“No, sir,” Bury said. He could hear a diffident catch in the kid’s voice. Lanoe was honor bound to send him back to safety. Hell, Lanoe was required by Naval regulations to arrest Bury on the spot and escort him back to the carrier so he could be formally charged with disobeying Candless’s orders.
Well, damn them. Damn Navy regs. Rules and codes of conduct hadn’t won the Century War, or the Brushfire, or the Establishment Crisis.
Pilots had.
“It’s good to see somebody with fighting spirit,” Lanoe said. “Take my left flank, and don’t break away until I give the word. Now—dive!”
It felt so damned good to be flying again. Bury hadn’t even realized how much he’d missed it. For all his anguish over his lack of a blue star, he’d forgotten that this was where he belonged, that being in the cockpit of a cataphract-class fighter wasn’t just a means to an end. It was what he’d been born to do.
He streaked down toward the dreadnought, tight up against Lanoe’s airfoils, and had to fight the urge to whoop for joy. Below them plasma balls shot across their bows, so close and so bright they blotted out his view of anything else. Hellions couldn’t cry—their bodies were engineered to conserve every drop of water, so the inside of his eyelids had been rendered almost frictionless. His eyes didn’t well with tears, but he found himself constantly blinking away the terrible light.
It didn’t matter. He felt like his fighter was flying itself, the connection between him and his controls so natural, so perfectly in tune that he didn’t need to see.
“Sir! The dreadnought’s maneuvering,” he called out. “Turning—we’ll need to adjust our trajectory.”
“Already on it,” Lanoe called back. “They’re retreating, do you see that? Check your tactical board. They’re running, Bury. They’re terrified of us.”
“As well they should be,” Bury said.
Lanoe laughed at that, a cackle of bloodlust. Bury thought maybe he should be afraid of that sound, but he wasn’t—instead he found himself laughing along.
“They’re trying to reach their escort, the interceptors coming up from the disk,” Lanoe said. “I don’t intend to let them get that far.”
Below them the screen of plasma balls momentarily cleared and Bury could see their target, a massive cage of white spars at one corner of the giant ship. It was close to one of the weapon pits, too close for any fighter to reach it without help. On his sensor board a green light lit up, telling him the pit was warming up, getting ready to loose a plasma ball. “Ready to break on your order, sir,” he called.
“Wait for it—wait for it,” Lanoe said, chanting it like a mantra. “Wait for it—wait—now!”
Bury shoved his control stick over to one side, even as the pit began to glow, even as the plasma ball started to form. His Yk.64 leaned over on its side and shot away from Lanoe’s fighter at an angle. The plasma ball came chasing after him, moving so fast he thought he couldn’t possibly get away in time. He pulled back on his stick, throwing his crate into a hard climb, and the plasma ball shot past right below him. Red lights flashed and warning chimes sounded all around him, but he’d made it, he’d avoided the—avoided—
He couldn’t breathe. His lungs were on fire and his whole body seized up. He felt like his skin was crawling with bugs and his vision started to turn red.
A display flashed up right in front of him, an emergency warning. Pilot in distress. Recommendation: seek immediate medical attention.
Bury could just make out the words. His vision had shrunk down to a narrow, dark tunnel and he couldn’t hear anything but a high-pitched whine.
He managed to check his status board and saw that his cockpit temperature had briefly risen above two hundred degrees. Hot enough to fry his plastinated skin—he couldn’t sweat, couldn’t shed that heat, it was roasting him alive—
“No!” he howled, and slammed one hand down on a control display. His fingers wouldn’t work, wouldn’t obey him, but he forced them to scroll through a page of options, forced them to choose an emergency fire control option that would spray him down with engine coolant, to lower his body temperature.
Foam flooded his cockpit, thick waves of the stuff washing over his helmet, the front of his suit. He couldn’t see through it at all, couldn’t feel his feet, his legs—but then—little by little—it worked. He cooled down, cooled to a temperature that wouldn’t actually kill him.
