Afterward he could do nothing but stand there wondering just how stupid it was possible for a human being to get.
Eventually Ensign Ehta came back.
“So?” she asked, raising her eyebrows.
He pushed past her and left the station. Headed down the stairs. He was nearly at the bottom before he realized there was nowhere, nowhere at all on this planet, for him to go.
Chapter Seventeen
Up ahead of Lanoe, Maggs’s fighter blazed in the dark with its scrolling coat of arms, and Zhang’s red tentacles writhed across her fairings. His own FA.2 showed no lights at all, though not for the purpose of camouflage—he just wanted to conserve battery power.
He had no idea how long this would take. If it was even possible.
In a career as long as Lanoe’s, it was inevitable he would run up against destroyers—in fact, he’d taken his fair share down in battle. Though always with heavy support from ground batteries or with a wing of fighters screening his advance. He’d never even tried such a foolish thing with just a depleted squadron like this.
Added to the desperation of the plan was the fact that he had no idea what an alien destroyer’s guns would be like.
Derrow had finally convinced him that this was no human enemy they faced. There just wasn’t a better explanation for how weird the enemy drones were, how unlike human ships they were—they had to be aliens. The thought didn’t help his mood.
“This is our big chance,” he told the other two. Though he thought maybe he mostly said it to convince himself. “They were dumb enough to expose one of their principal assets. We take this destroyer away from them, and the entire fleet is weakened. Maybe compromised.”
“Indeed?” Maggs asked. “May one ask how?”
“Derrow said there needed to be programmers in this fleet, somebody to correct the machines when they go wrong. If one of them is onboard this destroyer and we can take them hostage, maybe we can force the rest of the fleet to back off. We could end this whole war right now, right here.”
“There were a fair number of assumptions in that speech,” Maggs pointed out.
“It’s a chance we won’t get again, and it’s worth it just for that,” Lanoe told him. He would have liked to tell the swindler pilot where to stow his doubts, but just then he needed Maggs more than he needed the satisfaction. “Zhang, how’s your imagery coming along?”
“I’ve got good video but it doesn’t tell me much,” she said.
A display popped up in front of Lanoe, a video image of the destroyer in flight. They’d already determined the basic silhouette, a kind of twisted horn shape about two hundred meters long that looked like no human spaceship ever built. There was more detail now, showing a hull studded with machinery or crew areas or who knew what, so tightly packed it made the destroyer look like it was covered in barnacles.
Lanoe studied the image, looking for guns, trying to get an idea of its capabilities, but couldn’t make out any details that made sense to him. One thing did stand out—near the nose of the destroyer the overall shape was broken by a jagged patch that ruined the ship’s tapering curve. “Huh. Does it look to anyone else like somebody took a bite out of this thing?”
“Maybe it was hit by a meteor,” Maggs suggested. “Perhaps that explains why it’s taking its time coming toward Aruna. Maybe it’s damaged, even critically. Oh, wouldn’t it be wonderful if it turned out the thing we’re chasing had gone ahead and gotten itself killed before we arrived? If it was just a dead hulk?”
“You really think that’s a possibility?” Zhang said.
“Not should my life depend on it. Which in all likelihood it does,” Maggs replied. “When it comes to cosmic jokes, typically I find myself the one being laughed at.”
Lanoe frowned. “We can’t afford to assume we know anything here. We go in expecting a massive response—watch our for antivehicle fire, for flak, for escorts…Just keep your eyes open.”
“Oh, aye, aye, Commander,” Maggs said, with a sneer in his voice.
“And keep the chatter down,” Lanoe told him. “Communications by laser only from now on.” He switched off his radio panel before Maggs thought of anything else to say.
He got only a moment of silence, though, before a green pearl appeared in the corner of his vision. He saw it was Zhang contacting him and opened a private channel.
“What do you need?” he asked her.
“Just checking in. Seeing how you’re really feeling about this.”
“Like it needs doing,” he replied.
