charge of the squadron in place of Travis.
He would have been happy that the woman wasn't going into battle today, if the position of the carrier itself hadn't been so hopeless. Bondarevsky had been struck by her resemblance to Svetlana—not so much in face or feature as in the way she carried herself, the way her mind worked so closely attuned to his own—but it wasn't until she was wounded aboard the picket ship that he realized how much he'd come to care for her these past few months. It would have been almost too much to bear if she'd gone out there in a fighter like Svetlana, and never come back.
Her eyes met his. "Take care of yourself out there, Jason," she said quietly. It was the first time she'd ever used his given name. "Don't forget, you owe me a date when we get back to Landreich."
His eyes strayed to the swell of her breasts under the khaki uniform she wore, then back to her mocking eyes. "I'll be there," he said. He would have taken her in his arms, but he was conscious of other eyes on the two of them.
"I'll be there," he repeated, and turned to leave the briefing room. It was time for battle.
Flight Wing Briefing Room, FRLS Mjollnir
Approaching Baka Kar, Baka Kar System
1141 hours (CST)
"My thanks to you, darlin' of the flight deck, for making sure my wee bird can fly today," Aengus Harper was saying. A last-minute fault had threatened to ground his Strakha and keep him out of the action today, but Sparks had taken personal charge of the techies who had traced the glitch down and corrected it in time for him to go back on the roster.
If Harper was going to die on a suicide mission, he intended to do it in the cockpit of a fighter, not sidelined as he'd been all these years.
Sparks didn't answer. He followed her gaze to where Bondarevsky and Travis were talking, then looked at the tech officer again. "Does he not know, then, that you love him, lass?" he asked.
She met his eyes and flushed. "What makes you say that?" she demanded.
"I've seen the look a time or two before, lass," he said. "Even put it in a few ladies' eyes, from time to time. You'll not be denyin' that you're in love with him, will you now? And for a long time, I'd say."
She nodded reluctantly. "A long time. But he was in love with another pilot back then, until he lost her on the Kilrah raid. After that . . . well, he was just getting over her, and I was just a techie petty officer besides."
"And later?"
"We almost . . . got together once," she told him. "But the timing was still wrong. He made it a rule not to fraternize with the junior officers once he became captain of a carrier . . . and just when I thought he wasn't going to be my ship's captain any more, we drew another assignment together." She looked away. "After that, I decided I didn't want to trade the friendship I knew we had for a romance I wasn't sure we could ever manage. Now . . . it looks like I've lost him again. To another pilot, too."
"You should tell him how you feel, lass."
She shook her head. "Not much point in it now, Aengus. The last thing he needs is to have something like that laid on him now. And everyone says we won't be coming back from this one. So I lose him one way or another . . . better I don't cause him any more grief."
"You're one in a million, Janet McCullough," Harper told her. "And if you weren't head-over-heels for that one over there I might be trying to court you myself."
"Save it, flyboy," she told him. "Or did you forget you've got a launch coming up?"
Strakha 800, VF-401 "Shadow Cats"
Approaching Baka Kar, Baka Kar System
1148 hours (CST)
"Eight-zero-zero, good shot," Bondarevsky said. He pushed the fighter's throttle forward and felt the gravitic differential pushing him back into his seat as the Strakha accelerated. "Good shot!"
"Roger, eight-zero-zero," Boss Marchand replied. He checked the status of his cloak and nodded inside his flight helmet. No one he'd ever heard of had ever tried launching a stealth fighter with the cloak on, but it had gone off without a hitch. The deployment plan called for the Strakhas to get off of the flight deck early, with cloaks up to hide the launch from prying eyes. It would make the operations cycle easier once the full Alpha Strike went forward later . . . and it guaranteed that the Strakhas would be in position for a very special mission before the Cats suspected anything was amiss.
One by one the rest of the squadron joined him, though his sensors continued to show surrounding space empty save for the carrier herself. When all eight of the cloaked fighters were assembled, Bondarevsky switched on his commlink once again. "Asgard, Asgard, this is Loki. Launch completed. Proceeding to designated target." In honor of the carrier's name—and perhaps in memory of Viking Jensson as well, the codenames for the various elements of the strike mission were drawn from Norse mythology. Asgard, the home of the gods, was the carrier, while the cloaked Strakhas operated under the name of the trickster god, Loki.
"Loki, Asgard, copy," came the reply from Lieutenant Vivaldi. "Make sure you sting the bastards a couple of times for me!"
The Strakhas, unseen, undetected, raced inward toward Baka Kar.
