by Richard Fox
“Get him off me!”
“Splash one bandit!”
Panicked transmissions begged Durand to turn around. Durand hated to leave her squadron behind and outgunned, but her mission demanded she keep her burn going for the Chinese Q ship. The ivory-white spaceship, a bisected cylinder decorated with an enormous white crane and hanzai characters, maintained its course to the colony fleet. At this range and with her gauss cannon, the ship was practically a barn door for her to hit.
“We have a read on that thing’s ACM?” she asked.
“Assume military grade. Don’t waste a shot and risk going dark,” Albrecht said.
“We’ve got company!” announced Sledge, Albrecht’s wingman. Five Jiantous had broken from the dogfight and tore after Durand and her flight. Durand saw the Chinese fighters’ afterburners flaring white-hot as they closed.
Durand pushed her engines to full military power, as fast as she could go without engaging her own afterburners. Her Eagle had enough power for the rail gun or the afterburners, not both. They had tens of seconds before the Jiantous were on them.
The Q ship was still beyond their effective range. Durand magnified the Q ship’s image with a gesture. Two prongs of a rail gun jutted from the prow of the ship, already sizzling with electricity. Flak batteries had sprung up on the hull from compartments.
“Sir, it’s got one big goddamn rail gun, not an internal battery like we thought. That thing’s bigger than the guns on the Charlemagne,” Durand said. If the effective range on the Q ship’s gun was longer than the batteries on the Charlemagne...
“If it takes out the Breitenfeld, the rest of the fleet are sitting ducks. It’ll pick off the colonists long before the rest of the fleet can engage it,” Durand said to Albrecht and the rest of their flight. Modern void capital ships relied on their ADS and maneuvers to avoid damage; a single hit from the Q ship’s rail gun would rip a ship inside out.
“How long until it has a shot on the Breitenfeld?” Albrecht asked.
“Maybe another minute. I don’t think we can hit that ship and deal with the ones on our ass before that happens,” Durand said.
“Gall, Burro, do a tumble as soon as our pursuit is in range and continue the attack. Sledge, you and I will make an out-of-range rail shot to spoof the defenses and buy them time,” Albrecht said.
Durand put a hand on the ventral/dorsal thrusters and felt her chest tighten. Tumble shots always made her queasy. The Jiantous bore down on them, nearly in range.
“Three…two…one…mark!”
Durand flipped her fighter over and kept her momentum toward the Q ship. The stars swirled around her and the target icons came around. She pulled the trigger on her gauss cannons and raked rounds across the Chinese fighters. One exploded, dirty red flames flaring from the machine before the vacuum snuffed the wreck into nothing but expanding detritus.
With no time to celebrate, Durand flipped her fighter back toward the Q ship and gunned her engines.
Sledge and Albrecht fired their rail guns and the magnetically accelerated slugs crossed half the distance to the Q ship before a swarm of rockets and flack intercepted the shots. The recoil from the shots robbed the two fighters of speed and they bellied over to face the remaining four Jiantous.
Durand glanced over her shoulder, no Jiantou on her six. Tracer rounds flared behind her like a swarm of fireflies in the night sky.
A burst of light erupted in front of her. Shrapnel from a flak round peppered her canopy, turning the right half into a mess of craters and leaving a crack like a bolt of lightning deep in the synthetic diamond canopy.
Durand sent her Eagle into a barrel roll and dove out of the line of fire. A peal of explosions filled her previous flight path. A dozen warning icons demanded her attention, which Durand ignored as she jinxed her fighter and varied the speed of her attack to spoof the anti-aircraft batteries trying desperately to kill her.
“You all right?” Jenkins asked.
Ice crystals crept across the inside of her canopy, absolute zero’s effect on ambient moisture. Durand flipped a panel of switches on her left side and her fighter sucked the atmosphere from her cockpit. A glance at her mostly green weapons panel gave her hope.
“Venting atmo…gun still works. Get ready to fire,” Durand said. The Q ship loomed ahead, flak batteries flashing yellow from gauss fire.
