“My read is that they think they have all the time in the world,” Iyotake said. “It’ll be four days before the last regular drone reaches La-Tar. Without knowing about Scorpius, they’ve got to think they have at least a week.”
“And if they know about Scorpius, Admiral Kosigan is going to need to launch a bloody witch hunt,” Henry said. “Nobody farther out than Zion knew anything except us. If that leaked, IntelDiv is going be very, very busy.”
“Indeed. Do you want me to check in once you’re on the flight deck?”
“Yes,” Henry confirmed. “Just link in; there’s no need for you to be physically present. She’s probably right about arming the Lancers; they’re the last real weapon we have.”
The flight deck was a busy hive of activity when Henry stepped onto it. One of the largest open spaces on the battlecruiser, it played host to their eight starfighters in bays along each side. Lights glittered in those bays, highlighting the still-odd-looking form factor of the new fighters.
One of the bays was dark, but enough light crept in from the rest of the bay for Henry to see the massive hole torn through three-quarters of the length of Raven-One.
“There you are,” O’Flannagain said, emerging from one of several robotic trolleys running around the deck. “Catch.”
Instinct was enough for Henry to grab the package she tossed him with ease, and he stared down at the familiar colors and bundled shape of a freshly fabricated flight suit.
“What’s this?” he demanded, suddenly completely off-balance. The flight suit was marked with his name. His rank insignia. Even the entirely non-regulation red-gold wings of an ace who’d flown in the first campaign against the Kenmiri.
“It’s a flight suit,” O’Flannagain said with exaggerated patience. “Raven’s fabricators have your size on file. It’s synced with Raven-Eight, though you’ll want to double-check everything.”
“Stop,” Henry ordered. The pilot stopped. Henry gestured. “Iyotake, link in,” he snapped. A virtual image of the XO appeared between the two of them, presented to them both by their internal networks.
“Lay it out, Commander O’Flannagain,” he told her. “Fast.”
“We can’t launch missiles from the bottom of a hole that’s now twice as deep as Raven is high,” the CAG told them. “We’re barely clear to get the SF-One-Thirties out around the hull, but we are clear.
“But we fired off all of our missiles in the engagements with the Drifter starfighters, and the entire battlecruiser is down to thirty-six missiles total,” she said. “So, the XO didn’t want to approve loading the starfighters without your authority.”
“Seven starfighters, twenty-eight missiles,” Henry said aloud. “That doesn’t even leave Raven with a full salvo, so I see the problem. Not following on the flight suit, though.”
“Two of my pilots, Lieutenant Brankovich and Lieutenant Commander Phạm, are in the medbay,” O’Flannagain told him. “Lieutenant Commander Gaunt is dead; his quarters were vaporized when we got hit.
“So, I have seven fighters and five pilots. Five fighters only need twenty missiles, but I don’t want to trust a single twenty-missile salvo to take down a Guardian.”
“If I give you the missiles, they’ll all be full penetrators,” Henry told her. “That will help.”
“The odds are still better with twenty-four than twenty,” she replied. “And as it happens, there is someone else on Raven qualified to fly an SF-One-Thirty. That someone is a double ace with more fighter-on-fighter kills than anyone in the fighter wing and is the third-ranked pilot on the ship for fighter-on-starship kill participation.”
“No.” Iyotake had finally caught up. “We cannot put the commanding officer of a United Planets Space Force capital ship in a goddamn starfighter. That’s a violation of at least six different regulations.”
“Enforcing those regs would fall on Commander Thompson,” Henry pointed out. It was probably unfair of him, but it was true. “But…even putting that aside, Commander O’Flannagain, I only have virtual hours on an SF-One-Thirty. I’ve never flown one in real space.”
“Which still puts you ahead of our shuttle pilots, who are not starfighter-qualified, period,” she told him. “Ser, you’ve kept up your virtual and realspace hours to keep your wings. You’re qualified to fly a One-Thirty.
