Heritage of Flight

by Susan Shwartz

  Her boards showed the haze of screens encircling Leonidas and the Secess'. Just one glancing hit, just one, and metal vapor would cloud those shields, make them visible to the naked eye. The screens hazed as Leonidas's lasers slashed out. The running lights dimmed on the big ship. Inside, even the thrum of its lifesupport would pause for the space of a gasp, then resume as power flowed away from armaments and throughout the ship, then gathered for the next surge.

  She herself targeted and fired—not mechanically, but with the maniacal precision of a chessmaster forced to choose a move in microseconds. The ship yawed, then resumed attitude. She scanned damage control: assuming nothing else failed, the hit wasn't major. She could press the attack, and she did. Acceleration touched her, pressed webs against her, and apparent motion increased. She fought.

  Once again Leonidas's lasers seemed to coil and spring; the Secess’ ship returned fire. A pallid haze enveloped both ships, glinting as the white dwarf's savage light struck clouds of frozen vapor into ferocious rainbows. The light intensified about the ships, then widened as power was diverted from other systems into protection.

  "Keep back!” Pauli whispered. Signalling to the three ships nearest her, she headed toward Leonidas, careful to use all available cover to dodge the Secess’ one-man craft. On unattainable Earth, she had heard, there were beasts who fought each season over mates. Their weapons were immense racks of horns which they would lower and aim at one another. But once those horns ... those antlers ... locked, the beasts were too stubborn, or too stupid, to be willing or able to disengage. Some, she heard, died that way, to be found, seasons later, as racks of bleached bones, their fatal antlers still, inexorably locked.

  Once, and once only, she had seen firelock: two ships of roughly equal strength committed, shields and weapons, to destroying one another, as weapons and defense reached a balance in which the captain who diverted power to weapons was instantly consumed as his shields weakened, or the captain who reinforced shields was driven back and driven back until, inevitably, he had to weaken them.

  Firelock ended one of two ways: swift, vicious intervention by ridercraft or another ship; or mutual annihilation as systems failed, or overloaded. A brilliant pilot might elude it; but Leonidas's master was no such thing. In the past three years, they had started promoting senior engineers rather than strategists in order to safeguard those ships still in good repair. He might not be pilot enough to avoid firelock, but Pauli was about to stake her life on his being a good enough engineer to hold out until the riderships managed to break it.

  They regrouped outside firing range of the two huge ships, now enveloped in light, punishing even as the viewscreens polarized. Half the riders reconfigured as guards against the Secess’ single fighters, while the others prepared for the first of a series of quick onslaughts against the base ship: in fast, fire hard and full power—then out again before the ship's heavy armaments could skewer and melt them at a beam. This would either weaken the Secess’ ship long enough for Leonidas to strike hard, killing or crippling its enemy, or enable Leonidas to pull back and retreat.

  Ship-to-ship transmission crackled and whined in and out of phase, weakened by passage through the screens. As the riderships poised for their first strike, words emerged from the static created by screens and Secess’ jammers ... “will begin pumping..."

  "What?” That cry came from a pilot several hundred kilometers out ... the emissions of her ship shone more clearly on her status boards than the actual ship itself to the naked eye. Pauli knew that one too: before the war had pulled her from her labs, she had had an interest in physics.

  "...all Jump-capable ships retreat, prepare for Jump on the mark ... others link with Amherst and Daedalus ... prepare for upconversion."

  She remembered now just why the man had received his captaincy. It wasn't just that he was an engineer; it was that he was a weapons specialist. And when he got started talking, he was a spellbinder. One off-watch, he had entertained an entire wardroom with his plans for converting the ship's weapons to gamma-ray lasers. The problem wasn't breaking the atomic nuclei to produce gamma rays—more than one planet knew that to its lasting and highly radioactive sorrow. The problem with gamma-ray lasers lay in pumping the material, then raising it to a uniform energy level from which the actual laser would be fired—all without melting the systems ... even the adamantine components of plated diamond that served shipwide as microprocessors and were all but indestructible ... or letting the laser beam degrade. Thus far, the captain's engineers had managed to store energy from the ship's power plant in what the techs called an isomeric state. The problem was altering its energy level. Where would he find an outside...

