Asylum (Loralynn Kennakris Book 3)

by Jordan Leah Hunter

  Nor did it make much sense to try to fit a station like Asylum with enough point-defense systems to provide effective coverage over its entire area, and ECM and decoys were of no use to a target so large that weapons didn’t need to be terminally guided to hit. The only real defense for large stations was the fleet assigned to them, and if she could find a way in, Kris thought with a grin, with the Asylum Fleet where it was, that would be next to no defense at all.

  Assuming she could launch the torps. She brought up fire control. If that bastard Mertone had had them disable it . . .

  He hadn’t. Fire control worked normally. She hit select. Four torps came up on the weapons control panel. She frowned.

  Was that right? After thinking a moment, she decided it was. These fighters usually carried only two torps, mounted on the in-board pylons. At most, they carried four, so the autoselect software was programmed to only look for four. Besides, fire control probably knew that it was slightly loony to try to fly with more than four loaded—as she was finding out.

  But would autoselect recognize the other four, once the first salvo was gone? Four torps might hurt a station, but not that seriously. Eight would, and if she was very lucky, it was just possible they might take it down. And, it occurred to her, she didn’t have to actually launch the last four . . .

  Nah, save that thought for later.

  There was one way to find out. She manually deselected the in-board pylons and watched the weapons control panel. After some cycling and chewing, the other four torps showed up. It worked!

  Abruptly, her comm-link crackled; a burst transmission at the very lowest power. Somebody breaking comms-silence so soon?

  “Kennakris, what the hell’s going on? I’m getting weird emissions off your bird.” Tole’s voice. Dammit! He must have picked up her cycling the fire control. Time to choose . . .

  She keyed her comm-link to match his burst. “Ah—I’ve got a little problem here.” She popped her faceplate and tapped the lip-mic with a gloved finger to get a little realistic noise on the line. “I think the jump scrammed something on this overloaded bucket—”

  “Come again? You’re breaking up.”

  “Repeat,” Kris said, muffling her voice and groping under the console. Now where was that damn coupler? Ah, there— “I gotta problem here. I’m shuttin’ it down.” She wiggled the coupler as she talked and was gratified to hear Tole’s perplexed voice.

  “—shutting what down? Dammit, Kris, I’m losing—”

  She cut her power back to 0.3 boost. “Losing power,” she mumbled, wiggling for all she was worth. “Don’t know wha—” She cut the mic with a dramatic click. And grinned. Tole’s voice came again, fainter.

  “Kris? Kris!”

  “Cut the chatter!” That was Huron’s voice on the override circuit. “Lock it down, Tole.”

  “But sir! We’ve got a—”

  “Can it before I put a burst up your ass!”

  The comms went dead. Kris grinned wider as the little blue dots of her friends receded from her on the T-Synth. She cut back power again. Time to check the opposition. The Halith had expanded their search radii about thirty percent, according to Mertone’s briefing. That should leave some nice fighter-sized holes. She added the passive sensor data to the tactical overlay, looking for the outer-system patrols. There they were, a bunch of little red dots. Nicely spread out too. The lightspeed data were an hour old by now, she didn’t dare bring up scanners to go fishing for anything newer. As long as nothing spooked them, however, things looked just fine.

  She had the T-Synth run a prediction. It came up even more spread out. Better and better. She tapped away on the console. The T-Synth plotted a trajectory that should avoid both patrols and deep-radar sweeps—it left a surprising amount of leeway.

  Lookin’ good, Kris commented to herself. She changed course, upped the boost to 0.4 and plotted a helical transit through the outer asteroid belts and the wide, dust-filled zone they called Junkland. Crossing the last belt would be trickier. She’d have to get beyond it before she could be sure of getting a good torpedo lock. The T-Synth couldn’t find any holes in the radar fence at that range, and she would be within the envelope of the innermost patrols—to say nothing of Ilya Turabian. But if she caught them by surprise, they shouldn’t be able to get a firing solution that quickly. Getting into position for the second launch could be tight, but if they were a little slow, and she got lucky—

  The maser tight-beam alert wailed, startling her. Reflexively, she keyed the burst link. “Who—”

  “Shut that off!” Huron’s voice, brittle and furious.