“There are only six unwounded people on this ship I can say that of,” she concluded. “And taking you out with us, if it comes down to it, might just save everyone.”
“Or kill the captain,” Iyotake replied.
“Iyotake, you’re right,” Henry told his XO. “But we both know you’re perfectly qualified to command a battlecruiser of your own. If something happens to me, you can take over—and Raven isn’t going to win this on her own.
“If we get a clean shot at one of those Guardians, it might be worth it,” he allowed. “But it’s still a terrible idea, O’Flannagain, and we have a lot of other arrows in our quiver first.”
“I’m not planning on taking us all right now, ser,” she said. “I just want to make it clear that when we go out, you go with us. So that we don’t argue about it while there’s a Guardian in weapons range.”
Henry knew he shouldn’t do it. It was a terrible idea, one that risked Raven’s commander…and yet, O’Flannagain was right. Six fighters were more likely to succeed in an attack on a Guardian than five. It could make the difference between a suicide run to buy Raven time and an actual kill that changed the tone of the entire situation.
And he wanted to kill these bastards. He’d never been so angry, so determined to exact a blood toll on the people who’d killed his friends and two women he’d loved, in his entire life. It might be wrong…but it might be right, too.
Either way, he was going to do it.
“You’re right, XO,” he repeated. “But so are you, Commander.”
He looked down at the flight suit.
“You have the con for the moment, Iyotake,” he told his XO. “I’ll be in the loop…but I’m going to go suit up. Authorize the missiles for six Lancers. That still leaves Raven with a full salvo in the launchers—and Song is to start fabricating new missiles ASAP. She’s authorized to draw our materials stockpiles all the way down.”
“It’s dangerous,” Iyotake said after a moment. “But it might be worth it. Whatever happens, I guarantee you the Drifters are not going to see it coming!”
Chapter Forty
The first Charlie charges went off almost an hour later, a testimony to both the slowness of the Guardians’ approach and the thoroughness of their search. The entire meteor swarm was almost half a million kilometers long, but getting within thirty thousand kilometers of the larger asteroids shouldn’t have taken that long.
Henry was leaning against a wall in Raven-Eight’s storage bay, linked into a virtual simulacrum of his bridge while still in position to jump aboard the fighter in minutes if they’d missed something.
“Charlie-Four just blew,” Ihejirika reported, unnecessarily to anyone watching the tactical feed. A dozen five-hundred-megaton fusion explosions made quite the display, even before they tore a three-hundred-kilometer-long meteor into shreds.
“I almost feel bad for what we’re doing to the real estate,” Iyotake said. “If anyone lived in this system, this meteor swarm would be part of their astrology. Maybe even their religion.”
“And if anyone lived in a barren hypergiant star system, I’d actually have considered that,” Henry agreed. “As it is, there isn’t even anything here for people to live on.”
The Guardian he was watching dodged away from the explosions, engines pushing hard to fling the big ship clear of what they clearly thought was a trap…and right into the detonation radius of Charlie-Six.
“I wish we had our guns,” Henry told Iyotake as another meteor blew apart, sending the Guardian flinching back toward the edge of the meteor swarm. “I think they’re a bit spooked, and Bandit Two’s new vector would leave her out of support range from Bandit One.�
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“We could send the fighters?” his XO suggested.
“No, that’s not just our Sunday punch, Iyotake; it’s our only punch,” Henry said. “We’ll hold it for when we have no choice.” He considered the display. “Ihejirika, can we manually detonate Charlie-One and -Five?”
“Yeah, we have a relay on the surface with a tightbeam transmitter, but… Oh. I see.”
The tactical officer’s confusion faded before he could even ask. Charlie-Five would create a false sequence, an apparent vector of explosions that might guide the Drifters in the wrong direction. Charlie-One would both look like they were trying to distract from that sequence and be the closest set of charges to Guardian Bandit One.
“Detonating.”
