“Singh, report,” she called. “Singh. Report!”
“I’m, uh, here,” the pilot called back, sounding short of breath—but alive. “I’m okay, got a little toasty in here, but I’ve got plenty of coolant pressure, I’ll be—I’ll—”
A second plasma ball erupted from a weapon pit directly beneath him. There was no warning—it was not one of the pits that Candless had been monitoring. There was no chance of him maneuvering out of its way. It engulfed him so fast and at such a high temperature that Candless could actually see his fighter incandesce inside the plasma ball, a negative-image silhouette, white inside the blue heart of the plasma projectile. In a moment the plasma ball had passed him by, heading upward and into dead space. Candless looked for any wreckage, any debris from Singh’s fighter, some irrational part of her thinking that maybe, just maybe he was still alive somehow. But there was nothing.
Singh had been utterly vaporized.
Candless squeezed her eyes shut, if only for a split second. She’d lost another one, another of her charges. Singh had never been her student, she had barely known his name. She had been responsible for his safety, though. She’d told him he was going to be okay if he just followed her orders.
She had failed him.
“He … he just …”
It was Forster, ignoring her order regarding chatter. She lacked the moral strength to upbraid him.
“He’s gone,” Forster said. He sounded utterly surprised. As if such a thing were physically impossible. As if a cataphract pilot couldn’t possibly die.
“Ma’am,” he said, “I think maybe—”
“Stick with me, Forster,” Candless insisted. “We can do this, but only if we stick together.”
“Sorry,” he told her. “I’m … I’m sorry.” He peeled away, climbing fast to get out of the range of the plasma balls. Soon he was just a bright spot, a moving speck of light against the myriad fixed stars of the galactic center.
Candless growled in frustration. She was so close—within seconds of the blister. She was utterly unprotected in her run. The only intelligent choice in that situation, the only sane choice, was to break off, to open her throttle and get clear.
To hell with it.
She reached for her throttle. Not to accelerate so she could get away. Instead she punched for a negative burn, the retros in the nose of her fighter burning hard—to slow her down.
If she was going to risk everything for just this one shot, she intended to make it a clean, direct hit.
Lanoe grabbed his knees and rocked back and forth. His eyes bugged out of his head as he watched the display with growing tension, urging Candless on from afar. “Come on, come on,” he said. He knew exactly what she was doing, why she was slowing down. He approved—even if it put her in serious danger. Even if he couldn’t afford to lose her. She was the best pilot he had out there.
A green pearl spun in the corner of his vision. He glanced at it, thinking if it was Bury again he would demote the kid on the spot. It wasn’t Bury—it was Ehta. He flicked his eyes sideways, never turning his head away from his display.
“Sir,” she said, her tone icily formal. Well, her tone shouldn’t surprise him—he had put a pistol to her head not long ago. “The guns are hot and ready. We can fire on your signal.”
Lanoe felt his teeth rasping against one another. He knew, on one level, that he should give the order. He should let Ehta fire the guns, and probably destroy the dreadnought with one quick salvo.
On another level, though, a less rational but far more compelling level, he had a reason not to fire. To let Candless prove his theory that if you took out the canopies the dreadnought would be removed from play. To save those guns for when he really needed them.
“Stand by,” he told Ehta.
“Sir, I … I don’t want to question your orders, but we have a perfect firing solution right now. The dreadnought is maneuvering. If we wait, even ten seconds, we’ll lose our shot. We’ll have to start target acquisition over from scratch, and—”
“Stand by,” he told her again.
She cut the link. Lanoe knew she was probably fuming, down there on the gun deck. Cursing his name. He could live with that, as long as she followed his orders.
Sometimes in war a commander had to make choices his troops didn’t understand. Couldn’t understand. Sometimes that had to be okay.
“Come on,” he told Candless. “You can do this.”
Weapon pits all over the dreadnought were heating up, plasma balls gathering strength before they were launched. Candless was low enough, close enough to the giant ship’s hull, that it would be difficult for the plasma balls to actually hit her. Difficult, but not impossible. From what she’d seen they could fire at any angle, even with an elevation of zero. From the enemy’s perspective, a shot that low might be too big a risk to take. The plasma ball that took her out would graze the very skin of the dreadnought. It would damage the ship it was trying to protect.
The alternative, though, was to let her take her shot. To let her kill some of the dreadnought’s crew. She doubted they would take that chance.
On instinct she threw her control stick over to one side. Hit her maneuvering jets and sent herself zigging and zagging across the dreadnought’s skin. She did it just in time—a plasma ball launched in the same moment she started evading. The coral-like hull of the dreadnought bubbled and flowed like candle wax as the plasma ball rocketed toward her, right on her tail.
Candless banked off to one side and let the plasma ball shoot past her, close enough that she felt her eyebrows start to curl and smolder, felt sweat pour like a waterfall down the back of her suit. But then it was past.
And she was right where she needed to be.
The blister was enormous, maybe a hundred meters across—the size of one of the late Batygins’ destroyers. It filled most of her view. She could have rammed right through one of the panes of glass that filled in the cagework, burst inside, and startled the hell out of the jellyfish in there.