  An outside source? He had an outside source: the firelock.

  "Lee, don't!” Borodin's voice crackled through the fragmented communication, then squealed out. “Daedalus, what's your status..."

  "Jump plotted..."

  "You don't know this is going to work,” Borodin argued.

  "We don't know it won't,” came Captain Lee's voice. “In any case, I have been ordered to use any and all means to safeguard your passengers."

  Arnaut and those other damned marshals! That was a whole ship out there they were talking about hurling into the equivalent of a very small nova. Not only was the ship not expendable, it had a hell of a lot of fine people on it, friends and comrades of Pauli and the other pilots.

  Quickly the pilots conferred on ridership frequencies as, all around them, the Secess’ fighters struck, attempting to break their formations, weakening their chance of ending the firelock. Disobey orders? Retreat? Turn and fight all comers? Counterpointing their hasty quarrel over the best alternative was the captains’ argument: Leonidas, stubborn, sure of its strength; Daedalus, frantically testing systems and backups; and the Amherst. Voices rose and fell, cleared, then phased out as the firelock intensified. Pauli imagined that her short, sweat-damp hair stood on end from the energies that Leonidas prepared to harness.

  A short bark, and a spate of sounds comprehensible only as orders silenced the captains until Borodin's deep, slightly accented voice took over the comms. “All ships!” he cried in the archaic slang of a planet probably lost to all of them forever. Slang was better than code for emergency messages. Code could be broken. Slang could only be understood—and the Secess’ had moved so far from Alliance that they no longer shared many of the same referents. “Mayday! Sauve qui peut!" It was the call of uttermost disaster, old even as Earth counted age, a cry for flight so desperate that those unable to keep up must be left behind. And if Borodin sounded it, it could not be disregarded. He was too canny a fighter to cry rout where none existed.

  Pauli's ship sensors fluctuated wildly. The radiation detectors emitted a steady beeping which meant, if she were lucky, a clouded badge and a warning, and if she were not ... she didn't expect to live long enough to have any children, so it made little difference. Firing at the Secess’ fighters who pursued gleefully, she and her companions turned and fled toward the two refugee ships. Acceleration pressed her into her couch, which tilted back to enable her to withstand the pressures. Ahead of her and behind, the starlight dopplered as she neared lightspeed. Her breathing deepened, then turned to panting as pressure really took hold. Raising her hand to adjust the angle of the NavComp readout became a supreme effort. If it had not been for the ache in her head from recycled air and the shock to her eyes of explosions too quick for polarization to shade, she might have dreamed that this was a particularly brutal simulator. More pressure, and her vision reddened, her focus narrowing to that one precious readout. She grunted as she forced a stiffly gloved hand up toward NavComp, keying for intercept with Amherst.

  The overstressed detectors hooted a final time, then were silent. Only the digital readout continued to climb. “X rays,” Pauli recalled. Lee had planned to use X rays to trigger the upconversion from which the actual laser would be fired.

  As if sensing something new and hideous, the Secess’ ship's rat
e of fire slowed, and its shields intensified ... “Too late,” muttered the pilot turned physicist. “He's engaging it now! Prepare for Jump on Amherst's coordinates!"

  The pilot had anticipated her order: well enough. Pauli was no scientist, and the other knew it. She concentrated on breathing and her boards. Around her, the other pilots pressed for maximum speed. One stopped dead, power gone, until a Secess’ blasted it to shards and gleaming vapor. Others, unable to maintain the pace, swung wide, hoping to avoid the shockwave to come.

  "The drive ... I'm on overlo—!” Yet another ship veered sharply off, tumbled, then exploded as its drive overloaded.

