Lanoe knew he ought to slow down, let her catch up. But the cruiser was undefended and he needed all the speed he could get.
For a second he was flying alone, no one for kilometers around him, and he used the break to send a message to Valk. The AI replied instantly, as if he’d been waiting for the call. Lanoe flicked his eyes across the green pearl in the corner of his vision.
He didn’t waste any time on greetings. “How long until the gun fires?” he asked.
“Lieutenant Ehta and her marines are busting their humps down there, but it’s still another eighty-nine seconds,” Valk said.
Eighty-nine. Too long.
He shoved that thought away. “You’ve got hostiles inbound,” Lanoe said. “What about secondary defenses?” There were plenty of small guns onboard the cruiser, PBW cannon no bigger than the ones mounted on Lanoe’s fighter. The problem was that they weren’t automated. The same law that banned AIs banned mounting guns on drones, or giving any kind of computer access to a lethal weapon, meant a human being needed to crew every one of those secondary guns.
Had the Hoplite still possessed a full complement of crew, there would have been plenty of marines to fire those PBWs. With just a skeleton crew onboard, most of Ehta’s people would be busy getting the big coilgun ready to fire.
“I’ll see if she can spare a couple of people, but you know ship-mounted guns won’t stop trained pilots,” Valk told him.
An old truism of space battles, one Lanoe hardly needed to hear just then. “They’d be better than nothing. If even one of these Centrocor bastards lines up a good disruptor shot on you,” he said, “we lose. And it looks like there’s going to be”—he checked his boards—“three and a half seconds when they’re in range and I’m still too far out to be of any help. Do you think—”
“Oh, hellfire!” Ginger shouted, on the squad channel. Loud enough to hurt Lanoe’s ear. “No … Oh, no …”
“What’s the matter?” Candless called. “Ginger—are you in trouble?”
“No—no,” the girl sent back. “No, I just … He—I had a shot, and I took it, and—”
“If you’re not in immediate danger, then cut that chatter!” Candless said.
Lanoe didn’t have time to check and see what was going on with Ginger. He had his hands full at the moment. “Candless,” he said, “where are you?”
“I’m coming. Five seconds behind you.”
“Acknowledged,” he said, because there was nothing else to say. His BR.9 could fly only so fast. He could see the Hoplite now in his augmented canopy view, a rectangular shape of light in the dim nether of wormspace. The four Centrocor fighters were just yellow dots, converging on the cruiser far faster than he liked.
He picked one—they were equidistant, he just picked one at random—and feathered his stick, nudging his fighter in its direction. He brought up his weapons board, thinking maybe there was some great solution there, but he knew he wouldn’t have time for anything fancy. His sensor board showed him things he didn’t want to know. All four of the Centrocor fighters were loading disruptors. Even though he couldn’t see them as anything more than lighter specks in the dark, his computer could read telescope data to see that they had unlimbered the heavy weapon launchers mounted in their undercarriages.
He forced himself to pull his finger away from his trigger guard. If he fired now, at this distance with everyone moving at incredible speeds, his shot could go anywhere. He might get lucky and hit one of the fighters, but he might also hit the Hoplite—which was a much larger target.
Ten seconds out. The fighters were almost in range. He saw PBW fire coming from one of the Hoplite’s small guns, fanning out around him, failing to hit anything. Five seconds out, and the Centrocor fighters were already in range of the cruiser. It would take a couple of seconds for them to find the right firing solution, to decide where to put their deadly munitions, but he was still—
One of the yellow dots on his tactical board blinked out, and a fraction of a second later a burst of light showed against the dark, as one of the Centrocor ships exploded.
“You can thank me later,” Maggs said.
“I’m sure you’ll remind me,” Lanoe told him. There was no time to think about how that changed things, if at all. He could see his target now, its bubble-shaped nose pointed at the cruiser. It was skating along sideways, the pilot holding steady as he prepared to launch his disruptor. It looked like the round would cleave right through the Hoplite’s engineering section—and if it connected, if the disruptor’s smart munitions detonated inside the cruiser’s engines—
It was a hypothetical, only. The pilot didn’t even have time to look up as Lanoe tore into him with both PBWs. The Centrocor fighter came apart at the seams, its disruptor unlaunched.
Two to go—both of them on the far side of the cruiser. Candless was still three seconds out. Lanoe threw his ship sideways, curling around the Hoplite’s side in a lateral roll, his maneuvering jets hissing and stuttering and his inertial sink pulling backward on him, hard, like a giant hand pressing down on him, flattening him. The cruiser turned underneath him and he pulled out of his maneuver in a tight half spin, his guns already blazing.
The third Centrocor pilot had time to try to maneuver, to evade. It didn’t work. Lanoe’s particle beams sparked and bounced off the Yk.64’s vector field for a moment, then finally connected, a steady stream of fire carving right through the fighter’s midsection, severing pipes and conduits and power lines. The lights inside the bubble canopy went dark and the fighter twisted away on a random trajectory. Either the pilot was dead or they’d lost all control of their vehicle. It wasn’t a clean kill, but Lanoe didn’t care. He wasn’t out here to murder Centrocor’s pilots—he had to save the cruiser.