She could see it. Not clearly—the tinted glass dulled its colors and her velocity blurred its features—but she could see a reddish spherical mass in there, pulsating with motion. A Blue-Blue-White. This was the closest she’d ever gotten to one of them.
She had a firing solution. She tapped her weapons board to confirm, then pulled her trigger.
The Yk.64 lurched as the disruptor’s tiny thruster fired, throwing the projectile forward at hundreds of meters a second. The moment it was clear of her undercarriage it started to detonate, a Roman candle shedding fire as it raced toward the blister.
Candless streaked past the blister, accelerating hard as the hull disappeared beneath her and she saw only empty space below. She didn’t even watch to see what the disruptor was doing to the dreadnought because some ugly premonition told her she might not survive long enough to see the fruits of her labors.
A quick glance at her tactical board proved out that hunch. Behind her, two weapon pits were blazing hot, already launching plasma balls. Both of them headed in her direction, on intersecting trajectories. She was right in the middle of a crossfire.
Lanoe could see nothing but the disruptor, could only watch as it plunged through the dark glass of the blister. A sheet of transparent material twenty meters across starred and then shattered, and for the first time he could see inside the crew space of the dreadnought. Not that he had time for a long look. He just made out a bewildering scene, strange shapes and surfaces that were designed for the comfort of entirely nonhuman creatures, before the disruptor filled the blister with smoke and light, pulverized coral bursting outward in an ever-expanding cloud, fizzing liquids that caught fire and then extinguished themselves almost instantly as they were exposed to the vacuum of space, and then—yes—
An adult Blue-Blue-White, scorched, battered, and oozing fluids, came tumbling out of the ruined blister, its tentacles twisting around each other as it tried to cover its mouth, as it tried to protect itself against the su
dden decompression. Lights flared inside its translucent mantle, desperate signals Lanoe would never be able to understand, blue and orange and white, purple and purple and purple, some kind of distress call, but the lights dimmed, even as Lanoe watched, even as the creature slowly died. Its body squelched and throbbed, de-forming until it was stretched out like a long tube, then contracted to a tight, muscular sphere—and then relaxed.
Its lights went out, one by one. The tentacles went limp.
Lanoe leaned his head back and laughed, a nasty, howling guffaw of a laugh that sounded repugnant even to his own ears, but he couldn’t stop, couldn’t help himself. The damned thing was dead. Dead, dead, dead.
Candless was moments away from death, with nowhere to go. The two plasma balls were racing toward her, competing to see which one could immolate her first. Even if she shot straight upward, away from their intersecting paths, she would be flash-fried by their radiant heat. She didn’t have time to breathe, didn’t have time to think.
Marjoram Candless was a hell of a pilot. She’d fought in almost as many wars as Lanoe, had won more than her fair share of battles. She’d been trained by the finest flight instructors the Navy ever had, then—when she’d tired of war—she’d joined those ranks herself. She didn’t need to think. She had reflexes honed by countless hours in the cockpit, by hundreds of hair’s-breadth escapes.
Her fingers moved across her engine board, sketching out a maneuver that might save her. The board flashed and required that she confirm she actually wanted to do what she’d asked it to do.
She hit YES before the screen could even finish rendering the text. Then she punched her throttle and yanked her hand away from her control stick, as it snapped around like a snake.
She had switched off the compensators on her rotary engine. Her cataphract responded, as cataphracts always had—this being the oldest trick in the book, the rotary turn. Her engine turned into a massive, incredibly energetic flywheel and she turned ninety degrees in less than the time it took her heart to beat, even with her pulse racing. Her thrusters kicked in and she shot forward, not up, away from the plasma balls, but down.
She grabbed the stick and banked hard. The plasma balls met each other atop the dreadnought’s hull, colliding in a massive burst of plasma that would have vaporized her as surely as they’d vaporized Singh—except for one thing.
By the time they met, she wasn’t on top of the dreadnought anymore. She was underneath it, sheltered by the giant ship’s own mass.
She wanted to whoop for joy, for relief, for the sheer terror of still being alive. She wanted to punch something, she wanted to cry out.
She didn’t get a chance to do any of those things. Because even as she was making her crazy turn, even as she was maneuvering to safety—she heard something whine and scream and then break loose with a terrifying snap.
Navy regulations strictly forbade rotary turns. Pilots used the trick anyway, because it could save their lives. The reason for the prohibition, though, was that it also put an enormous stress on your engine mounts.
In a well-built cataphract like a BR.9, the Navy’s workhorse, that danger was minimal. The BR.9’s engine mounts had been reinforced specifically to take that stress. But Candless wasn’t in a BR.9. She was in a Yk.64, a fighter built by one of Centrocor’s many subcontractors. Designed and fabricated by the lowest bidder.
Candless touched her control stick, nudging it just a hair. The Yk.64 moved, twisting away from an incoming plasma ball that was still a few seconds away. But something behind her rumbled and groaned and a red light popped up on her engine board.
“Hellfire,” she breathed. She had no idea how far she could push the engine before her engine mounts gave way entirely. If they did, if her engine came loose inside its compartment, it might just leave her stranded, unable to maneuver.