  “Huh? What?”

  “I said, shut that fucking thing off!”

  She did, gloved fingers trembling. The vehemence of his tone astounded her. She’d only heard Huron actually angry once before. And that time—

  The maser alert sounded again. This time she keyed up the maser link. Huron’s voice blasted over her helmet set. “I wish I had time to tell you what I think of this little stunt of yours—”

  “Back the fuck off, Huron!” Now she was mad. “I didn’t ask for your fuckin’ company!”

  “Bullshit!” he shot back. “You asked the moment you decided to fuck me over with this tantrum you’re having. And right now you don’t stand a snowflake’s chance in hell of getting within launch range of that station.”

  Kris ground her teeth on the lip mic. “Y’know, you can be a real asshole at times.”

  “Well, you’ve known that since Nedaema. Now shut up and listen.”

  “Don’t ever tell me to shut up, asshole.”

  “Alright, Kris.” She could tell the effort he was putting into making his voice sound almost normal. “Dial it back a notch. In about two and a half minutes this link is going to be too dangerous to talk on. You’re committed now, so I’ve gotta tell you how this thing is going to work.”

  She wasn’t mollified. “I know how this is gonna work.”

  “C’mon, Kris. Gimme a chance here.”

  She sighed. Well, alright. Since you asked nicely. “Roger that.”

  “Thanks. First thing—shut down fire control and turn off your shields.”

  “What?”

  “Do it. I’ll explain.”

  She did it.

  “Fine. These aren’t recon fighters, Kris. Fire control leaks more signal than you’d think on these birds. You might as well be babbling in the clear as running it all the time. I’ll tell you when to bring it up. Shields go down because if they’ve got an ultra-wideband scanner, they’ll light it up all over the place. At weapon frequencies, shields are just a big damn mirrors. I don’t know if the station has one, but that dreadnought sure as hell does. They spared no expense on that baby.”

  “What’s two?” Kris asked, impatiently aware of the diminishing minutes.

  “Two is”—Huron sounded almost pleasant now—“you’ve never mixed it up with real torpedoes before. Those torps will need about eleven to fourteen seconds to lock up.”

  That shocked her. “I thought it was only six.”

  “In the manual, it’s six,” Huron corrected. “In the simulator, it’s six. But with all this crap around, you’re looking at eleven to fourteen. And if Ilya has a phase-conjugate canceller on board, and somebody thinks to bring it up, it gets worse. A lot worse.”

  “How much worse?”

  “Torps may not lock at all.”

  “That’s worse,” she agreed.

  “Yeah. Then it’s your T-Synth against their BMC. Guess who wins.”

  “Great—”

  Huron stepped on what was about to be a pretty good piece of freelance invective. “You’ve probably figured out by now that you can only launch four at once.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay. Your first run should be almost free. Surprise and all that. That’s a nice approach you’ve got planned.”

  “How in hell—”

  “Nav-Comp bleeds signal, too—I peeked.” Huron sounded pleased with himsel
f, even over a tight-beam link.

  “Oh.”

  “Right. A couple of last-minute things.”

  Kris curled her upper lip sardonically. Oh, now for the good news?

  “As we go in, you’ll have to bring up fire control. When you do, all hell’s gonna break loose. They’ll launch immediately. Don’t bring shields up—the new anti-rads live on that stuff. Keep the shields down until they’ve got at least four or five out the tube—”

  “Four or five?”

  “Yeah. Make ‘em hunt around and sometimes they get in each other’s way. The boost wake on those things generates clutter for the ones behind. Don’t give ‘em a bright target until you have to.”

  “Jeezus, and I got you once?”

  “In playtime, Kris. Playtime’s over.”

  I guess so.

  “Last. You’ll have noticed that that thing handles like a pig and you’ve only got one gun.”

  “Right.”

  “You can’t use it until you drop those torps.”

  “Oh—”

  “Yeah. Having eight torps loaded confuses the hell out of the software. Once you dump the torps, it’ll find the gun. But not until then. Guess what that means.”

