by Rick Partlow
“Ash, target the emitters!” I called to him, opening up before I’d finished the sentence.
The proton cannon couldn’t damage the actual laser, but it might put metal slag in the way that could attenuate the beam…oh, hell, I doubted it, but it was worth a try. The computer simulated the proton beams since they were pretty close to invisible without any atmosphere to react against, and when the virtual lightning struck the bow of the Tahni destroyer, there was a crackling corona of light that didn’t need to be simulated when they hit the deflectors.
We may as well not have bothered. If we created any blockage, the laser burned right through it in less than an eyeblink, and then the Ship-Buster that had been closing disappeared into a cloud of expanding plasma that kept coming anyway, dispersing against the destroyer’s deflectors. Almost lost among the real and CGI fireworks in the display inside my head was a line of laser pulses from the Gatling, firing automatically at one of the destroyer’s missiles that had manage to track us down.
But this missile was more heavily armored than the ones from the fighter, shrugging off the long, spendthrift burst the computer afforded it, and I could see two of them closing on the Acheron just a few kilometers off my port wing. They were accelerating at close to twenty g’s and there was no way we were going to shake them…
“Ash, Transition!” I yelled, feeling an empty pit in my stomach. “Short as possible!”
If I’d taken a second to think about it before I did it, I probably wouldn’t have. I didn’t know if we were at minimum safe distance yet, didn’t know if being this close to the destroyer or the moon or the gas giant’s gravity well would even allow the wormhole to form. I just fed the Teller-Fox warp unit a burst of energy from the capacitor bank and smashed a hole in the universe.
Reality, gravity and my stomach were all wrenched out from underneath me and I barely had time to take a breath before it happened again just a second or two later. Suddenly I was back in realspace and a good ten light-seconds away from the destroyer and the gas giant, though still on the ecliptic, and Ash was coasting beside me, all of our pre-jump momentum stolen away.
“Jesus,” I heard Ash gasping in my ear. “Did we actually just do that?”
I couldn’t help myself; I laughed.
“I remember the first time you said that to me.” I hit the maneuvering thrusters and turned my nose back around towards the battle. “Come on, get ready, we’re going back in. Keep a capacitor charged and if we need to, we can jump back out again.”
“And if we wind up spread over two universes like a damned fog instead?” Chief Burke grumbled. I pulled back into my body and glanced over at her.
Her baleful glare was barely visible through splotches of what had to be vomit decorating the inside of her faceplate and I winced.
“There’s a reason you’re not supposed to jump that close to a planet, ma’am,” she scolded.
“There’s a lot of things I’m not supposed to do, Chief.” I shrugged. “I usually wind up doing them anyway.”
A lurch and a shift and we were only a kilometer from the hull of the destroyer. Grey, pitted metal crawled by beneath us and my heart climbed up into my throat as I realized how close we’d come to colliding with the enemy ship…or simply opening the wormhole inside it. I checked the threat display frantically, looking for the three Ship-Busters that had still been closing when we’d jumped out, but two of them were gone, probably taken out by the ship’s laser. The third was maneuvering off to the starboard, maybe fifty kilometers away, and I could see the black scoring across the armor on its wedge-shaped nose where it had taken a hit.
I thought about radioing Keating to launch the second strike, but it would take a half hour for the signal to reach him and hopefully, he would already have seen the situation by then and made the decision himself. I realized I was counting on Keating to make a good decision, but either way, a call from me probably wouldn’t change anything.
“Son of a bitch,” I heard Burke swear softly, and I immediately knew why.
When we’d jumped out, there’d been a dozen of us; now there were nine. The missing IFF transponders were like a blank space in my display, but I knew who was gone: Rivera, Coronado and Quraishi. Of the three, I’d only really talked to Coronado and hadn’t liked him much, but I still felt a kick in the belly. I’d been gone less than five minutes, and three of us were down.