“Listen—I’m just going to put this out there. If we don’t come back from this, we’re leaving Niraya in a real lurch,” she pointed out. “Valk’s a legend but he can’t handle the defense on his own.”
“If we can’t take down one destroyer with three of us, there’s no point tackling the entire fleet with four,” he told her. He knew better than to think she was questioning his tactics. Back when she’d been his second in command, Zhang had always made a point of playing devil’s advocate just before a big offensive. She didn’t do it because she doubted him, but because she wanted to make sure he’d thought through all the angles.
Knowing her motivation made it slightly less annoying.
“What do you think about Maggs? Is he up for this?”
“He’s got a Blue Star. And we’re about to find out how he earned it. I know you’ll be watching him like a hawk, so I’m going to just pretend I have full confidence in his abilities.”
Zhang laughed. “You’re finally learning to delegate.”
“Guess so.”
“Okay. Just one more thing. If we do make it out of this…if we get back to Niraya.”
“Yeah?”
“I want to buy you a drink.”
He couldn’t help but smile, since she couldn’t see it. “After that long talk we had about feelings, you’re thinking we should see what’s left of what we had, huh? Figure out what we are to each other now.”
“I’d like to give it a shot,” she told him.
He could hear in her voice how serious she was, how much she really wanted to try to patch things up. It had been seventeen years, and things had been ugly between them even back then. He had no idea how he would respond to her now, if they were actually alone somewhere with their helmets down. He had no idea if he could really get past seeing her in a new body. A body a tiny fraction of his age.
Still. A good commander knew when to let his people unwind.
“Sure,” he said. “It’s a date.”
The green pearl winked out as she cut the connection.
It was folly to think that the destroyer wouldn’t have any escorts. Zhang released a cloud of microdrones dedicated to scanning the local volume of space and it wasn’t long before she’d spotted what she was looking for.
She opened a connection to both Lanoe and Maggs. “I’ve found their pickets,” she said. “They’re spread out on an arc about ten kilometers long.”
“How many?” Lanoe asked.
“Sixteen. The same number Valk found back when we first came to this system. My imagery’s pretty blurry but it looks like one big one and fifteen small craft, just like he saw.”
“The same composition?” Lanoe asked. “An interceptor and fifteen of those unarmed orbiters?”
Zhang chewed on her lip. She wasn’t sure what to make of her sensor data. “The big one’s definitely an interceptor, just like the one Valk fought. The little ones, though—they’re smaller than the orbiters he described.” She sent the imagery over to the other two pilots. “Smaller than we are, even. I don’t know what to make of that shape.” In the image the small craft were just a couple of lumpy pods mounted on a skeletal frame. “I think that pod at the back is a thruster unit. The one at the front might be a gun.”
“Best always to assume one’s foe is armed,” Maggs suggested. He sounded bored. Flying through empty space for hours along a preset trajectory could take its toll, Zhang thought. She hoped he would sharpen
up once the shooting began.
“Scouts,” Lanoe said.
Not all fighters were created equal. The cataphracts like Zhang’s BR.9 and Lanoe’s FA.2 were multipurpose assault craft, equally good at bombing runs and raids on line ships and dogfighting. There were smaller craft, though, called carrier scouts, used solely for escorting line ships. Fighters stripped down of everything nonessential, holding just enough fuel for quick jaunts and just enough ammo for a few minutes of fighting at a time. They tended to be underpowered, so much so they couldn’t even mount vector fields—and as a result, they tended to get picked off like flies in any real battle. Cataphract pilots tended to sneer at carrier scouts, though it took a special kind of mad bravery to fly a scout.
“Looks like,” Zhang said, “though I don’t think we should take anything for granted right now.”
“Sure,” Lanoe said. “What’s their trajectory look like?”
“They’re headed toward us, though on a long curve,” Zhang pointed out. “Maybe trying to flank us. I think it’s safe to assume they’ve already noticed us. Using those life-detecting sensors Derrow showed us, I guess. Orders, Commander?”