“I’m hit! Hit—” the transmission from Sledge cut out.
The range reading on Durand’s canopy flashed green.
“Fire!”
The recoil felt like her fighter had run into a brick wall. Her restraints kept her in her seat but her arms and head whipped forward. As her chin struck her chest, her helmet kept her from losing teeth but the hit felt like a boxer’s uppercut.
She shook her head to refocus and saw the Q ship still ahead. Two new holes clean through its hull marked her and Jenkins’ hits.
Jenkins’ fighter soared ahead of Durand.
Durand yanked her control stick to the side and opened her throttle to regain speed.
Nothing. The Q ship veered across her canopy.
“Second shot charged!” Jenkins said.
Durand’s cockpit was dead; emergency lights flickered around her. The only display still working was for the battery and it read: CHARGING. Her rail shot had overloaded her systems. She was a sitting duck.
“Firing!” Jenkins shouted. Durand saw her ship slow as the rail gun strong-armed her forward momentum. A flak round burst just below Jenkins’ fighter and it lurched higher like it had been kicked.
Three more flak shells burst around Jenkins. The Eagle disintegrated in a flash of flame, reducing her and her ship to ash and twisted metal.
Durand reached out, her hand striking the canopy. Jenkins was gone, just like that.
Durand sat back, ready for her turn in the fire. Her hand went to a crucifix beneath her flight suit, no time to say a proper prayer. But there was still time to be of use to this battle. She squinted at the Q ship, trying to find where Jenkins’s last shot had hit.
“Breitenfeld, any station on this net, the Q ship is damaged, venting atmosphere.” Lightning arced between the long prongs of the rail gun. The burst from the gauss cannons had ceased and the Q ship rotated slowly away from Durand, bringing the top of the ship into view. A black maw on the rear of the ship arced electricity from the within, like a thunderstorm in the night.
“The battery stacks are hit!” The exit wound from Jenkins’s last shot might be enough to kill the Q ship. “I say again, the ship’s battery stacks are—”
White lightning leapt from the battery stacks and arced back against the hull. The Q ship shimmered as raw power flowed through it. The white hull blackened as it burned. The spine of the ship cracked and the lightning ceased, leaving an afterglow on Durand’s eyes. Durand watched the Q ship float on, like a dead animal on a lake’s surface.
“Gall, Burro, you read me?” Albrecht said.
Lights returned to the cockpit and a slight nudge against her chest told Durand the engines were functioning again.
“This is Gall. I went into reboot after my first shot but I’m coming back online. Burro is…down,” she said.
“Can you make it back to the Breitenfeld or do I have to squeeze you into my cockpit? No time for a pickup,” Albrecht said.
Navigation beacons returned to her HUD and the Eagle’s maneuverability returned slowly.
“I can make it back. It’ll be slow and if we run into any more—wait. Where are the Chinese?” None of the threat icons were on her HUD.
“EWO cracked their attack programs and their firewalls. We got aim assist back and finished them off. I got one without help but the last three almost got me,” Albrecht said.
Durand flew toward Albrecht’s blue icon. A yellow border on the icon told of significant damage to the ship.
“I’m coming up on you,” she said. Albrecht’s port engine was a ragged mess. Gauss bullets had badly drilled the rear third of the fighter. That it
could still put out any thrust was a miracle.
“I don’t know what’s holding you together. Don’t sneeze,” she said.
“You don’t look too hot yourself. Get back to the ship—hurry,” he said. She could see him beneath what remained of his canopy as she sped by. Gauss rounds had perforated the canopy and knocked a third of it into the void.
“I’m not going to leave you out here,” she said, slowing to match his speed.
“There isn’t another bogey for a million kilometers in any direction and my landing will be uglier than a soup sandwich. Get on the deck before I wreck it on my way in.”
“This is Captain Valdar.” The new captain cut off Durand’s attempt to argue. “Search and rescue has the last of our pilots. The slip coils are malfunctioning. Return to the ship with all possible speed or you’re going to float out here until the Union decides to send a ship, or until the Chinese do.”
