“Good,” Lanoe said. “Send them the message I wanted originally.” You must answer for your crimes. Candless shot him a cold look when she heard his order, but he didn’t care.
He’d bent over backward to try to talk. To give them a chance to explain themselves. It had taken every bit of restraint he had. If it were just up to him he would have come in shooting, and not stopped until every last jellyfish was dead.
He’d held back for one simple reason. He couldn’t win this war alone. He needed Candless if he was going to succeed, and he knew she didn’t share his burning need for justice. If he attacked the Blue-Blue-White without immediate provocation—if he shot first—he knew he would lose her forever.
So he’d given the aliens a chance, and they’d blown the Screamer out of the sky. Lanoe knew perfectly well there was only one way for this to end. All he needed was to nudge them a little. Make them show their true colors. They’d wiped out countless alien species before now—surely if he just irritated them a little, they wouldn’t hesitate to open fire.
And then he would be justified in any course of action he chose. He could start his war, and no one could question his right to do so.
If the bastards would just take the bait …
“Sending now,” Valk told him.
He nodded, knowing there were enough cameras on the bridge that the AI could see him. “Move us closer,” he said to the pilot. “Twenty kilometers.” That would still leave plenty of room for maneuvering when things got hot. “Valk, keep repeating that message until I say otherwise.”
“Understood,” the AI said.
Beams of light shot upward from the clouds. Searchlights that roamed around the sky before converging on the carrier, one of them momentarily washing out the display of the dreadnought. The carrier’s imagery systems compensated almost immediately, filtering out the incoming light.
“Are you receiving?” Lanoe asked Valk. “Getting anything you understand?”
“Yes and no,” the AI said.
“What’s going on, Valk? You’re our translator. You’re supposed to understand their language. Why is this a problem?”
“It’s impossible to say, precisely,” Valk replied. “The signals they’re sending just don’t make sense—they look like random words, or at most like they’re encrypted. It could be just that, that they’re sending in some code that they assume we can decipher. Or maybe they’re just using complex idioms, and my vocabulary is too basic to understand what they’re saying.”
The AI paused for a moment.
“Lanoe—I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
Candless cleared her throat. “Commander?” she asked. “What does Valk have to say for himself?”
Lanoe looked up. He realized, suddenly, that she couldn’t hear the AI. That Valk was speaking directly to him, and only to him. Well, Valk always had been smart. He knew what Lanoe wanted before he even asked for it.
He opened his mouth, planning on telling Candless exactly what Valk had told him. That they couldn’t understand the incoming signal. Then he reconsidered.
He could lie to her.
He could make up any answer he liked. Valk, he knew, would cover for him.
There were times, in war, when you had to limit what people knew. Even your closest fellow officers. Don’t think of it as lying, he told himself. If she knew that they’d failed to communicate with the Blue-Blue-White, she might insist that they back off. Try some other approach.
But that meant losing the initiative. It meant deferring justice, and that simply wasn’t acceptable.
“They’re refusing to listen,” he told her. “They’re threatening us.”
He made a point of not looking at her. Lanoe knew how to bluff—he’d learned that in a hundred battles. “Closer,” he said. “Ten kilometers.”
Gravity tugged gently at him as the carrier accelerated, easing its way forward.
The display grew even clearer as they got closer to the dreadnought, but still he couldn’t see through its blisters. He wanted to know they were there. Wanted to see at least one of the Blue-Blue-White onboard that thing. Back at Niraya they’d fought nothing but drones. He wanted to kill a damned jellyfish.
Damn you, he thought. Take the shot.
“Are they scanning us?” Candless asked. A good question, one Lanoe should have thought to ask himself.
“I’m not detecting any electromagnetic radiation from the dreadnought,” the IO said. Which wasn’t a complete answer, not by a long shot. “No sonic pulses … We’re being swept by a laser, but it’s a very low-energy beam. Not even powerful enough for spectroscopy. Of course, they could have sensors we don’t know about.”