One to go, just one enemy left. Lanoe tripped his compensators and threw his ship into a rotary turn, until he was flying at right angles to his previous course. He reached for his trigger and lined up his shot—
Just as the disruptor launched from the Sixty-Four’s belly.
Lanoe was close enough to actually see it happen, to see the projectile emerge, its tiny thruster burning hot as it accelerated toward the cruiser.
His stomach tried to churn inside his abdomen. The inertial sink prevented that—it was still crushing him against his seat—so instead an acid belch started worming its way up his throat. He wanted to cry out but his teeth were clenched too hard.
The disruptor was a diamond-hard carbon rod a meter long, studded with nodules of high explosive. It was designed to dig through the skin of a large ship and keep going, burrowing through bulkheads and structural elements and crew spaces alike, the explosives timed so they would go off in series. A continuous fireball that could chew right through armor plating, right through interior bulkheads, right through crew spaces and never stop. It was a devastating weapon, built for one purpose only: to kill spacecraft.
This one entered the cruiser just aft of the officers’ bunks and tore its way out through the side of the bridge, exploding continuously as it moved through the ship. Lanoe saw blossoms of fire erupt again and again from the side of the cruiser, watched a cloud of debris expand outward from the cruiser’s ruined nose.
“No,” he said, very quietly. “No. Valk—”
The bridge—the cruiser’s bridge was just gone. The disruptor tore its way out of the cruiser’s hull, still exploding in a plume of superhot metal and fast-expanding gas, a bow wave of fire. The place where the bridge had been was nothing now but torn metal and scraps of carbon fiber, long, loose threads of the stuff flapping in a sustained shock wave.
“Valk!” Lanoe shouted.
He almost missed the fact that the last Sixty-Four, the one that had delivered the killing blow, was turning its guns on him.
A grim smile spread across Shulkin’s hollow cheeks, and a sound a little like a death rattle—or like a triumphant groaning—resonated up from inside his chest. Bullam turned back to the display and watched in awe as the video loop
ed there, video of the cruiser’s front end twisting and rupturing under disruptor fire. “We did it,” she breathed. “We did it. We did it. We did it. They’re—they’re dead, and—we’re not.”
Someone was calling, someone was calling out a series of requests, but she didn’t even listen. She just wanted to clamp her eyes shut and breathe, to inhale for the first time in what felt like hours, but she knew had only been a few minutes. “Captain,” she said. “We’re safe now. We can start thinking about how we’re going to capture Lanoe. I’d like to suggest—”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, civilian,” Shulkin told her. “I do believe I ordered you to remain quiet while on my bridge.”
Bullam frowned. She turned to look at the displays again. One showed a schematic view of the cruiser, with all the damaged areas highlighted in yellow, orange, and red, data spooling all around the view as telemetry came in. The cruiser didn’t just look dead, it looked like it had been beheaded.
Other areas of the image still showed blue and even green. The engines, for instance, were untouched. Most of the gundecks were perfectly intact.
She jabbed one finger at the display. “They lost their bridge,” she said. “Come on! That has to count for something.”
“Most likely it counts for the death of a small number of pilots,” Shulkin told her. “It doesn’t matter. They don’t need the bridge to control the ship. They can fly that thing from any display onboard. Did you think nothing like this has ever happened before in a war? The Navy builds their ships to keep fighting long after most of the crew is dead.”
“But the gun, the, the Mark II coilgun that they’re readying to fire at us, that has to be—it has to,” Bullam said. She could hear how incoherent she sounded but she couldn’t stop talking. “This has to count for something!”
“It counts for honor,” Shulkin said. “If we die now, at least we bled them first. Meanwhile, we still have nine fighters in play. And they’re still eleven seconds out from firing their gun.”
Lanoe dashed sideways, his positioning jets firing hard as he tried to break the Sixty-Four’s lock on him. The Sixty-Four dipped its nose and spun around to keep facing him and he knew there was no way he could evade. If he could have ducked around the side of the cruiser, put it between him and the Centrocor fighter—but there was no time.
Time.
He’d given the Sixty-Four’s pilot far too much time. He’d been distracted by seeing the disruptor tear through the Hoplite, by knowing that Valk was in there—Valk, Valk was dead—damn it. He pushed that thought away. He’d been distracted, and he’d given the Centrocor pilot plenty of time to work up an AV solution.
He should already be dead. Lanoe had seen these pilots in action. They weren’t the best the Navy had ever produced but it was clear they knew how to fight. Why hadn’t this one killed him already?
Unless they had orders not to. Just as Maggs had suggested.
He twisted around as the Sixty-Four’s PBW fire raked across his weapon fairings, as shot after shot broke through his vector field and red lights lit up all over his boards. He lost an airfoil and then one of his cannons and then something crucial in his engine, some vital conduit, and suddenly his main thrusters just dropped offline, while a warning chime told him that heat was building up behind the shielding that separated him from the reactor. He twisted and dodged, trying to turn away some of those hits with his vector field, but he was too close. Orders to keep him alive or not, soon enough one of those shots was going to hit something vital. He might not come out of this dead but he doubted if Centrocor cared if he was captured in one piece.