Of the rest, I could see four of them still trying to shake the missiles, and two of them clearly weren’t going to make it. I recognized the IFFs as Vinnie Collazo, the little guy I’d talked to in the break room, and our Squadron Leader Commander Hideya. Their wingmen were both already gone and they were only seconds from being overtaken themselves.
“Vinnie!” Ash broadcast before I had a chance. “Commander Hideya! Transition out and back, get them off your tail.”
“That’s insane,” Hideya snapped, his voice muffled by the pressures of the g-forces, and I could see his Gatling still firing burst after burst at the incoming warhead even as he accelerated away from it at close to ten gravities.
Vinnie jumped immediately, and the two missiles on his track kept going through the space where he’d been. They were too far away from anyone else and carried too little fuel to be a threat anymore. I couldn’t see where he came out, and I hoped Ash and I hadn’t just sent him to his death.
“Do it, sir!” I urged our Squadron Leader, calculating the distance from him with the help of the ship’s systems and realizing there was no way to get in range in time to help, not even if I accelerated fast enough to kill Burke and me both.
He didn’t respond, just cranked his acceleration up to twelve g’s and I realized he had to have passed out, probably programming the computer to Transition when it got to the minimum safe distance. That didn’t happen. The Tahni weapon hunted his ship down with shark-like single-mindedness and consumed him in a searing flash of fusing atoms and there wasn’t a damn thing we could do about it.
I wanted to scream and I wanted to curse, but more than anything else, I wanted to make someone pay. The IFF transponders flickered like stars in my inner eye.
“First Squadron,” I snapped, my voice sounding strange in my ears, “get this thing’s attention. If you get in trouble, jump out the minimum possible distance and then get your ass back into the fight. Ash, follow me; we’re going to escort this fucking missile home.”
“Aye-aye, ma’am,” he said, without irony.
The Tahni destroyer was spinning on its axis, trying to bring its laser to bear on the Ship-Buster, and Ash and I were racing to put ourselves between that laser and the missile. Nearly five hundred kilograms of me was pushing me back into my acceleration couch and I was biting down on the mouthpiece built into my helmet and trying to lose the sensation of being crushed by retreating into the interface.
Inside its virtual confines, I could see that the four other cutters that had been in range were making a run on the stern portside weapons pods of the destroyer, firing volley after volley at the missile launch rails there, the one vulnerable spot in the armor. The Tahni had already launched another spread of missiles from its starboard rails and they were curving around the hull to stab outward at the cutters harassing it. But all that was a side-show to the main event, keeping that Ship-Buster intact and on course.
I reached out to its control systems, feeding it my access codes and instructing it to use Ash and I as cover for the approach. It replied in machine language and it took me a moment to wrap my mind around the communication; I was getting close to the limit of what the drugs and the suit could do. I was pretty sure Burke had lost consciousness, and I hoped I wasn’t doing her any damage that couldn’t be fixed, but our cutters were finally moving into position.
The destroyer fired her laser again, targeting the missile, but the Ship-Buster was spinning rapidly enough that the blast only melted off a few centimeters of armor before it shifted course out of the beam. Ash and I were just aft of the firing arc of the laser po
rts and I signaled to him over the interface to fire in conjunction with me. Our proton cannons lashed out at the same firing port we’d targeted before and this time, there was a reaction. The deflectors overloaded just above the port and chain lightning flashed down into it with an explosion of burning metal.
The Ship-Buster shifted course, drifting to the side with the damaged port, only ten kilometers away now and still boosting, though I thought it couldn’t have much fuel left at this point. I was too far out of it to follow the physics involved and the orbits and the angles of attack; I was going by instinct and feel and what the computer was telling me over the interface and making me think were my own instinct and feelings. It was as if I just knew what was going to happen, the same way you know that when you move your body a certain way, you’re going to move this far and at this speed.