“Understood,” Candless said.
Shulkin suddenly slapped the armrest of his seat. “Is this a damned scrap, or an Admiralty cotillion?” he demanded.
Lanoe turned to look at him. The captain’s glassy eyes were burning like coals. He felt a strange and not entirely pleasant kinship with the man. Shulkin wanted the same thing Lanoe did—a fight. But it was never enjoyable to look at a madman and feel like you were looking in a mirror. In fact—
He didn’t get to finish that thought.
“Thermal signature,” the IO said, his voice a worried squeak. “There!”
On the display one of the dreadnought’s weapon ports was circled in red. A subdisplay came up, showing an infrared view, with the port glowing a brilliant white.
“Maneuvering thrusters, now!” Shulkin called out. The Centrocor bridge crew snapped into action, the hands of the pilot and the navigator flying over their consoles. A panel opened at the pilot’s position and a manual control yoke sprang up into her hands.
It happened before Lanoe even saw it. A ball of orange fire had emerged from the weapon port on the dreadnought, an incandescent mass of plasma a hundred meters in diameter, and it was headed right for them.
Lanoe wanted to laugh. He wanted to sing. He had his first shot, his justification. If he didn’t die in the next few seconds—he had his war.
“All pilots to their vehicles,” Candless called. “Cataphracts in Alpha wing, you’re out first. Beta wing, be ready to scramble on my order. Carrier scouts hang back but remain on standby.” Within seconds a wave of fighters launched from the carrier’s flight deck, streaming out like bullets from a gun.
“Batygins!” Lanoe shouted. “Move up, but watch for that projectile! Ehta, get those guns warmed up! Valk, get the cruiser moving, I want a broadside in ninety seconds!”
The plasma ball was still headed for them, blazing across a red sky.
Candless could almost feel the frenzied activity all around her, as more pilots jumped into their canopies, as ships maneuvered. All the blood in her body shunted over to one side as the carrier swung about, trying to get out of the way as the plasma ball tore toward them. “Are we going to make it?” she demanded.
“Yes, ma’am, but it’s going to be close,” the navigator said. Her eyes were as wide as saucers.
Shulkin sputtered, a series of sharp coughs racking his chest. “Keep those fighters in good order! I want a double arc formation now. If I have to come out there and teach you how to fly, I bloody well will,” he growled.
Candless brought up a tactical display, showing the cataphracts moving to form curving formations around the dreadnought. The pilots were keeping their distance, none of them moving in to attack, as if they were waiting for the rest of the wing to get in place first. Before Lanoe had taken command of the Centrocor vehicles, Candless had fought those pilots, and she hadn’t been impressed much then, either.
Lanoe was right behind her, one of his hands on her shoulder. “There’s a BR.9 with my name on it. Shulkin has the bridge. I’m going out there myself.”
“Of course you are,” she said. It was standard Navy practice that the commander of a fleet did not under any circumstances jump in the cockpit of a fighter and go haring off to join the fray. Command-level officers were far too valuable to risk in t
he chaotic welter of actual combat. Lanoe had never been the kind of officer who played by the official rules, though, and she didn’t have the time or the inclination to stop him. “What about Maggs’s fighter, though? The one with the new targeting algorithm?”
His face lit up as if she’d just given him a birthday present. He nodded and then disappeared without another word.
“Ma’am!” the IO said. “Ma’am—the plasma ball!”
A display popped up in front of her, a camera feed from the flank of the carrier. The plasma projectile swept across the view like a little star, too bright to look at directly. Tendrils of ionized gas snapped all around it, some licking the skin of the carrier and searing right through its armor. Red lights appeared all over her damage control boards, and the whole carrier lurched beneath her, but then the projectile was gone, shooting past them out toward the far end of the disk.
“Alpha wing, get in there and fight!” Shulkin screamed. “Beta wing, screen their advance! Batygins! By all the fires of hell, where are you?”