“Acknowledge, Breitenfeld, we’re limping but we’ll make it home,” Albrecht said. Valdar’s icon dropped off her HUD. “You heard the man—get moving.”
Durand grumbled and gingerly increased power to her engines. She questioned the wisdom of rushing to a ship with malfunctioning engines but she decided to take her chances with Ibarra engineering over a Chinese prison.
She flew past an Eagle wing, spinning lazily in the vacuum, the serial number of the fighter half-missing and blackened.
“How many did we lose?” she asked.
“Five,” Albrecht’s voice cracked as he spoke. “No damage to the Breit or the fleet and we swept the sky. Damn fine job.”
Jenkins’s final moments replayed in Durand’s mind and she felt like anything but a “damn fine job” had just transpired.
She shook her head and focused on the Breitenfeld, the aft hangar gate open to receive her. With the malcode threat gone, she queued up the auto landing sequence. Sparks shot from the panel and a malfunction icon came up on her HUD.
“You think?” She keyed her throat mic, “Deck, I’m coming in on manual…have fire and rescue there just in case.”
A panel descended from the ceiling and lights of the optical landing system, called a meatball by tradition, flashed to guide her in safely. She lowered her speed and focused on the meatball, making minute adjustments to her course.
The lights ahead of her wavered, like a sheen of water vapor passing in between her and the ship. She blinked hard. Must be the adrenaline wearing off, she thought. The Breitenfeld wavered again and she swore she could see the star field beyond the ship.
“Anyone else see this?” she said.
“Focus!” Albrecht ordered.
Durand followed the meatball’s landing path and lowered her landing gear. Gravity returned as she crossed the hangar’s threshold. Her Eagle wobbled against the new force and her rear wheels struck the deck.
What should have happened next was her forward gear hitting the deck and the vectored thrusters around her ship bringing her to a quick stop.
Instead, her forward strut cracked in half the instant it made contact and her plane’s nose struck the deck. Durand’s Eagle ripped across the flight deck, spewing sparks and whirling into a lazy spin as it almost cut a furrow against the graphene composite steel.
Durand almost ejected, then remembered the unyielding bulkhead just above the flight deck. She caught sight of the forward edge of the flight deck as her fighter spun, the precipice becoming another item on a very long list of things that were about to kill her.
If she overshot the runway, the Breitenfeld would smash her like a bug against a windshield.
Friction against the deck slowed her Eagle and Durand braced herself against the back of her seat to eject if she went over the edge. Maybe she’d be blasted out into space instead of against the hull.
A few yards from the edge, her forward motion came to a sudden halt.
Durand, not waiting to test her luck, unbuckled herself and pulled the emergency release on the canopy. She heaved the canopy aside and leapt from the cockpit. Earth-normal gravity brought her to the deck and she fell with all the grace and dignity of a toddler’s first failed attempt to walk across a living room.
“Move! Get clear, lassy,” came MacDougall’s voice over the IR.
She scrambled back to her feet and ran toward a waiting team of crewmen and medics behind safety bumpers on the left side of the runway. She looked over her shoulder and saw MacDougall in a lifter exo-suit standing behind her Eagle. The suit’s clamps had grappled onto the tail section—and stopped her from going over the edge.
“Albrecht is coming in. He’s in worse shape than I am,” she said. She pointed toward the rear of the runway. Albrecht’s Eagle loomed in the darkness.
“No thank ye at all. I’ll remember that the next time you’re about to go ass over teakettle—”
Shouts broke over the IR. A scrum of sailors, masters at arms by their shoulder brassards, shoved and wrestled with three Chinese pilots whose red flight suits were tight enough to give them all away as women and which shone like rubies against the white-armored sailors.
One of the Chinese snatched a pistol from a sailor’s holster and fumbled with it.
Durand drew her gauss pistol and aimed.