  “When the fighters arrive, it’s game-over.”

  “The lady wins a star.”

  Keep that smart-ass tone out of your voice, asshole. Well, on second thought, don’t. It wouldn’t be you, otherwise . . .

  “—keep them off your back as long as I can, Kris. Time’s up. Go to wig-wag if you need to talk. When they launch, you can mic up and scream like hell. It won’t matter then. Huron out.”

  “Kennakris out.” Over and out—very much over and out.

  The run-in started out easy. They ghosted in on Kris’s chosen trajectory, as dark and silent as could be. As they approached the outermost asteroid belt, Kris automatically keyed up the collision avoidance system. Huron immediately wig-wagged Off.

  Alright, but only if you go first, Kris snarled silently and took it down. Without shields, it wouldn’t take anything much bigger than the end of her little finger to ruin her whole day.

  Huron couldn’t have possibly heard her—could he?—but he pulled over the top and took station in front of her. She turned up the gain on her forward view screen as high as it would go. Her reward was a nice view of his running lights, blue and red, about fifty klicks up ahead. Follow the leader . . . She did, passing easily through the outer asteroid belt and the broad, dust-filled Junkland. She began to hope. No pulses yet . . .

  Just outside the innermost asteroid belt, the sensor warning receiver blipped once. The hair stood up on the back of Kris’s neck, a feeling amplified by the flight helmet. Just a sidelobe? Please? Then there was a spatter of noise on the tight-beam link. “—of a bitch. We got trouble, Kris.”

  She keyed the mic. “Maybe it’s just a sidelobe?”

  “No. Deep-radar track pulse. Main beam.”

  Shit! “How’d they—”

  “Someone on Ilya is a hell of an operator. We’re gonna see a launch warning in about . . . yep, there it is. Max boost, Kris.”

  Kris saw the red warning indicator even as he said the words. No lock indication? What’s going on? Running to catch a missile? What sort of lunacy was this?

  Huron was boosting away, and she jammed it to catch up. Weight down squashed on her, but not hard enough. Damn, this thing accelerated slowly . . .

  “What’s going on?” she breathed into the mic, unconsciously lowering her voice. “Why are we maxing to—”

  “Barrage missile launch.” There was a secret lingering in Huron’s voice—how did he get in those inflections over a tight-beam link? “Looks like they’ll drop it long.”

  So what’s the punch line?

  With a grin she could hear, he supplied it. “I think they think we’re a capital ship—or ships. Check the spread.”

  She turned on the scanners. It showed the approaching missiles as a heavy fan of orange lines.

  Just great, they’re trying to take out two lousy fighters with enough fire power to slag a cruiser. I hope they bust somebody for conspicuous waste.

  “Boost higher, Kris,” the comm-link crackled.

  “I’m running plus-eight.”

  “Run plus-ten. The engines probably won’t blow till eleven.”

  Stellar, she thought as she nudged it up, now I can get ionized even sooner.

  “Good,” Huron’s voice came again. “If they’ve given themselves a normal interval, we’ll be inside it in about ten seconds.”

  Hope you’re right, thought Kris. Barrage missiles detonated outwards, setting up a plasma wave that obliterated everything in front of them.

  “Should give us a real nice background for about two minutes,” he punctuated her thought. “Start an impact minus-twenty counter now.”

  “Why?” she muttered, setting the timer. “Goddamned doomsday cuckoo clock?”

  “Shield timer,” Huron answered. “Might do some good if I’m wrong.”

  Yeah, right. Kris flicked her eyes up to check the ugly orange spray radiating lethally towards them. The blood in her ears got thunderously loud as the counter ticked down with a heartbeat’s slowness—except that her heart was going about two hundred beats a minute. Two hundred long beats . . .

  Then she noticed something funny. “Huron, where in hell’s the fleet?”

  “What? What are you talking—Oh.” Yeah, Kris thought, Oh. The Asylum Fleet, which had been on the opposite side of the orbit from them, wasn’t showing up on the scanner at all. “Where’d they go?” she asked again.

  “Can’t say I care,” Huron replied, sounding piqued. “I’d watch that barrage, if I were you.”