“Ten seconds out,” one of the destroyer captains said.
“Ten seconds out,” the other one repeated.
“Ma’am,” the IO said, “ma’am!”
“Hellfire, man, what is it now?” she demanded.
“The other ships, the ones below the clouds—they’re surfacing!” he said.
She glanced up at the big display, the camera feed from the nose of the cruiser, and saw them. All of them.
Lanoe dropped down through the narrow airlock and flipped over toward the Z.XIX. Maggs’s fighter was a nasty-looking machine, streamlined as sharp as the edge of a razor. The most advanced fighter the Navy ever built. Lanoe had never actually flown one of the things before—he’d always considered them overdesigned, good for making an impression but too complicated and difficult to repair for field use. He had to admit this one had style, though, with four PBW cannons protruding from its snout and wickedly sharp airfoils like sabre blades. Even its thruster cones had been installed with flare suppressors, so they looked like black crowns. This particular Z.XIX was equipped with the Philoctetes algorithm, too, a software package that doubled the effective range of its weaponry.
Lanoe kick-flipped into the open cockpit and let its canopy flow up and over his head. Boards flickered to life all around him. He started to reach for the controls.
“Good evening, Commander,” a synthesized female voice whispered in his ear. “Everything looks nominal. I’m ready when you are.”
Lanoe swiped through the displays in front of him, putting his weapon and flight controls right where he wanted them.
“Very good. Are you ready to deploy, Commander?”
Lanoe was. He released the docking clamps that held the Z.XIX to the carrier’s flight deck, then eased his way past the rows of fighters hanging from the walls. When he was clear he touched the throttle and felt the machine around him throb with life. He lurched forward out of the carrier’s maw, faster than expected—he wasn’t used to the power of the Z.XIX’s engines.
The fighter’s computer must have sensed his surprise. “Some pilots find the power of the Z.XIX intimidating. I can ramp down the engine response to compensate. Would you like to adjust the fine control on the throttle?” the fighter’s voice asked.
“Don’t you dare,” he told her, and peeled out toward the battle, his thrusters roaring like lions.
All around the dreadnought the fighters banked and rolled, taking the occasional long-range shot, which sparked off the giant ship’s hull. None of them dared get too close, as the dreadnought spat out plasma ball after plasma ball. Even a near miss by one of those enormous projectiles could engulf a cataphract in deadly flames—they would roast a pilot alive inside the cockpit, at the very least.
Shulkin kept shouting at the pilots to move in, to attack from a closer range. Some of the Centrocor pilots even listened to him.
Not that there was much point. One of the cataphracts actually got close enough to launch a disruptor right into the heart of the dreadnought. The most devastating weapon the fighters possessed. The disruptor cut right through the skin of the giant ship. It had been a solid hit, and the round functioned perfectly. The disruptor tore through the giant ship’s internal compartments, exploding continuously—doing the kind of damage that could tear a cruiser in half.
When the round sputtered out a kilometer inside the dreadnought’s hull, when the smoke cleared, Candless couldn’t even see any significant damage. The attack didn’t even slow the alien ship down. The dreadnought was just too big—disruptors wouldn’t be enough. If they were going to neutralize this threat they needed something much more powerful.
“Batygins, I’m waiting,” Shulkin growled.
And meanwhile the Blue-Blue-White continued to deploy more ships. Tiny compared to the dreadnought, perhaps. Huge compared to the human fighters.
They looked like bubbles surfacing on a pond. Spherical constructions of white cagework, fifty meters across. Long curved wings stuck out from their sides, and they trailed fire in their wake. There must have been a hundred of them, and more were emerging all the time.
“IO, scan those things—give me information,” she said.
Data scrolled across one of her displays.