Someone was calling his name. Ginger? Candless? No, no, it was Lanoe—
“Bury, talk to me, damn you! You’re the only pilot out here worth my time. If you got yourself killed I swear I’ll—”
“Sir,” Bury croaked out. “Present, sir.”
“Let me guess,” Lanoe said. “You need to break off. Head back to the carrier and leave me alone out here. Again.”
Bury forced himself to breathe. To think—even that was hard. Had his brain boiled inside his skull? No. No, he would be dead, if—if that were—
“Sir,” he said. “Did we get the blister?”
“Yes, damn you, I hit it with a disruptor,” Lanoe replied.
“Very good, sir,” Bury told him. “What’s our next target?”
Lanoe started to say something. Closed his mouth and held it back. The kid was in trouble. He’d barely made it—he’d let the plasma ball get too close. The only thing that saved him was that it went underneath his Yk.64. If it had passed over him, the radiant heat it gave off would have gone right through his canopy and burned him alive.
He wouldn’t make it through another near miss like that. There were limits to what the human body could withstand. Lanoe knew he needed to send the kid back, tell him to retreat to the carrier and—
No. They were close. They were so close to taking the alien ship down. He could see it—see it in the way the dreadnought raced to join its escort. See it in the very skin of the city-sized ship. Deep cracks ran through the coral now, long jagged wounds that told him the ship was dying. Just two more blisters. They were running out of time, but still, there was a chance—
A green pearl rotated in the corner of his vision.
Lanoe shook his head. Flicked his eyes across the pearl. “Candless?” he said. “Something I can help you with? This isn’t a great time.”
“How dare you?” she asked. She sounded upset. He figured he knew why.
“I’m in charge here,” he reminded her.
“He was my student,” she told him. “Bury is my responsibility!”
“He came to me. Looking to help.”
“You think that changes anything?”
Lanoe scowled at her, though she was dozens of kilometers away. “Did you call to yell at me, or—”
“Use the guns, Lanoe,” she said. “Turn the cruiser’s guns on the dreadnought. I know you don’t intend to. I know you have some secret reason why you won’t use your best weapon against this thing. But damnation, man! You can end this without anyone else having to die, without—”
Lanoe cut off the call.
He checked his tactical board. “Bury,” he said, “we have two minutes before the dreadnought reaches those interceptors. Before our lives get a lot more complicated. Are you with me? We have two of those blisters left to hit. I say we can do it. What about you?”
“I’m with you,” the kid said.
Lanoe nodded. All right, then.
The two of them looped out well beyond the battle area, then flattened their trajectory and dove toward the giant ship. Bury felt his blood singing as the two cataphracts flashed downward in perfect formation, their airfoils nearly touching. He spared a quick glance to his side and saw Lanoe through his canopy.
The old pilot was staring straight ahead, focused on the target. His lips had pulled back from his teeth in a grimace of pure bloodlust.
Bury forced the grin off of his own face. He scowled at the dreadnought below, at the blister that stuck out from its trailing edge. It was smaller than the others, barely fifty meters across, situated between a thruster and a weapon pi
t. Getting in there was going to be tricky, he knew, but he was sure Lanoe had a good plan for it.
“You had a hard time with that last plasma ball, didn’t you?” Lanoe asked.
“I came through just fine, sir. I’m good to fight,” Bury told him.
“That isn’t what I asked.”
Bury dropped his chin. The last thing he wanted to admit was that he’d nearly died, that he had to waste emergency coolant on lowering his body temperature. He guessed, though, that this wasn’t a time for evasions. “It was rough,” he said. “I almost blacked out, and—”
“You nearly went into cardiac arrest,” Lanoe said. “I’ve got your biometric data on one of my displays. You won’t survive another near miss like that.”
“Sir, I—”
“So this time you’re taking the shot. I’ll cover you.”
Bury felt his stomach turn over in his abdomen. “Are you … sure?” He shook his head. “No, sorry, sir, of course you are, I just—”
“You’ll do fine. The hard part is not veering off before you can loose your disruptor. Stay on course. Ignore your fear. You have a firing solution?”