Combat Information Center, FRLS Mjollnir
Entering Baka Kar Orbit, Baka Kar System
1208 hours (CST)
"My God, what a monster," someone breathed, and Geoff Tolwyn agreed. He had once thought Behemoth was a truly impressive piece of machinery, but the huge bulk of the Kilrathi dreadnought was something unimaginably larger and more terrible. The huge space station and repair dock alongside was larger, but not by much . . . and space stations didn't generally fly under their own power.
Or carry sufficient weapons to wipe out a fleet or lay waste a planet.
Still unchallenged, the carrier was on final approach. Dahl and Murragh were busy talking to the station controllers, requesting final approach clearance, ostensibly so they could dock with the station and arrange resupply and repairs for Karga. He had been concerned about allowing the Kilrathi to play too big a role in the operation, in case one of them harbored more loyalty to his race than to his Prince, but the encounter with the picket boat had proved he could count on Murragh and the o
thers. Tolwyn could safely ignore that entire facet of the attack. It was in good hands. At any rate, most of the attention at the station was bound to be focused on the distant skirmishing around the jump point, where Xenophon, Durendal, and Caliburn were playing tag with the ever-increasing force of Kilrathi ships closing in on them from all parts of the system.
Richards was playing it canny out there, avoiding combat. The three Landreich ships could dodge away from almost anything their size or larger, altering vectors in plenty of time to avoid coming into range of a Cat ship's guns. It would take a carrier with fast-striking planes to bring them to battle, and so far the only carrier they'd detected in motion was still close to an hour from the scene of the fighting. A second carrier was reported near the station, but its power readings indicated that it had suffered some heavy damage—probably the one Kevin Tolwyn had reported as taken out of action by the pirates at Hellhole.
"We have clearance," Vivaldi announced. "Port side approach."
"Very good," Tolwyn said. "Just where we hoped. Mr. Clancy, I'll thank you to steer for the port side of the station. And make sure you take us in close across the bow of that beast."
"You want centimeters or millimeters, Admiral?" Clancy asked. "Or would you prefer microns?"
"Just bring us across her bow, and I'll be happy. Mr. Deniken, are you ready?"
"All guns standing by," the Tactics and Gunnery Officer confirmed. "Ready for your order."
"A little longer, if you please." He touched an intercom stud. "Mr. Graham? Status?"
"All systems nominal, sir," Graham reported. "Shields cycling at nine-six-fiver. The drives are looking good.
Damage control parties are ready." He paused. "Would this be a good time to wish I was still back on good old Nargrast, freezing my butt off with Murragh and the rest?"
"Luck of the draw, Mr. Graham," Tolwyn told him. "Flight Deck, prepare for launch operations on my signal. All stations, preparatory." Tolwyn waited a long moment, savoring the feeling of command. "Mr. Vivaldi, you may hoist our colors, if you please."
"Aye aye, sir." In the days of sailing ships on Earth, a warship trying for the kind of surprise Mjollnir sought today might sail into combat range flying the flag of another nation, a legitimate ruse de guerre. But before the first broadside, the false colors would be hauled down and the real national flag hoisted. Mjollnir was doing the same thing electronically. Her transponder had broadcast the Identification Friend or Foe signal for the Karga, but now Vivaldi switched that transponder signal off and brought up Mjollnir's new code, identifying her as a ship of the Landreich.
The waiting was over. The battle was beginning . . ."Now!" Tolwyn said. "Execute Ragnarok . . . Now!"
Strakha 800, VF-401 "Shadow Cats"
Near Orbital Dock Asharazhal, Baka Kar System
1216 hours (CST)
"Ragnarok, Ragnarok, Ragnarok. I say again, Ragnarok!"
The Norse battle between the gods and the giants, a fitting code-word for the order to start the attack, thundered in Bondarevsky's ears. He activated his commlink. "That's the signal, Shadow Cats!" he said. "Attack designated targets at will."
His hand reached out to drop the cloak that screened his Strakha from detection. The heavy fighter slowly emerged from its hiding-place in a bent portion of space, hanging bare meters above the hull of the dreadnought. As the Strakha's targeting sensors registered a lock, Jason Bondarevsky opened fire at point-blank range.
They had adapted this portion of the battle plan from the attack Banfeld's pirates had launched against the carrier at Vaku. But they had two advantages the pirates had lacked. Their stealth technology allowed the Shadow Cats to place themselves in close to the target before the attack . . . and the shield emitter arrays of the orbital dock and the massive dreadnought were far better targets than those found on a carrier.
The eight Strakhas had stationed themselves directly adjacent to eight different emitter batteries, six on the dreadnought, two more on the station. Hidden, they had reduced speed to close to zero, using thrusters to keep station against microgravitic influences but otherwise simply matching orbits perfectly with the Kilrathi station and its monstrous consort. Normally fighters tried to operate using high speeds and rapid vector changes, using their maneuverability to protect them from the dangers of Double-A-S. But that limited the time available to achieve a target lock and fire.