“You two get on either side of them. I’ll hang back a little and catch whatever you miss. Take these things down fast—we’re not far from the destroyer now, and if it starts firing flak at us we want to be able to get out of the way.”
“My pleasure,” Maggs said, and surged ahead.
Zhang cursed under her breath and chased after him, Lanoe dwindling behind her until he was just a point on one of her displays, a tiny flicker of warmth under her fingers. She poured on the speed and hit her maneuvering jets, her inertial sink pulling her firmly but gently back in her seat.
Up ahead Maggs had pulled into a tight corkscrew maneuver, starting his attack run already, well before they reached the enemy. It was a ridiculous waste of fuel and she wondered, not for the first time, if maybe he’d bought his Blue Star—or used his famous father’s influence to get it. She knew nothing of the man or his record, only what Lanoe had told her. Which was mostly that she needed to watch his every move.
The enemy ships appeared on her displays first, then as tiny dots she could just make out in the gray distance. One small advantage of her cybernetic eyes—because she couldn’t see the stars, the enemy ships stood out like the only objects in the universe. They were strung out on a line, each one keeping an exactly equal distance from the one on either side. The slightly larger dot had to be the interceptor, keeping station at the left end of the line.
Soon she had crisp imagery and she got a good look at the scouts for the first time. Their design was dirt simple and ugly. The gun pod at the front was spherical, its curved shape broke only by a tiny aperture that made the pod look like an eyeball. A thin skeletal frame extended from the back of the pod to connect to a lumpy thruster unit that looked almost porous because it was covered in dozens of tiny maneuvering jets. No human engineer, Zhang was convinced, would ever build something so awkward and mercilessly utilitarian.
Maybe alien engineers had different priorities. Maybe all they cared about was making the little ships lethal. Well, she thought, only one way to find out.
Maggs reached them first, still spiraling madly at a speed that would have crushed him into paste if not for the inertial sink in his fighter. He was coming at the enemy from the right, so Zhang curved in on the left in a broad arc, keeping well clear of the line to come at them from the side.
The enemy ships started firing before either of them was in range. The interceptor pumped out kinetic impactors, big chunks of metal, just like Valk had said. The scouts belched plasma fire, just like the foundry towers back on Aruna, though her sensors told her this plasma was a lot less energetic. She did the math in her head, because she knew in a second she would be right in the path of those guns. The plasma fire would only be effective at short range, but the scouts wouldn’t need to score direct hits. Much like with the foundry towers, even deflected shots would heat up her BR.9 until she was roasted in her cockpit, until the blood in her skull boiled and turned to steam.
Best not to get hit too many times, then, she thought.
This was going to be a tough fight, the two of them against sixteen. Zhang braced herself and punched her throttle, readying herself for the barrage—
“Mind if I take this dance?” Maggs called, startling her.
Before she could answer all hell broke loose.
Maggs came in fast, tightening his corkscrew until he was almost spinning on his axis. His twin PBW cannon flashed wildly, almost hypnotically, and one scout then another was sliced in half, their plasma pods rippling and melting like candle wax as they overheated.
The other thirteen responded instantly, breaking their formation and spinning away each on a different trajectory, some looping high over Maggs, some slipping underneath him. They moved with speed and agility Zhang could barely believe, turning and pivoting until she couldn’t follow them, until they were just flickering points on her display. Their plasma guns twisted around in their mountings, their fire lancing out at Maggs a dozen times a second. Zhang thought he was done for as they swarmed around him like a cloud of deadly gnats, as fire washed over the flanks of his BR.9.
But it turned out she’d been wrong about Maggs.
His fast corkscrew approach hadn’t just been for show. At that speed even a computer couldn’t track him. The scouts were incredibly maneuverable, but it seemed all they could do to keep out of his way.