“Working one up now.” A virtual Aldis sight bobbed around Bury’s canopy. Sensors in the Yk.64’s fuselage built up a profile of the open space inside the blister, looking for the optimal placement for the disruptor. A blue light lit up on his weapons board. “Got it!” he said.
“Then it’s your show. Don’t even worry about that weapon pit—I’ll draw its fire when you get close. Go!”
Bury opened his throttle and surged forward, maneuvering just a little when he thought he saw a plasma ball streaking toward him. It fizzled out long before it could reach him. He normalized his trajectory and poured on even more speed, until the blister grew huge in his forward view.
So close—but the disruptor needed to be launched from extremely short range, especially against a moving target. He dropped in low and raced across the dreadnought’s skin, cutting his speed for better accuracy, sure that Lanoe would keep him safe if the weapon pit started heating up. On his canopy the Aldis was locked tight to one pane of glass in the blister’s cagework. He held his finger over the trigger, fighting his natural impulse to squeeze it out of pure nervous tension.
A little closer … a little closer—a shadow passed over Bury and he looked up for just a fraction of a second to see Lanoe pulling away from him, spinning on his long axis as he burned hard to get out ahead of a plasma ball.
Bury hadn’t even seen the plasma ball launch.
He didn’t need to. He just had to focus on getting closer, the pale hull of the dreadnought a featureless blur below him, pits and craters just stuttering shadows, a little closer, a little—a little—
There! The blue light on his weapons board turned green and he pulled the trigger. The sputtering, sparking disruptor jumped away from him and his whole fighter lurched upward, just a tick. The disruptor round blazed forward, straight toward the blister, and Bury realized with a start that he needed to veer off to avoid colliding with it himself. He hauled back hard on his stick and punched open his throttle, even as the disruptor smashed through the glass and into the blister.
He didn’t look back, couldn’t spare any attention on checking to see if the hit was good, if—
Something hard bounced off his fuselage, sending up a welter of sparks as his vector field accelerated it away. If he’d been in the carrier scout, that impact would have—
Another impact. Another, and then a hailstorm of tiny projectiles smashed across his canopy, chunks of white stone that looked like, pieces of—Oh hellfire, he thought, those were pieces of the dreadnought’s hull—
His forward view filled with white.
The dreadnought had already been cracked. That last disruptor must have shattered a big piece of it, creating an incredible cloud of debris. Millions of coral shards, each of them flying free on their own trajectory. The chunk right in front of him was two hundred meters across, just a small sliver of the dreadnought but big enough to hit him like a giant-sized flyswatter, he—he—
He needed to move. Bury shoved his stick sideways and hit his maneuvering jets hard. The broken slab of coral rotated slowly as it came toward him, turning a jagged edge in his direction until it looked like the devil’s own sword coming down on his head, like it would cleave him in half if he didn’t—
Move, damn you, he thought, and kicked in his positioning jets as well. The edge of the shard came down so fast, seeming to accelerate as it—
It struck Bury’s fighter just before he could get free of it. He was thrown sideways in his seat, his inertial sink pinning him down as hard as it could, but it wasn’t quite enough. All the blood slammed over into one side of his body as he was sent spinning off into the dark, black dots swimming in his eyes so thick he could see nothing at all, if there was another piece of debris even a fraction the size of that one, if he was flying right into a cloud of broken coral, if he—
For a second there was nothing.
Not even darkness. Just—a cloud of nothing.
He heard nothing, saw nothing, felt nothing. He was pretty sure he was dead.
Then—
With a shocking suddenness, everything came back. Alarm chimes howled in his ears and red lights flashed everywhere around him. Voices were talking to him, dozens of voices shouting and babbling and asking questions, but his ears were ringing so loud he couldn’t tell what they were saying, couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe—
“I said,” Lanoe shouted, “are you alive in there?”