Alternatively, it could misfire. And explode.
“Hot damn!” Lanoe shouted, loud enough to hurt her ears. “You did it! Candless, you did it! I knew this would work.”
“Lanoe,” she called. “I have an engine fault. I have to withdraw. Right now.” A second red light came on, this one warning her that heat was building up inside the engine compartment. That … was bad. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry, but—”
“Candless,” Lanoe called back. “I need you in there. There’s five more of those canopies to pop.”
“I understand, but—”
“You’ve seen just what Centrocor’s pilots are worth. You’re the only one who can do this. The only one who can kill this thing.”
“Perhaps,” she said, in the tone of voice that worked on him—sometimes—“you would like me to steer and fire with one hand, while I use the other to physically hold my engine together? Perhaps, if I had three hands, I could use the third to throw my disruptor like a dart. I’m telling you that I have a fault, and—”
“I can see your telemetry from here. I’ve won battles with more heavily damaged fighters than yours. Get in there and do it. That’s an order.”
Candless frowned but she knew that she’d lost. She could hardly refuse a direct order from her commanding officer. She had always lived her life as a concrete example of the value of Navy discipline. To refuse now—
“Very well,” she said. “I’ll do it.”
Lanoe didn’t even bother to reply.
“Shulkin!” Lanoe called. “Hang back! There’s no need to expose yourself to those plasma balls!” The carrier was edging toward the dreadnought again, in spite of his previous order. “What the hell are you thinking?”
“That you’re making a hash of this battle, sir,” Shulkin said. Sounding distracted, of course. “I have several antivehicle guns I can bring to play. I intend to savage the enemy, as you and Captain Candless can’t seem to hit a target five kilometers wide.”
Lanoe bit back a curse. The guns on the carrier were heavy-duty particle beam cannons—a little stronger than the ones the cataphracts carried, but totally incapable of cutting through the dreadnought’s coral-like hull. He didn’t know what effect they might have on the cagework canopies, but he doubted they would be more effective than disruptors. They had a shorter range than the dreadnought’s plasma balls as well, which meant Shulkin would have to put the carrier at risk just to get off a shot.
“I’m ordering you to back off,” Lanoe told Shulkin.
“With all due respect, sir, if you won’t use the cruiser’s guns—”
“I’ve got my gun crews on standby, damn you,” Lanoe said. “It’s my decision when they fire, not yours.”
“I realize that you are older than me, Commander,” Shulkin said, “but not by that much. You will remember a saying from the old days—if you’ll forgive a little profanity. Never try to bullshit a bullshitter.”
“Are you and I going to have a problem, Captain?” Lanoe asked. “I gave you a damned order. Back up and stay clear of the battle area. I have a plan here, and you’re stepping on it.”
“Very well, sir,” Shulkin replied. “I wish you much luck with your plan.”
Candless got herself turned around. Slowly. Found another blister, a smaller one hanging from the underside of the dreadnought like a malignant growth. She readied another disruptor round. “Someone,” she called on the common channel. “Someone cover me. I’m—”
She didn’t have time to finish the sentence. Even as she pushed her stick forward, as she started her run, a warning chime sounded behind her head. Red lights started popping up all across her boards, some of them flashing.
It was too late. She’d already opened her throttle. Her engine was blazing away, pushing her toward the blister in a perfectly straight line. It didn’t matter that behind her she could hear more engine mounts giving way, one after the other, like gunshots.
She glanced down at her engine board, dreading what she would see there. It was, indeed, bad. The engine was floating inside its compartment with no support at all. For the moment it was moving her in the direction she had chos
en.
If she tried to use her maneuvering or positioning jets, though, or if she attempted to gimbal her thrust—in other words, if she attempted to steer in any way—the engine would tear right through its compartment. Rip through the shielding behind her back. Fry her like an egg—and keep going.
She could hear it rattling around back there, vibrating its way off of its broken mounts, roaming around in its compartment. The slightest jar, the tiniest deviation in her course would be all it took.
Meanwhile, she was on a collision course with her target. Unable to veer away. Plasma balls were coming in—she could see at least three of them headed in her direction.
She wanted to scream. She wanted to pound on her console until the warning lights went out, until everything worked again. She knew far better than to think that would work but the primal impulse was there.
Instead, she dragged her weapons board around until it was directly in front of her. The virtual display was something to focus on. It showed all of its systems as operating at optimal levels. At least there was that.
She brought up her disruptor’s preferences page and scrolled through the options, time slowing to a crawl as she contemplated how she could best make use of the last few seconds of her life. She found the option to have the disruptor explode on impact. Yes, she thought. Yes, that would do.
She confirmed her choice. Then she repeated the selection for each of the disruptors in her magazine, and for all of her antivehicular rounds as well. When her Yk.64 collided with the blister, it would make a highly impressive bang.
Then she locked her stick, so that the fighter wouldn’t deviate from its course by accident and ruin her chance to at least accomplish something with her death.
It was all happening too fast for her to be able to panic, or even truly process what was happening. She tried to organize her thoughts, to compose herself for the end. She had been a good teacher, she thought, as the blister raced toward her. She had probably saved a few lives in her time, though not as many as—
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