He twisted around one last time, until his canopy was facing the Sixty-Four’s bubble, wanting at least to see the pilot who brought him down. He got a glimpse of a suited figure, lit up by their displays. He tried to bring up a virtual Aldis sight, tried to line up a shot to let the bastard know he could give as good as he got—
—And then he had to turn away, flinching as the Sixty-Four exploded into shrapnel and fire. He was close enough, and the explosion was bright enough, that for a moment his canopy turned solid black, opaquing itself to protect him from going blind.
In that moment when he was alone in the dark, unable to figure out what had just happened, a green pearl started spinning in the corner of his vision.
He flicked his eyes across it.
“Thought you could use a hand,” Maggs said.
Lanoe was not about to say thank you. As much as he knew he should. “Sure,” he growled. It was the best Maggs was going to get.
The bastard didn’t push his luck by asking for more.
Lanoe’s canopy shifted to full transparency again and he looked around, trying to get a feel for the battle. With all the sensors and comms and equipment onboard the BR.9, with all the emphasis its designers had put on situational awareness, there were still moments like this in every battle, moments when you could only guess if you were winning or losing. He tapped virtual keys on all his boards, trying to figure out how badly damaged he was, trying to figure out who was nearby. Candless came up on his wing even as he started to get a clear picture.
“I’m late, I know,” she said. “Terribly sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he told her. “Glad to have you here now. How are the kids holding up?”
“The ensigns are causing some havoc, which I imagine is what you had in mind for them,” Candless told him. “The carrier is turning around—a risky proposition in wormspace, of course, but they’re desperate to get away from our firepower. It’s going to be a close race to see whether we can shoot first or they escape.”
Lanoe glanced over at the cruiser. He’d almost forgotten about the coilgun. He could see the protective shutters pulling back from the muzzle of the gun, a deep black pit in the Hoplite’s side. He couldn’t help but let his eyes stray up toward the big ship’s nose, toward the torn metal and cloud of debris that had been its bridge.
“Valk’s dead,” he told Candless.
“Oh,” she said. “I … I know what it meant to—”
“No, I’m not,” Valk said.
There was a long second or two where Lanoe tried to process what he had just heard. He’d already begun to accept the fact of Valk’s death, that the AI had been torn apart by the disruptor that cracked open the ship. He’d started to think about what that meant, about how he could carry on his crusade against the Blue-Blue-White without—
“No, really,” Valk said. “Not dead over here. You two might want to move back.”
The coilgun was ready to fire.
“Oh, hellfire … oh, ashes—I’m blind, my eyes—my eyes—”
Bullam wished that Shulkin would order his IO to turn off the audio channel. Aleister Lanoe had wounded one of their pilots but had lacked the mercy to finish him off. Now they had to listen to the poor fool beg for help.
“My eyes! They’re—they don’t work. I can’t fly—I can’t fly like this, please! Please, I need remote recall. Please!”
If Shulkin felt any pity for the man, he didn’t show it. “Data,” he said. “Give me the pertinent data.”
“We’ve completed our pre-maneuver turn,” the navigator told him. “Engines on full. We’re gaining distance, but—”
“It won’t be enough,” the carrier’s pilot said. “I’ve goosed the engines as much as I can. We’ll probably lose one of them, at this level of output. There’s only so much energy you can force through a thruster cone, and—”
“Understood,” Shulkin said. “IO?”
The man sat motionless in his chair, covering his eyes with his hands. “See for yourself,” he said.
Bullam looked up at the display hovering over his position. At first she couldn’t tell what she was looking at. A cloud of gas and dust obscured the midsection of the cruiser. Right in the middle of all that confusion was a tiny, perfectly circular black dot.
Vomit surged up her throat as she realized what that dot was. The shell that the c
oilgun had just fired. It looked like a dot because it was headed directly for them, because she was seeing it nose-on. It grew steadily bigger as she watched.
“How much … How much damage will that—that thing do?” she asked, her words so quiet they sounded lost in the moaning and shrieking of the blind man.
Shulkin seemed to hear her anyway. “That’s a seventy-five-centimeter heavy ordnance round. Jacketed in depleted uranium with a high-temperature explosive warhead. Those shells were originally designed to level cities. You saw what the disruptor round did to the Hoplite?”
“I did,” Bullam said.
Shulkin nodded. “That was a Fleet Day firecracker compared to this.”
There was gravity now, as the carrier’s engines pushed for acceleration. A force holding her down in her chair. She pulled her legs up and wrapped her arms around her knees, because somehow that felt comforting.
In a few moments—a minute at most—she was going to die.
There was nothing anyone could do about it. She considered what she might want to do in these last few moments of her life, but nothing, absolutely nothing appealed to her. Mostly she just wanted to stop shaking.
“I can’t see! Don’t you understand? I need remote recall, I’m asking for—”
Shulkin still had part of the shredded armrest in his skeletal fingers. He tapped it against the denuded metal arm of his seat. “Why didn’t they kill him? The man’s blind,” he said. “Surely that’s an easy kill?”
The IO lifted his head to stare at Shulkin. “That’s what you’re thinking about right now? About easy kills?”
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