Sometimes not even that. His PBWs scored another hit, and then a fourth. The scouts folded up like they were made of sticks and cheap glue. He struck a fifth scout, his fire carving a line through its eyeball-like gun pod, and the thing just exploded, metal scrap jetting outward in every direction, the plasma inside burning as hot as the surface of a star for a millisecond, expanding in a vast shock wave that was gone before Zhang could even register its existence.
He cut the sixth one in half, its thruster and its gun pod spinning off in opposite directions, both quite dead.
The seventh twisted and darted away from him, only to collide with the eighth, neither of them surviving the smash-up.
Half the picket detail gone and Zhang hadn’t even properly engaged yet. She made a mental note.
Maggs had not bought his Blue Star. He’d earned it the old-fashioned way, by being a hell of a pilot.
Zhang’s vector field throbbed all around her then and she had to stop thinking about anybody else. A kinetic impactor had just come within centimeters of tearing her to pieces.
The interceptor was right on top of her.
Though less emaciated-looking than the scouts, it was still ugly as sin, a shapeless, lumpy design studded with spiky guns. It seemed to fire in every direction at once, its impactors streaking outward on random trajectories. Valk had described the never-ending assault of projectiles but she hadn’t understood what he meant until she saw it for herself. It didn’t seem to be aiming at all, just lobbing rounds at everything in its local volume.
She readied a disruptor round, then slewed around it in a wide, careful arc, keeping her nose pointed at the interceptor as she raced past its flank then around until she could see the hot exhaust of its thrusters. Her weapons panel chimed and queued up messages as the BR.9 worked desperately at finding a good firing solution.
She swiped the display away, instead locking her weapons to fire straight ahead. Then she brought her nose around to line up perfectly with the interceptor’s glowing main thruster.
An impactor bounced off her canopy, rattling her bones. Warning chimes sounded from her damage control board.
She ignored them. Burned to stabilize until she felt like she was hanging motionless in space, the interceptor rotating slowly in front of her. Flexed the fingers of her hand, then wrapped her index finger around the trigger on her control stick.
Zhang fought by one simple edict: Never waste ammunition.
One shot, one kill.
She wa
ited until she could look straight down the interceptor’s main thruster, into the hot core of its engines. She wasn’t thinking at all, she was just there, an extension of the fighter’s weapons. When she squeezed the trigger she felt nothing.
The fighter lurched almost imperceptibly as the disruptor round jumped free. The tiny shock was enough to bring her back to herself and she slammed her control stick over to one side even as she punched the throttle, sending her veering off to the side, well clear of the interceptor.
Her disruptor detonated deep in its belly. It seemed to blur in her displays as it vibrated with the chain of explosions. Then some store of fuel or ammunition inside it cooked off and it blossomed into a vast cloud of heat and debris. Zhang’s boards all chimed at her for a moment as she was buffeted by the shock wave, but her vector field held and the warning signals went silent one by one.
Zhang felt a smile creep across her face. She’d won. She’d beaten the bastard and she was still alive and—
Then a scout swung through her view, its gun pod staring right in through her canopy. Her eyes showed her an infrared view of the thing and it was bright, blindingly bright as it belched plasma across the front of her BR.9, searing heat pouring into her canopy until sweat coursed down her face and she was certain this was it, that she’d made her last mistake, that she was dead—
But as quickly as the heat came, it fell away. Ahead of her the scout had been torn to shreds, reduced to ragged jetsam that twisted away into nothingness.
A sleek shadow raced across her view, so fast she barely noticed. Maggs, in his own fighter, coming to her rescue.
She scanned the local volume of space and found none of the enemy left. The scout that he’d just blown up, the one that nearly killed her, had been the last of the fifteen. He’d destroyed them all while she took out the interceptor.
She opened a communications link. “Nice shooting,” she said. “Thanks.”
“Entirely my pleasure,” he told her.
Maybe he wasn’t such a bad sort after all, she thought. She’d met enough pilots in her time—trained enough of them—that she knew there was a certain sort, a kind who were insufferable in the barracks room but once they were out on the field they found their true selves, their nobler natures, and—
Forsaken Skies Page 30