  Behind the fleeing riderships, light rippled about the firelocked craft. In less than a microsecond it peaked, stabbing into an explosion of such speed and brilliance that the ports had no time to polarize. Pauli squeezed her eyes shut and prayed that the ships could make Jump before the shockwave hit them. At least the distress buzzers were out, she thought as the first tremors of the wave buffeted her. Ahead of her loomed the Amherst. She forced leaden hands to controls, cutting speed and Gs so fast she almost retched. Half by instinct, she headed for the blessed familiarity of the flight deck's landing bays and the welcoming symmetry of their bright landing grids.

  Her ship touched down, and the lights died as the landing bay closed. Her boards ran through their usual spectrum of powering-down, and she sagged against her webbing. How many ships had made it into the safety of flight deck? The others would have to ride out Jump alone. She'd done that once in a ridership, and would probably do it again—if she were lucky enough to survive—but she didn't envy them the experience.

  Borodin's voice barked out the command, “On the mark, all ships NOW!" Control boards bent and shimmered, gravity faded, and the ships Jumped...

  Realspace contracted and expanded simultaneously in a frenzy of infrared flickering to violet, then back, rocking and racking the ridership as the shockwave struck, and Pauli yawed back and forth until Jump...

  ...Motionless ... away ... hell exploding, worse than the heart of that white dwarf star in the binary system ... a hideous scream, thought, not heard, never to be heard, from the throats of Leonidas's crew, which had created its gamma laser, and died of it—but had obeyed orders to the last, and taken their enemies with them.

  Gravity seized and released, and Pauli screamed soundlessly—like Daedalus; like the damned!—as Amherst dipped and plummeted down the bubbles some madmen said underlay space, skimming the treacherous supercurrents of radiation so bright that even quasars seemed dark, a froth of tachyons and fermions, then slid into a trough of soundless, timeless darkness.

  Buffeting subsided as the ships Jumped, base ships and riders. Time twinged and trembled in their wake. Then space curved about them, silent and protective, and they left a timeless, trackless hell behind.

  2

  Communications had long since been lost—my God, how long? Pauli looked for the chrono. It was not in its usual place on her boards, which twisted and shifted even as she stared at them. She put out a hand, and saw it shimmer, deform, then remold again before her eyes. An instant later her eyes seemed to pierce the seals and articulations of her glove, and she saw her bones glowing through the insubstantiality of her flesh. Her body began what felt like a slow churning, simultaneously inside and out.

  For the moment, she was deaf and blind; in the next, she was deluged with sensory impressions, crawling along her nerves until she screamed, though she heard no sound. Realspace impinged. Communications resumed, a babble of panic, then squealed out; and Jumpspace folded them into its hideous self once more. It was not a place for humans, had never been. Time stretched out ... are we trapped? To be trapped in Jump: after the first long Jump, when you suffered the distortions of curving space, there in the frothing realm where galaxies were born. Time was suspended there, and matter. And to wake there, eternally, in your flesh, an unholy resurrection, why that was the one fear that, more than combat, brought you shuddering up out of uneasy sleep. You did not really exist in Jump; you entered it and left. If you entered it and could not leave, you could not die—having never really existed there in the first place.

  Gravity and weightlessness pressed simultaneously, and realspace beckoned, tantalizingly close. Come on, come on, this shouldn't happen! Pauli thought, her consciousness straining toward thought as her eyes, trying to see light in the darkness, created an aurora of scarlets and yellow against her eyelids. Realspace will exist if I must invent it! she declared soundlessly. She considered stars, and planets, seas, and starships: let them be! she declared, a mental howl.

  Amherst slid down the wave of no-time and place. Very well: if the situation called for blasphemy, then let blasphemy exist too. "Let there be light!" she screamed.

  Absurdly she heard her voice shrill up, then crack. In a “second” more, she would laugh, assuming she could hear or feel it, at her megalomania. Well, if they did not escape Jump, she would have all of a mad eternity to appreciate it.

  Realspace tore through the illusions then. The rasp of her own labored breath, the smell of stale air, of chemical cleansers, and of her own sweat came into manifestation once again as communications growled, then exploded into life. The chrono solidified, mute testimony to the fact that they had spent close to two minutes conscious in Jump. Any longer and they might not have been able to pull free. Or be sane thereafter.

