Asteria felt her heart pumping hard at the thought of flying again. Skarne was smiling at her. She thought, he has all the skills to reprogram a repair bot—but he's a Commoner.
Commoners could be bribed.
"How about it?" Skarne asked.
"Sure," Asteria told him. "Thanks. But why did you pick me?"
"Because you're a good pilot," Skarne said. "Because the fighter controls are almost identical to the trainers you did so well on. And because you're a Commoner. We don't get many chances."
Still wondering if Skarne was her friend, Asteria reported to the fighter bay and paused to admire the sleek craft. Like the Cybots, they looked almost like liquid mercury, teardrops of shining metal just large enough to accommodate a pilot. They were reliable, responsive vessels.
Unless one had been reprogrammed to be a death trap.
With her nerves fluttering, she suited up, put on the helmet, and fell into the adopted habit of not breathing as the suit fed her oxygen. The six real pilots didn't even acknowledge her—all Aristos, she thought, though she could not see cheek tattoos through the visors and did not ask. They stood at attention while Captain Talan, her face unusually grim, escorted the slender, darkhaired Princeps Corinth Kyseros—he didn't look old enough to be given command of a planet—and his entourage to a lander, a shuttle capable of ferrying fifteen people to the surface.
The pilots manned their craft, and Asteria felt the familiar tingle of anticipation as the ship merged with and enhanced her senses. Quickly, she did an especially thorough check of all systems, then ran three sets of diagnostics. All seemed to be in order.
The flight deck was cleared. The huge air lock was opened, and the first two fighters moved out under grav drive, followed by the shuttle, then two more fighters, two more, and finally Asteria's ship.
Her heart swelled as she sailed into the silence of space. Theron hung in the velvet blackness, glowing blue, shining white, beautiful. Stars gleamed unblinking. The High Docks sailed ahead, a complicated and intricate structure that looked as though it had been put together haphazardly.
The commlink cut in: "Guard seven, when you're within range, close with the docking station and give it a visual inspection."
"Aye," Asteria subvocalized. She made a face. Now she knew why she had been given the chance to accompany the new governor. There was a job to do that no Aristo wanted! Typical.
Guard one gave the command to switch to ion propulsion, and the shuttle and its escorts began to move rapidly away from the Pax. Their trajectory would take them within a kilometer or so of the High Docks. It did not need to be a long detour, Asteria decided.
She peeled off as the flight made its nearest approach to the docks. She reported in: "The station's lights are on. I see no activity in the docks at all. I see six, eight small craft moored." She scanned the station as her fighter moved within mere meters of its outer hull. "I read power activity in the normal range. I don't see any—"
Ahead the hull of the Docks' main repair bay exploded silently, a blast of orange flame and gas. Before Asteria could react, she felt the belt beneath her pressure suit expand, and then she dropped into the strange slow-motion perception. Amid the boiling vapors from the ragged hole in the station's hull, she saw darting shapes: a cloud of deadly silver craft shaped like broad arrowheads. "Raider ships!" she transmitted. "Twenty or more, fighter-class!"
She received no acknowledgment. Something was jamming communications.
Three of the silvery Raider fighters had angled away from the cloud of ships that had erupted from the Docks. They peeled off toward her. She saw the sudden gleam of plasma cannon, rolled, half-looped, and turned, pulling high G forces as she fled toward the governor's flight—still in formation, apparently unaware of danger. "Alert!" she transmitted, forgetting to subvocalize, actually yelling the word. She regained control: "Alert! We're under attack!"
No response. She was barely ahead of the enemy fighters. Why weren't they firing?
Of course—plasma bolts would get the attention of the Empyrean pilots!
And she fired a warning shot. Saw it sizzle past the portside escorts. Saw them suddenly break formation.
She whipped her fighter around and closed with an enemy craft. Her targeting sensors went out.
They're jamming our tech!
She had targeted visually before, in the War Games back at the Academy. The enemy ship fired a plasma bolt at the same instant she fired her laser cannon at it. She rolled the fighter, and the shot missed her by a matter of half a meter or less.
But she scored a direct hit. The enemy fighter blossomed into gas and debris.
She had no time to think, no time to plan. Now she could see the Pax, far away—and she could see the glowing green trace lines of ion exhaust from dozens of fighters closing in. Wake up! Fight back!
A spear of white leaped from the Pax. One of the fighters closest to it exploded. The flight deck hatch dissolved, and she could just make out a swarm of Empyrean fighters exiting the Pax. Then her 360-degree vision caught an enemy ship sailing into position to fire at her, and she reversed thrust just as its laser flared. The laser beam passed through the space she had been occupying a half-heartbeat before.
They took the High Docks! The Raiders took the High Docks and are using it as their base!