  She checked on it. The orange fan got closer and closer; the scanner could pick out the individual missiles now. The counter ticked down; ten seconds, seven, five. She reached for the shield controls—

  “Piece o’ cake!” Huron exulted suddenly. “Don’t look back!”

  It didn’t matter, the sunscreens had already darkened. Her fighter rocked a little in the shock wave of the back-blast.

  “Punched a hole right through the asteroid belt,” Huron commented wickedly. “That ought to give them some nice hot dust to look at for a while. Lieutenant, you may commence your run.”

  “Yessir!”

  Kris engaged fire control, brought up the torpedoes, plotted an in-bound course at Asylum Station. She dropped the boost back a bit, picked an aperiodic oscillating approach. The T-Synth digested her inputs, beeped approvingly and drew the attack run on her screen, complete with preferred launch ranges, estimated detection times, and missile fly-out times. In its electronic opinion, she could launch with a seventy-percent solution twenty-three seconds before the anti-rads blew her into superheated plasma.

  Three out of four. Not so good. Better to make these four count; the second run was going to be very iffy. If she held on another six seconds, she could get a ninety-percent solution. With six fewer seconds to ditch the missiles in a logy ship. Hmmm . . . Yeah, go for it. It might be her only chance.

  She watched the T-Synth intently, letting the autopilot worry about the flying for a moment. Any second now . . .

  Yep. The yellow lock-warning light started blinking frantically. A couple of seconds later the launch alerts went off. There, there and there: three anti-rads boosting out. She’d just crossed maximum torpedo-lock range.

  “You happy now?” she quipped into the link, finger over the shield button.

  “Not yet—”

  Jesus! Remind me never to play chicken with you again.

  She glanced at the T-Synth’s weapons control window. Come on—lock up. The seconds ticked by, agonizing. Lock up, dammit. The torp-lock indicators lit green. “I’m locked!”

  Huron did not reply. Three more launch warnings beeped at her, then a fourth. Seven missiles running out . . .

  “Happy now?”

  “Ecstatic.”

  She hit the shield button. They
would take at most two of those missiles, then fold. The forward armor might take a third, depending on the leakage. Might . . .

  If you’ve got any more brilliant ideas, Huron, now’s the time.

  He had a couple. He dumped some chaff buckets and laid down a barrage of plasma fire. Watching the traces on the T-Synth, she thought he must be heating his guns way up. Two missiles lost lock. Huron started zigging and jagging, blaring away on every frequency his fighter would generate. The missiles seemed to pause in their hunting, then veer towards this more obnoxious target.

  Don’t play it too close, I’ll still need your help after this.

  She refocused on the weapons control window. Seven seconds to launch. Five. Three . . . She slapped the launch button. The torpedoes ripple-fired, making the little craft shudder and buck. Kris pulled back into a hard lateral skid. Heavy deceleration slammed her into the straps, her vision reddened; the hull creaked and groaned.

  Christ, this thing isn’t built for that kind of launch shock! I hope the next one doesn’t rip something off.

  Bottoming out of the skid, she hit full boost. Again, acceleration slammed her—back into the seat this time. The edges of the screen got dim and fuzzy. Blinking as the compensators reacted, she prayed that Huron had kept those missiles busy for just another second. Climbing fast, she broke a roll back over the top in a textbook missile-avoidance maneuver. Huron swooped in to take position off her left wing.

  “Clear for the moment.” He sounded exhausted. She glanced sideways; her view screen showed nimbus burns along his spar tips.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah.” It sounded like a sigh. “Juked all but one. Shields took it.”

  “Still up?”

  “Recovering. They upped the kilotonnage on those bastards.” Wonderful. “That isn’t the bad news, though.” Kris hung silently on the last syllable, waiting. “Check your scan. Ilya’s broken orbit.”

  “Well, we can stay out of her way easily—”

  “Not with that cloud of fighters around her.”

  Kris glanced at the scanner. There Ilya was, a bright yellow diamond enveloped by a cloud of angry red spots. A flying hive surrounded by some very pissed-off bees. No, not good at all . . .