  "Riderships by the numbers ... report in, please!"

  Faint voices crackled over the ship-to-ship bands as the craft who had ridden out Jump divorced from their base ships called in.

  "Do you require assistance to dock?” Borodin asked.

  "Negative ... but I'm going to kiss the deck once I touch down!” one pilot replied, then laughed hysterically. Other voices sounded weepy, exhausted, and nakedly relieved. But there were too few. At least two riderships had not pulled through Jump and...

  "Daedalus ... do you copy? Daedalus, please reply!"

  "God, no,” Pauli whispered. Instead of cracking the hatch and swinging out, she sagged back. That whole ship, plunged into a maze it could never escape. Lost, its crew; and all the civilians, and the refugees. Tears threatened. “God, help them. They never had much of a life,” she whispered. “But at least, now, they were about to have a chance."

  "Yeager, are you there? Report!” Borodin's voice cracked sharply, snapping her back into alertness.

  "Yeager, aye. Request permission to come to the bridge."

  She cracked the hatch, swinging out and down, her boots echoing on the textured metal deck of the landing bay. The lights outside the bay almost blinded her, and she leaned against a bulkhead with several other pilots who emerged almost at the same time. Behind them rose the whine of machinery closing the docking bays, activating the catapults that hurled another shift of pilots into space. Please God, no Secess’ lurked in this system as well.

  "We shouldn't have left them out there,” one woman told Pauli.

  "Ought to be an explanation,” muttered another man to low growls of assent. Someone owed them some answers: why the secrecy, why the haste, why the Leonidas, with its irreplaceable crew and systems, had been condemned as expendable?

  "Where are we going, anyhow?"

  "I'm headed for the bridge,” Pauli announced. “To get some answers!"

  Profane agreement growled out. Still in the aftermath of that appalling Jump, Pauli lurched against a bulkhead, steadied, then aimed toward the nearest elevator. The other pilots crowded in.

  And nothing moved. Nothing in the elevator, that was. Pauli thumbed for communications. What the hell kind of stupidity was this? After that abortion of a Jump, damage control parties would have to scour the ship, system by system. God knows, the medical staff would need to tend the refugees, or any crewmember whose grasp on reality might have snapped in transit. But the elevator was not moving.

  "Backup power doesn't work either,” reported the woman nearest controls.

  "Down the corridor. Try the next one."


  "It's not going to work,” Pauli called out at the backs of the pilots who left to take that advice. Only moments ago—but parsecs away—she had called herself paranoid. Now she began to suspect her own skepticism.

  "Engineering? Yeager here. Trying to reach the bridge. We don't have elevator power here. Is this a malfunction?"

  "Neg...” the comm squawked, then went dead.

  Interesting. Predictable, too. Why keep the pilots from the bridge? Paranoia threatened to overwhelm her. Pilots were the one group capable of asking questions that someone didn't want answered, or learning the answers on their own. Answers to questions such as where they were headed, and by whose orders, and why Leonidas had died. She didn't think that this was Captain Borodin's idea; it wasn't Borodin's style. But then, it wasn't Borodin who had ordered her back to the Jeffrey Amherst, either. A marshal had taken command in the battle. But she couldn't expect one of them to tell her anything helpful...

  The nearest ready room had computer access, she thought, and trotted toward it. Her legs were steadier now. Punching up diagrams of the ship, she nodded to herself. There they were: service hatches, ladders, crawlways ... she was walking faster and more steadily now, glancing about from side to side as if she herself were a ship expecting attack. It was like arriving in a new system and conducting reconnaissance for Secess'. She spared a brief thought for the pilots who were doing that right now. Good luck, brothers. What system were they in, anyhow?

  She punched up the codes to access navigation. ACCESS RESTRICTED flashed on and off on the tiny screen. The red light spread out over her hands where they shook on the keyboard. Raising an eyebrow, she used a higher priority, and was unsurprised when that failed too. Muttering to herself, she headed for the hatch she had noted on the ship's plans.