Bury fought his own rebellious tongue, fought the speech centers of his brain that were sparkling like fireworks. “I,” he managed to gasp out. “I.”
It must have sounded like “aye.”
“Hell’s bells, Bury, you do cut it close. Get out of that cloud—we need to regroup with the others and—”
“Five,” Bury managed to say, the word rattling around inside his mouth.
His teeth felt loose.
He looked down at his damage control boards. The slab of coral had sheared off half his airfoils and ripped free the armored fairing all down one side of his fighter. It looked like nothing crucial had been hit, though.
“Five,” he said again.
“What? Bury, talk to me—are you okay, or—”
“Five,” he told Lanoe. “That was my fifth kill. I’m an ace.”
“Bury—”
“Lanoe. Sir. I believe you owe me a blue star,” Bury said. A shiver ran down his spine.
“Why, because you killed that dreadnought?” Lanoe asked. “I have two pieces of bad news for you. No, scratch that. Three pieces of bad news.”
Bury reached for his stick. Moved to swing up away from the cloud of debris, back toward the formations high above what was left of the dreadnought.
“Go ahead,” he said warily.
“First—there’s one more blister on that thing,” Lanoe told him. “You hurt it bad, yes. You tore a big chunk off of it—but it’s not a kill. It’s still got power to its thrusters and a couple working weapon pits. Second, even if you had taken it down, you don’t get credit toward a blue star for killing capital ships.”
“What? But I … what?”
“I know, it doesn’t seem fair, but those are the rules. You have to defeat five small craft in single combat, and they have to be confirmed kills. Me, personally? I blew two dozen ships out of the sky before I got called an ace. Back then, it was a lot harder to confirm a kill, you needed two independent witnesses to—”
“Damn it, Lanoe! You said three pieces of bad news! What’s the third?”
“You just might get your chance after all,” Lanoe told him. “It took us too long to hit that last blister. The interceptors are about to arrive. Check your straps, kid. Things are about to get hectic.”
Chapter Twenty-One
When he’d been back on the cruiser, watching the interceptors approach on a tactical board, they had looked bad enough—forty-fi
ve enemy craft, burning hard to support the ailing dreadnought. They were huge compared to his cataphracts, and they outnumbered him, too.
Now they were here. And things looked so much worse.
The interceptors looked a little like the airfighters Lanoe had seen down in the atmosphere of the disk, but the resemblance didn’t hold up to close scrutiny. Big spheres of cagework and glass, studded with powerful thrusters. A crown of spiky projections that had to be weapons stuck out from the front of each ship. The interceptors measured a hundred meters across—they were as big as destroyers.
And there were forty-five of them.
They swerved back and forth as they came, running some kind of evasive pattern. The cruiser’s guns wouldn’t be able to hit them, even if he’d been willing to try—the slow-moving guns wouldn’t be able to get a lock.
He’d thought he still had some time, at least ninety more seconds to blast away at the last of the dreadnought’s blisters. Valk had given him some idea of how fast the interceptors could move, and he’d based his projections on that. It looked like Valk had failed him yet again. The leading edge of the cloud of interceptors was already on them, advancing on the formation of Yk.64s around the dreadnought. They must have poured on a little extra speed at the end, in a desperate attempt to reach the dreadnought before it was destroyed.
He looked down between his feet at the dreadnought. It was ailing, wounded—maybe mortally so. An entire edge of its hull had been cracked off by Bury’s disruptor, reduced to a cloud of tumbling debris. Its thrusters pushed it in wide, lazy circles, unable to stabilize its trajectory. One of its command blisters remained intact, though, and clearly it was designed to keep operating right up until the last of its pilots was killed. Plasma balls were still streaming from its weapon pits, though not as fast now.
The interceptors were the greater threat. There was no question. He didn’t know what those weapon spikes could do, but he had no doubt they could chew up a cataphract-class fighter with ease. If he didn’t stop the interceptors, and soon, they would plow right through his useless wing of Yk.64s and move on to the cruiser and the carrier, which were ill-equipped to hold them off without support.
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