She saw impacts and explosions as the enemy fighters concentrated their fire on the Pax. A cruiser had good shielding, and a fighter couldn't hope to penetrate it—not one fighter alone.
Twenty-five or thirty was a different matter. But what Raider would attack an Empyrean ship? That was madness—the government might overlook a random raid on a Fringe World, but a direct attack was different.
Asteria Locke.
The comm was working again! "Here! A flight of thirty to fifty Regus-class fighters—"
They are not piloted by humans.
"Who's this?"
I do not remember my name.
The Cybot!
"Alert the Captain!"
Already done. I cannot communicate with our fighters. Only with you. Seek out a faceted orb. That will be the Tetra command vessel. Destroy the orb.
Tetras! Here, in the Theron system!
An enormous explosion planetside. Asteria's throat tightened. The shuttle had been destroyed. She closed with an enemy fighter, fired, did some damage, whisked past it. Then she was in the midst of a swarm of them. Her mind buzzed with a cross-chatter of bizarre, inhuman voices, overlapping each other—
Move to seize the main craft. Take the main craft.
Acknowledged.
Acknowledged.
The small craft is an easy target.
No, follow the Admiral's orders and concentrate on seizing the main craft.
Acknowledged.
Asteria gasped. The communications were not coming through her commlink—nor were they expressed in words. It was more like a direct flow of thought, so intense that for a moment she felt a fierce urge to join the enemy fighters, to attack the Pax.
Seize the main craft.
The Admiral's orders.
She had a searing vision of Theron being scoured clean of human life.
Sterilize.
She felt an alien resentment that the Admiral was one of them, was human, and that the Admiral's orders must be obeyed.
The main craft. Take the main craft—
They wanted to take the cruiser. As they had taken the Raider fighters. The Tetras wanted a cruiser—
Or the one giving the orders wanted them to take it. What admiral would give such an order?
The Adastra had been a dreadnaught, but even so, nine small Tetra craft attacking without warning had all but destroyed it. If the Tetras had command of a cruiser—
Find the orb!
"How am I receiving the Tetra transmissions?"
Unknown. We have sustained damage. Someone aboard is disrupting all communications. Hurry! Find the orb!
Someone aboard.
Kayser. It had to be
Kayser! Whose uncle was an admiral—
Asteria's trajectory had taken her past the High Docks. She saw two Empyrean fighters ahead, confronting three enemies. She accelerated to help, and at extreme range, she fired, disabling one of the enemy ships. As her fighter flashed past it, she concentrated fiercely: Where is the orb?
And she felt a surge of—not emotion, too diffuse to be called that—an urge, an irrational desire, to protect the orb—to keep it safe—alien minds thinking of the orb, thinking of its position—
It's under the Docks!
Garbled transmissions now: "They've retreated!"
"They're attacking the Pax. Guard flight, report in! Who's with us? Guard one here!"
"Guard three!"
Silence. Asteria said, "Guard seven! Come with me. There's a Tetra ship near the High Docks. Concentrate your fire on that!"
She soared away without hearing any acknowledgment. Ahead, above, lay the High Docks, and past it the Pax, now fighting desperately. The Docks swelled rapidly in her view as she sped toward it, recklessly using the ship's energy. If she didn't have enough left to get back to the Pax or enough to engage the enemy command ship, it wouldn't matter anyway.
There it was! Nearly invisible, a jet-black, glittering, faceted orb, only tens of meters across. It was already firing missile weapons, tiny streaking lances less than a meter long. Asteria waited until they were moments away, then switched on grav drive, set to its highest level. The repelling force pulsed outward, and the incoming missiles glanced off the invisible barrier. Now the orb was firing lasers—and again she had the uncanny sense of hearing the enemy communications:
Fighters protect the command. Command under attack by two enemies. Fighters protect the command.
Two? With a sickening lurch, Asteria realized that Guard one had been destroyed. She fired her plasma cannon. The orb twirled, and she missed; but she had locked onto the target visually, and with her heightened instincts, she maneuvered to keep it in sight, the G forces all but pulling her apart. Six enemy fighters vectoring in fast. Now the orb was against the blue of Theron, a stark black shape.
You cannot do this. We have allied with the human command. You cannot do this—
"Watch me," she said aloud, and she loosed every weapon she had. The orb exploded, and a moment later, her fighter plunged through the wreckage, taking hits. She felt—
Ours! Ours! Our—
The belt.
Tetra technology!
That was how she had intercepted their communications—
But it was no longer Tetra tech. It had molded itself to her physiology, to her mind—
Everything went black.
seventeen
he floated in absolute darkness. The fighter had taken
damage. Its sensors no longer worked. She had no power. No life support.
I've got maybe five minutes of oxygen. My last trajectory will take me straight into the atmosphere of Theron. The fighter will burn up on entry. So—I'll suffocate, or I'll burn. Which will happen first?