A few seconds passed with lightspeed coms and delays, and Henry nodded to himself as Guardian Bandit Two continued to accelerate away from the center of the swarm—but adjusted her course along the “path” laid out by the detonation of Charlie-Four through Charlie-Six.
Bandit One, on the other hand, was adjusting her course to arc around the bombs…which would bring her quite close to Delta-Two.
“Satine, do you have the data on Bandit One?” he asked.
“I do. I’m thinking I order Delta-Two to pulse up the heat levels a bit—low enough to look like they’re hiding, high enough to look like it’s us hiding badly—until they definitely show interest, then cut everything out. Make them dig.”
“I like it,” Henry agreed. If the Drifters had to dig deep into one of the massive meteors to try and locate a signal that had looked like Raven, that could buy him hours.
“Guardian Bandit Two’s course is going to buy us some time,” he told everyone. “She’s headed along a route that’ll take her to the wrong end of the meteor swarm. If we can get Bandit One to slice up one of the big ice chunks looking for us, that buys us more time.”
He was playing for minutes and hours. He was down to just over thirty-six, but that still meant they needed to play matador for a day and a half.
“Pulsing up Delta-Two engines for a heat signature,” Satine confirmed. “Let’s see if they take the bait.”
Taking the bait turned out to look a lot more impressive than Henry had expected. Based on the Guardian’s slow approach into the meteor cluster so far, he’d been expecting a detailed examination of the meteor and potentially digging into it with lasers to extract Raven.
Instead, the moment Bandit One flagged the heat signature at Delta-Two, the Guardian dove toward the asteroid at full acceleration and spun in space to bring her full broadside to bear. Ten heavy plasma cannon aligned on the ice chunk and went to full rapid fire.
Plasma bolts designed to hammer down energy shields and vaporize meters-thick armor went through ice like it wasn’t even there. Each hit vaporized thousands of cubic meters of ice and exploded tens of thousands more into the void.
Even so, the scale of the meteor they’d buried Delta-Two in meant it took several minutes for Bandit One to reduce one of the largest objects in the star system to debris and vapor. Raven’s shuttle was vaporized somewhere in the middle of the chaos; even Henry wasn’t sure where.
“Maybe we should have put the grav-shield up,” Iyotake murmured. “I wasn’t expecting that.”
“The shuttles don't have them,” Henry replied. “Our grav-shielded shuttles were on Carpenter, though I wish we’d rigged up something now. Even a faked gravity shield might have made the Drifters think they got us.” He shook his head. “They definitely don’t think they got us there.”
The Guardian was slowing to a rendezvous with the new debris cloud, pulsing it with their sensors as they tried to resolve what had drawn their attention.
“Bandit One is poking through the debris,” Ihejirika reported. “With a bit of work, I think we can definitely draw her over to Delta-Three when she’s done there. Assuming she takes the bait, that will draw her farther away from us and buy time.”
“And Bandit Two?”
“Bandit Two is clear of the swarm; I think they’ve detected something along the path we laid.” Ihejirika paused. “I don’t know what, because I don’t have enough resolution from the scanners we left on the surface to ID anything outside the cluster that isn’t under power.”
“At their current velocity, that gives us lots of time, though,” Henry said as he pulled the detailed information on Bandit Two. The Guardian was up to a solid velocity away from Raven, a vector that meant Raven now had at least four hours before they had to worry about Two—and every minute they accelerated away from the cruiser was roughly three minutes more before they could threaten his ship.
“Bandit One is looking extremely lonely,” Iyotake said. “If we take her out…”
“We remove any question of whether we’re in the meteor swarm,” Henry noted. “And while Two is headed away from us, what’s Three up to?”
“Bandit Three is shedding velocity,” Ihejirika replied. The tactical officer paused thoughtfully. “I thought she was heading for the original rendezvous, but the vector is wrong. She’ll hit zero velocity almost a million kilometers short of where Carpenter and Glorious died.”
Henry nodded.
“Protector-Legate Half-Blue-Third-Red sees the same vulnerability on Bandit One that we do,” he said. “Assuming she’s coming right back, how long until Three can reach us?”