Today, though, the situation was different. The Strakhas decloaked and opened fire, pouring sustained energy blasts directly into the crucial emitters at point blank range before the Kilrathi even knew there were enemies in a position to fire. Neither the station nor the dreadnought had been maintaining shields at combat strength. They were set at low power levels to screen out minor radiation or random chunks of space debris.
So the sudden, overwhelming attack quickly punched through the protective screens and smashed into the arrays. In seconds there were huge gaps left in the Kilrathi shielding that would take long minutes to circumvent by reworking their power grid.
In the meantime, station and dreadnought lay wide open to attack.
As he continued to fire into the emitters, Bondarevsky saw Mjollnir making a slow, ponderous turn right across the bows of the dreadnought, where the shields were failing fast. Fighters and bombers were streaming from the two launch bays as fast as Boss Marchand could cycle them out, led by the Raptors of Etienne Montclair's Crazy Eights and the powerful Vaktoths in Commander Lin Dan-Giang's Black Lion squadron.
Then the carrier opened fire with her main guns.
Though not intended to engage in close space combat, the carrier had been well-equipped with batteries to ensure the destruction of any smaller fighting ship that managed to slip through her guard. They had only been able to get six of the eight massive laser turrets back in service during the refit, but Tolwyn had angled the ship so that four of those six turrets had firing arcs. They all opened up at once, and a moment later numerous smaller beams contributed to the massive assault. That had been the project Deniken had been wrapped up in since leaving Vaku. He had adapted the computer program that handled the largely automated point defense lasers, which were supposed to knock down incoming missiles or fighters that closed too near. Now they were slaved to the main guns, and if their individual power output wasn't much against the heavy armor that protected the dreadnought, together they increased the already furious energy that washed over the enemy ship's bow.
Armor sloughed off under the intense bombardment, but of course the dreadnought had plenty of armor to spare. Now it was a race between the Mjollnir's ability to pour out sustained energy fire, the dreadnought's staying power, and the Kilrathi crew's response time as they tried to man battle stations and bring the leviathan into the fight.
No one expected them to just sit there and take it for very long.
Command Bridge, KIS Vorghath
Docked, Orbital Station Asharazhal, Baka Kar System
1221 hours (CST)
Dawx Jhorrad emerged from the elevator to find the cavernous bridge of the Vorghath in the grip of confusion and near-panic. Striding purposefully toward his command station, he cuffed two enlisted ratings in passing and bared his fangs at an engineering officer who seemed completely out of his depth in the face of the crisis.
"Report!" he snapped, dropping into the command chair and turning the baleful glare of his mismatched eyes, one real, one bionic, on his first officer.
"Karga has launched an attack," Khrell nar Dhollas announced without any of the honorifics that were usually addressed to a commanding officer receiving a report. He had always resented the fate that had placed him, a Baron of the Empire, under the command of a commoner, and his contempt showed even when he was performing ship's business. But he was a skilled officer, and Jhorrad allowed him a measure of freedom. Neither of them could change who or what they were. "Just before firing, he changed his transponder configuration and signal. The identification is for a Landreich warship."
"Apes!" Jhorrad s
pat.
"A squadron of Strakhas was also involved in the initial attack, decloaking and opening fire on our emitter banks. Shields are down across the bow as far back as bulkhead one-twelve. Additional fighters are launching."
"Our response?"
"As yet, we have not been able to return fire," Dhollas said. "Generators were off-line and the crew was unprepared." That sounded like an accusation. It was true that he hadn't allowed the first officer to take the ship to alert status when the three ape ships had appeared at the jump point. At the time, there had seemed to be no particular reason for alarm. Two destroyers and a cruiser offered little threat. They would not have been able to penetrate the defensive perimeter, and even if they had tried there would have been plenty of time for Vorghath to go on alert status.
Now they were paying for his complacency . . . but there was no need for Dhollas to point out the fact so blatantly. He made a slashing motion, calling the Exec to silence. "Excuses and blame will not serve here," he said harshly. "Only results. All crew to combat stations, and bring the generators on-line. Reroute shields to cover the gap. Weapons turrets to acquire target and open fire. And cast us off from the station. I will not have Vorghath caught like a traggil in a trap!"
"As you command," Dhollas said stiffly. He turned, shouting orders.
The mighty dreadnought lurched as the carrier fired again and damaged one of the mooring tractors. Jhorrad's claws flexed instinctively.
He would swat this impudent ape who had dared to attack his ship . . .
Combat Information Center, FRLS Mjollnir
Near Orbital Station Asharazhal, Baka Kar System
Wing Commander #07 False Color Page 38