She had barely had time to think that before she felt the weird sensation that the belt was growing again. But this time—
This time, it didn't stop.
It flowed up her body and down her legs. She had no way of judging time. It could have taken a nanosecond, or it could have taken a full minute.
She couldn't resist, not in the pressure suit, not locked into the body-contoured confines of the fighter. Not when the flowing metal encased her face. Not when it closed over her head, over her fingers, over her toes, completely armoring her body.
And then—
Then she saw.
Not with her eyes, but through the skin of living metal that had covered her. She saw through the fighter itself, a universe sketched in unfamiliar colors and pulsing with unknown energies. Theron spun before her. The fighter was almost at the edge of the atmosphere. She had seconds left to live—
But another craft was pacing her. It was not a fighter, but a repair unit, moving too fast for its systems. It extruded claspers.
It can't possibly have enough power to lift the fighter.
She felt rather than heard the sound, transmitted through the fighter hull, of the pincers seizing the fighter. And then the hatch crumpled away.
"Aster! Are you alive?"
Dai.
"Here," she subvocalized. "I'm here!"
She felt the armor transmit the words in the comm spectrum.
"Can you get out? I think your pressure suit might have half a minute of oxygen left."
"I'll try."
She braced herself and shoved. The crumpled hatch broke free and tumbled away. She pushed herself out of the pilot's cradle—and felt the ripping of the pressure suit. It shredded away.
But the armor held. She writhed into space, reached for a handhold, and seized the pincers. "I'm holding onto your ship. Let the fighter go, or we'll both be dragged down!"
The pincers opened, and the repair ship powered up. "Can you hang on? I'll have to try to pull you inside!"
"Negative!" cried Asteria. "Lift us out with grav drive! I'll let you know if I'm running out of air, then we can worry about getting me aboard!"
She locked her arms through the struts of the pincer. Between her dangling feet, she saw her fighter, mangled, twirling down toward the planetary surface. Only when it had begun to streak orange did she say, "Are we in safe orbit?"
"For the moment. All right, I'm going to open the retrieval bay. I think I can route oxygen into it. Hang on!"
Behind her, the bay hatch dissolved. She hauled herself inside. "Close it!"
The bay hatch reformed. "How's your ox?" Dai asked anxiously.
"No readings."
"Flooding the bay…pressurized. Can you take off your helmet?"
It was a tight fit. She squirmed and twisted and finally managed to unseal and take off the flight helmet. Her face was still encased in the metal armor that had formed from the belt. "Helmet's off," she said, without mentioning the armor. "What's happening on the Pax?"
"The enemy fighters broke off contact. They're dead in space now. Our fighters are mopping up. Talan's sent a marine detachment to retake the Docks. How did Raiders get so many ships?"
"From the Tetras," Asteria told him grimly. "They've been capturing Empyrean ships for years. We were wrong about the Tetras. They're not organic. They're something like living machines. Silicon-based. They don't think we're real."
"What?"
"They see us as something like Cybots. But that's changed. Someone in the Fleet has allied with them. Some kind of bargain—the Tetras want this system. I saw their minds. They want to—to sterilize Theron, to kill all life on it. I don't know why."
"The planet's all right. We've established contact. The jamming broke off all of a sudden. They've been cut off because all the orbiting stations were seized a few days ago, but the population's all right." A pause, and then Dai added, "We lost the new governor."
"I saw it happen."
"Okay, we're coming up to the ship. This is going to be a rough landing. A lot of systems are down. Hang on."
It was a very rough landing. But the armor that encased Asteria somehow anticipated every jolt and twist, and it spurred her to brace an arm, stiffen a leg, and hang on for dear life. And at last, just before the bay door dissolved again, the armor retreated, flowed down her body, and became a belt again.
She crept out onto a flight deck that showed the shambles of battle. Dai hopped out of the repair pod's cockpit. He held out a hand and helped her up. She remembered to breathe again—the armor had taken over the job of supplying oxygen to her, having "learned" that from the pressure suit—and gasped, "How bad?"
"We lost fourteen of our fifty fighters," Dai said. "Took hull and structural damage. Lost about half of our sensor array. We had casualties aboard too. I don't know how many."
Asteria saw a familiar face in the crowd on the flight deck. Kain Kayser came toward them, a look of concern on his thin f
ace. "Are you two all right?"
"We're fine," Asteria said. "Where were you in the fighting?"
"Me?" Kayser blinked. "I—I was helping, trying to regain communications—"
"Funny how everything went dead at the crucial moment."
Kayser's eyes narrowed. "We were doing all we could," he said. "But I'm glad you two are safe." He held out a hand to Dai. "They'll call you a hero for going out in a repair ship to rescue her."
Flight of the Outcast Page 17