I didn’t really see the destroyer hitting her maneuvering thrusters or increasing her acceleration, but I knew on a gut level that she was doing a skew flip, and that her intent was to roast the Ship-Buster with her anti-proton drive. I also knew that the Ship-Buster was close…maybe close enough. And I knew we were all way too damned close.
I cut the drives just so I could yell it out of my mouth and make sure they all paid attention.
“Transition now!”
And I told the missile to detonate, just before I stroked the control with a thought and we winked out of existence.
For the longest moment, maybe the longest of my short life, I believed with all my heart that I was dead. I’d just realized that if I were dead, there wouldn’t be anything to do the believing when light burst around me and I found myself only a few thousand kilometers from a fusion explosion that outshone the system’s star.
“Ash…,” I whispered the name, trying to clear my head enough to look for his IFF.
“I’m here,” he said, as the transponder blinked insistently from just a hundred kilometers away. “Always.”
“I’d say you two were so cute you make me want to throw up,” Burke commented dryly from beside me, “but it’s clearly too late for that.” I saw her hand go towards her visor like she wanted to wipe it clean, then drop as she realized that was impossible. “Did we get the damned thing?”
I couldn’t tell; the sphere of white fire was as big as a small moon and blocked everything behind it, including electromagnetic signals. What I did see was a series of IFF transponders behind me, one flickering into existence right after another as the rest of the squadron jumped back into realspace. The closest was only fifty kilometers past Ash and his Acheron, while the farthest was at nearly ten thousand…and in-between was only one.
I tried to pull up the ship’s recordings of the data before we jumped, feeling a sick twisting in my guts at the thought that two of our ships, four people, had died because I told them to jump, or because I’d set the warhead off early…and then I stopped. What would it matter if they’d died because of that or in an attack I’d told them to make? Either way, they were dead and it was my doing.
I still hadn’t seen Vinnie again, either, I realized. Had he never made it to T-space? Had he simply ceased to exist? Or had he just not stopped running?
“There she is!” I heard Ash say and I tried to focus again, tried to pull my head out of my ass.
It was the destroyer. She was still in one piece, more or less, but her nose had been stripped of armor; it had mostly sublimated, and what had been left had peeled away like bark from a diseased tree. She was open to the vacuum at the bow, and there were flashes of fire as atmosphere mixed with electrical sparks on its way out. Her drive was dark, though I didn’t see damage on her aft end. Maybe a stray signal had shut it down from the damage the fusion warhead had done to her, or maybe her helm officer had shut it down for the skew flip and never had the chance to re-ignite it. Either way, she was tumbling end over end, still in the continued motion for that flip, heading outward from the gas giant but with not quite enough velocity to escape its gravitational pull.
I stared at her mauled and torn form, suddenly silent, weighted down with an inertia of my own, unwilling to say another word or make another decision. I don’t know how long I sat there, drifting both in the space outside and the space in my head, before a swarm of IFF transponders surrounded me, the cavalry arriving just a bit too fucking late.
Vinnie was among them, I noticed, and my lip curled both in relief and maybe a little contempt. He’d run to the edge of the system, abandoned us. I knew I shouldn’t have blamed him for it, but I did.
“Lt. Hollande, do you read?” Keating. Where the hell had his useless ass been?
“Hollande here,” I answered brusquely.
“What the hell happened?” He demanded. Like he had the right to demand a damn thing after sitting out there while we did all the work. “Where’s Commander Hideyo?”
“Commander Hideyo is dead.” I felt as if I was speaking to a child. What the hell did he think had happened to him? To all of them? “He was killed by an enemy missile.”
I forced myself to review the ship’s log and watch the sensor feeds, to find out what had happened to the other two ships. And there it was. One of them, the Palomino, had been destroyed by the Tahni warship’s last missile launch. Her pilot was a woman named Besson, I remembered. Nothing prepossessing about her; I don’t think I’d heard her say two words the whole time we’d been in the squadron together. The other, the Harbinger, had been piloted by Lindsey. He was a competent, soft-spoken officer, older than Ash or me; he always wore his hair barely regulation, just as long as he could get away with. I could tell by the gravimetic readings that he’d tried to jump into T-space, but the wormhole hadn’t formed before the Huntress had Transitioned, so I didn’t know if he’d made it.