“Alpha wing,” Candless said, tracking her fighters on a tactical board, “we have support inbound. Concentrate your fire on the smaller ships. Our best estimate is that those are airfighters.” The official Navy designation for aircraft that could not operate in the vacuum of space. “We do not believe at this time that they have vector fields.” Candless pursed her lips. “Engage them mercilessly. Unless you wish to prove you really are as cowardly as you seem.”
Sometimes people needed a little motivation.
Three of her cataphracts wheeled around and dove toward the clouds, ganging up on one of the spherical airfighters. They poured an endless stream of particle beam fire into its glassy sides, chopping it to pieces. Its wings went spinning away, falling toward the clouds below. What was left of the spherical ship followed them down a moment later.
Before the cataphract pilots could celebrate, however, three more of the airfighters surfaced directly beneath them. Guns mounted inside the wings spat high-temperature plasma that tore right through one of the cataphracts. The other two broke off in opposite directions, corkscrewing away from the incoming enemies. But there was no safety out there—in every direction, more and more of the airfighters were breaking the clouds. On Candless’s tactical board, it looked like there must be two hundred of them now. Ten for every cataphract in the battle area.
That fact must not have escaped Shulkin’s attention. “Where are the bloody Batygins?”
“Here,” the twin captains called.
“Here.”
The destroyers announced their presence with a salvo of missiles that streaked toward the dreadnought, contrails streaming out behind them. Heavy PBW fire from the destroyers’ guns lanced through airfighter after airfighter, popping them open faster than new ones could appear. The cataphracts broke from their formations to make room as the destroyers surged ahead of the carrier.
Candless’s heart thundered in her chest as she watched the missiles race toward the dreadnought. The first one caught the pitted upper surface of the giant ship, the explosion looking comically small in the midst of all that real estate. A second missile plunged in through one of the cagework blisters, filling it with dazzling light.
A green pearl appeared in the corner of her vision—a call from Ehta, back on the cruiser. “Sixty seconds until the coilguns are ready to fire,” the marine major said. “You think you can hang on that long?”
Candless watched the missiles tear into the dreadnought, and shook her head. “Still too early to tell,” she said.
Lanoe swung low under a cloud of airfighters, his quad PBWs raking their glass sides, shredding their wings. It had taken him a moment to learn how to make use of the longer range of this new fighter—he had to lead hi
s targets twice as much as he used to—but he was happy to make the adjustments.
“I have threats coming in on six different vectors,” the fighter’s voice told him. “Normally I’d advise retreat, but—”
“I’m just getting started,” Lanoe told her.
“I was going to say there’s no clear path out of the battle area. Please watch your six.”
Lanoe swung his head around and saw a plasma ball tearing through the air behind him. He goosed the throttle and plunged forward, away from its burning heat. “Thanks,” he told her.
Four airfighters were descending toward him, skidding around in a tight bank with their wings tilted almost vertical. He lit one up with a careful shot, then sprayed PBW fire wildly across the path of the others, missing two of them but tearing a wing off the other, sending it spinning down into the clouds.
The other two split off in different directions. Lanoe chased after one of them, never letting up on his trigger. It came apart in pieces and he twisted around just as the last of the four came screaming toward him, wobbling as it tried to recover from a sharp turn. He never gave it a chance to stabilize, sending a stream of PBW fire right through its spherical hull, bursting it open.
He’d hoped to see the jellyfish inside—rage was singing in his blood. When he saw what he’d accomplished, though, he spat out a curse. The glass ship didn’t contain a Blue-Blue-White pilot. Instead it was full of machinery, and nothing more.
“The damned things are drones,” he told Candless. “Just drones.”
Just like at Niraya, he thought. The Blue-Blue-White sent machines to do their fighting for them. Well, he’d won out against their drones before. He intended to do it again.
Safe for the moment, he pulled back on his control stick and punched his main thrusters, sending the Z.XIX soaring upward. Toward the dreadnought and the vacuum of space beyond. He put through a call to Candless and she answered immediately.
Forbidden Suns Page 24