A white flash erupted from her weapon and her target doubled over, clutching a thigh. The pistol fell to the ground and was kicked away in the confusion. The other two Chinese converged on their wounded comrade, pointing at Durand and putting themselves between her and the third pilot.
Clumps of blood warbled into the airless hangar, the wounded pilot’s cries trapped within her helmet.
Durand felt an atavistic need to hurt the Chinese pilots again for Jenkins’ death and for the rest of her fellow pilots that she’d never see again.
“Get out the way so I can shoot her again!” Durand yelled. That the Chinese couldn’t hear her IR didn’t matter to her.
The masters at arms peeled two of the Chinese pilots away and slapped restraining wires around their wrists, arms and knees. The two bound pilots struggled with all the dexterity of an inchworm as the men at arms carried them away.
A sailor stepped between the wounded pilot and Durand.
“Ma’am, I need you to holster that weapon,” he said.
Durand lowered the pistol to her waist, watching as two men at arms held the wounded pilot down and sprayed quick foam into the entry and exit wounds on her thigh. Restraining wires went around her wrists and arms but the fight had gone out of her.
The Chinese pilot, who would have been pretty had her face not been a rictus of hatred, shouted at Durand as she was carried off.
“Ingrates. We pick them up out of their dead bomber just like international law demands, and this is how they repay us,” a sailor said.
Durand shook her head and set her pistol to safe. She looked back to the end of the hangar to check on Albrecht’s approach…and did a double take.
Long red lines faded into being just beyond the edge of the runway and a keening hum assaulted Durand’s senses. The lines thickened, green forks of lightning arcing between the lines, and the space between them filled with an ivory light that grew in intensity.
Durand wrapped her hands and arms around her head to save herself from the onslaught, but the assault continued until all she could feel was white light stabbing into her eyes and a buzz that eradicated the memory of any other sound she ever had.
I’m dying, she thought. All that and this is how I die.
She felt a slight pop in her ears…and it was over.
Durand peeked between her fingers and saw the world as it should have been: a flight deck in the midst of recovering its fighter craft from a battle.
Crewmen gawked around them, everyone looking as shocked as she felt.
MacDougall was still at the rear of what remained of her fighter. The mechanic looked around him liked he’d just heard the whisper of a long-lost loved one.
Durand’s priorities came back in a rush.
“Albrecht! Ge
t that ship clear! He’s coming in,” she said.
She looked back to the far edge of the runway and saw nothing but empty space where she’d seen her squadron commander only seconds ago.
Albrecht was gone.
****
Captain Valdar, still strapped in his command chair, sat very still. The blinding light and overwhelming noise had ended only moments ago. Every display in the bridge blinked with error messages.
“What the hell was that?” he asked. He hit the control stick on his chair, but there was no response. He cursed and unsnapped his restraints.
“EWO, were we hacked?” Valdar asked. He struggled from his chair—the white noise had done something to his inner ear and holding his balance was difficult, like after three too many cocktails.
The EWO shook her head and tossed her hands in the air.
“All our higher systems were air-gapped and unpowered. There was nothing to hack,” the EWO said.
Valdar turned around too quickly and had to steady himself on his chair.
“Comms, send a status report to the fleet. Tell them…something,” Valdar said. “Your guess is as good as mine right now.”
“Everything’s down, sir. I can get on the hull and use an old signal lamp if needed,” the communications lieutenant said. Her holo displays wavered, then snapped into focus. “Oh, there we go. One moment, sir.”
Functionality returned to the rest of the bridge pods, but several of the holo screens wobbled from some sort of error.
“Engineering, how’re we on life support, battery power?” Valdar asked.
“Batteries are at 95 percent and taking power from the fusion plant, hull solar panels fully functional. The slip-coil drive is…well…that’s funny,” the engineer tapped at his console.
“Sir, fleet command wants to know if we experienced an anomaly. Seems it hit every ship,” the communications lieutenant reported.
A gasp from Stacey silenced the bridge.
“No! No, this can’t be right,” Stacey said.