“We have six ships known destroyed, one missing,” I reported, my voice businesslike but bile in the back of my throat. “The enemy destroyer is disabled; any further defenses are unknown.” I opened my mouth to say something, but clamped down on it and tried again. “All of our missiles are exhausted and my own fuel is barely going to cover the return flight. I’m sure the rest of the squadron isn’t much better off.”
“Understood, Hollande.” He seemed quiet, as if the losses were sinking in for him. Well, he wasn’t a monster, just an idiot.
I expected the next transmission from him to be him telling us we were pulling out, cutting our losses and getting the hell away from here before he fucked up even worse and got more of us killed. Who the hell knew what else the Tahni had in this system?
“Second Squadron,” he said instead, transmitting on the general net, “Proceed to optimal launch distance and engage the orbital station with your remaining missiles. Third Squadron, I want you to deploy in ground attack formation and execute strafing runs on the ground base. Don’t leave anything standing.”
The avatars in my display began boosting inward towards the habitable moon, moving away until the remains of our squadron were left drifting in the darkness with Captain Keating and his wingman, Commander Cochran. I hung slack against the restraints of the acceleration couch and began to feel each and every ache and pain of each and every bruised muscle. My back hurt, my breasts hurt, my shoulders were on fire; it seemed like it would be easier to list what didn’t hurt.
I was wet everywhere; sweat had matted my hair to my scalp, trickled down my back, filled my ship boots. And I’d pissed myself, I was fairly sure. The flight suit would absorb it and process it and get rid of it, but it was cold and clammy on my skin, disgusting and suddenly intolerable.
Everything was intolerable.
“Why did you wait so long, sir?” I asked Keating, using a private net. “We were down to the last Ship-Buster. We lost two ships making sure it could take out that destroyer.”
“Lt. Hollande,” his voice was severe and reproving, “I understand you’re upset, but you’d best watch your tone unless you’d like to be reported for insubordination.”
My tone…my tone had been flat and numb, like my though
ts, like my conscience. I should have shut up, but I had never really known what was good for me, and at the moment, I didn’t give a damn.
“Why did you wait so long, Captain?” I asked him again, quieter but still insistent.
“I had to assess the situation,” he told me, and the fact he actually answered spoke volumes. If he’d really thought I was out of line, if he hadn’t already felt guilty, he wouldn’t have told me a damned thing. “I couldn’t send our people back there blind. As soon as Lt. Collazo reported back…”
I tuned him out. I’d heard what I needed to hear. He’d waited until Vinnie got there and told him we were dying, one by one. He’d ignored it until he couldn’t ignore it anymore without someone calling him out for it.
Keating was a coward, and he was going to get us all killed.
Chapter Eleven
I think I knew something was wrong when they directed First Squadron to land on a separate section of the field from the rest of the Strike Wing.
“It’s probably because some of us need service and repair,” Ash told me when I brought it up to him while we were deorbiting Inferno. He didn’t sound confident.
“First Squadron please maintain radio silence.”
I turned, wide-eyed, to look at Chief Burke. The transmission had come from Orbital Traffic Control, but they never bothered to monitor private, ship-to-ship communications inside a unit. The Chief reached over and hit a control that muted the ship’s log recording.
“I don’t like the smell of this, ma’am,” she admitted. “Smells like someone trying to find a good place to bury the blame.”
The brown and green and blue curve of Inferno’s day side in the main view screens seemed suddenly less inviting and more threatening. I could feel the Huntress shudder as she sank deeper into the atmosphere, the turbojets screaming in their struggle against gravity. It was all out of my control; computer systems downstairs were conspiring with computer systems on the boat to bring us down where and when and how they wanted.