“Three hours minimum, ser.”
“My money says One spends most or all of that time sifting through the wreckage of Delta-Two and that whatever Bandit Two saw is far enough away that they’ll only be reaching it around then,” he guessed. “If we can use the Deltas to distract One and Three after that…that gets us some breathing room.”
He shook his head, glad that none of his officers could see it. His best-case scenario said they could play enough games to buy about eight hours. Then they’d be completely out of tricks and relying on their giant chunk of ice to hide them.
Chapter Forty-One
“There goes the last Delta.”
Satine’s soft report was probably redundant, but Henry slumped on the bench on the flight deck anyway. There wasn’t much of a point of him being on the bridge…and they were out of everything anyway.
This shuttle had been pulsing their engines and maneuvering, buying it enough attention from Guardian Three to draw sustained fire for almost fifteen minutes, even after the shuttle had been vaporized.
“I mark the time at twenty-seven hours,” Iyotake said quietly. “All Delta decoys and Charlie charges have been expended, ser. Orders?”
“None,” Henry admitted on a private channel with his XO. “I’ll check with Song and Henriksson in a moment, see if they can lower our heat signature any more, but…we bought fifteen hours we might not have had, Tatanka. I’m not sure what else we can do.”
“I’m guessing that six Lancers can’t take on three Guardians,” Iyotake said.
“With perfect surprise, we might be able to take down one,” Henry said. “Against two or three, they’ll just be a distraction.” He sighed. “I almost wish we had gone for Bandit One when they were alone, now.”
Two of the Guardians were still in the meteor swarm now. Bandit Two had gone a surprising distance off into the void, chasing something, but was now on her way back.
“Any clever ideas, XO?” he asked.
“If we turned off everything, we’d asphyxiate before we boiled,” Iyotake told him in an uncharacteristically grim tone. “I’m told that’s a better way to go.”
“We’re not that far gone yet, XO,” Henry snapped. “We might not make it out of this, but we are by God coming through as officers and spacers of the UPSF.”
“Yes, ser,” his XO said crisply. “Should I loop Song in, ser?”
“Yeah, let’s make this a conference.” Henry gave several mental commands, linking the chief engineer into a three-way private channel.
“Song, what’s our status?” he asked.
“Aren’t you supposed to harass Henriksson for those
questions?” the engineer asked with a sigh. “We’re about what you’d expect. I’ve stepped all four reactors down to ten percent, minimum safe levels. Every weapon capacitor is drained; every system I can think of to shut down is shut down.
“I’ve got drones and people all over the engines still, but it’s not good.” Henry felt as much as saw her shrug. “I suppose I have some good news.”
“I could use good news. What have you got?” Henry asked.
“Compensators are realigned and fixed,” Song told him. “The ship can’t take any subjective gees, it’s just not going to happen, but we can get back up to point five again.”
“That is good news,” Henry agreed. Irrelevant, unfortunately, since the Guardians could get up to point six KPS2, but good news. “Any ideas on reducing heat signatures or escaping this mess?”
She snorted.
“If it can be turned off, I’ve turned it off,” she told him again. “I’ve got one last trick to play, but we can’t sustain it for long.”
“That’s one more trick than I’ve got, Colonel Song,” Henry admitted. “What are we at?”
“I can shut down the radiators and hold all of our heat in the hull,” Song said. “We won’t have zero heat signature, but it’ll be low. Real low.”
“And how fast will the interior air heat up?” he asked.
“Little over a degree centigrade every two minutes,” she said. “So, we’ll have about thirty minutes, and even that is going to send people to medbay. It’s all I’ve got.”
“It might buy us some critical moments, Colonel,” Henry told her. “Get it ready for my command. Or Iyotake’s, depending.”
“Oh, it’s already ready,” Song said. “Give the word and we’ll be sweating in no time.”
“I look forward to it,” Iyotake said grimly.
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