by John Carr
Fighter Rank Vil smiled at the fragility of the human norm craft. Museum pieces, he thought in wonder. At least the Imperial Invictas, even half a century out-of-date, had been adversaries of a sort. He hadn’t actually meant to destroy the kites, only shake them up a bit, but at least two of the triple-winged high ones, the ones that didn’t register on his radar, had simply disintegrated as he passed. Fascinating, really. He looked down at the remaining enemy ships, most out of control, one or two fighting to recover from his pass. He saw no parachutes.
That’s interesting, he thought idly.
Still, any survivors would have the word out that the “pirates” were here, in force. He and his wingman, Stahler, had been waiting all morning to show off their newly painted fighter craft.
Fighter Rank Stahler hailed him on the combat frequency. “Amazingly frail ships.”
“Affirm. What do you think of my introduction to the cattle of the Dol Guldur’s air superiority?”
“Effective, but a bit overpowering, don’t you think?”
Vil checked his screen and visuals. He shrugged unconsciously.
“Evidently not. A couple of the kites are re-forming. We should have time to splash another pair before returning. Let’s go subsonic; be sure to give them a good look. I’ll show them some vertical thrust maneuvers.”
THE BRTTLE OF SHUROfi 361
“Have fun,” Stahler said without emotion. He had not embraced the pirate role as wholeheartedly as Vil and most of his fellow pilots, and he had never believed in arrogance toward an outclassed opponent. Desperate foes did desperate things, and could very easily surprise you.
IV
The flat spin was often fatal, Leino recalled coolly from his flight school classes. None of the aircraft’s control surfaces interacted with the surrounding air stream the way they had been designed to. Uossi Suomi craft used to have tail chutes or canard airfoils to help in such situations, but that was a long time ago.
Leino began going over every technique he knew to recover from the spin. Every aircraft type recovered in a different way, and you couldn’t really be sure how a particular ship would do it - or if it would do it at all - until you had to try and do for real. By then there was often no time to learn.
But he was lucky; he had altitude, his engine was still running, even his hearing had come back - in one ear, anyway. The airframe was making a high-pitched rattling sound, like a snare drum.
Leino dropped the flap opposite to the direction of the spin and kicked the rudder likewise as far as it would go. The airframe groaned impressively, but there seemed to be little effect otherwise. The ground was a good deal closer, now. Leino repeated his last maneuver and added a hard push on the stick, then yanked the throttle.
The biplane shuddered as its engine roared, the tachometer needle snapping past the redline. The ship stood on one wing, turned onto its nose, and dropped like a stone into a power dive.
Wonderful, he thought. At least before, I was going to die sitting down - not face first.
But it was possible to recover from a dive. He pulled out of it with a scarce hundred meters of daylight beneath him. He didn’t blackout, and that was a blessing, too. Recovering with a roll, Leino regained his former altitude in minutes, only to see the formation utterly shattered. Three aircraft were missing from the Redfielders’ squadron, and one of his own as well.
The spooks were nowhere to be seen but at the speeds they were obviously capable of, they could be back at any moment.
“Viggen, this is Leino, do you read?” His voice sounded funny to him; he ran his tongue over his gums, finding very little left of his front teeth. I must look wonderful, he thought; blood running down my face and no teeth. The wife’ll love this.
“Leino, this is Viggen, I read you; thought we’d lost you for a few seconds there. Nice flying.”
“Thanks. What the devil were those things?”
“Looked like supraorbitals. Some kind of fighter. Insignia makes them pirates, by my guess. Not scruffy ones either, like that Black Hand bunch that passed through here a while back. And pirates would make that sort of pass on ships like ours - arrogant bastards. Shock wave took out four of our boys. Sorry, still no pickup on radar.”
The radios squawked with another signal.
“Break, break, break. This is Viggen Four.” It was the Redfielder pilot who had been at high altitude with one of Leino’s men.
“Go ahead, V-Four,” Viggen said. The Redfielder squadron was indeed well-trained. Despite the obvious superiority of their opposition, they had all reformed into flying formation, and Leino’s boys were right with them. Leino felt a little better. He was airborne among some of the best Haven had to offer.
Not that it had saved four of them when that supersonic sky-train had gone by.
“I have visual on the spooks, bearing 227 degrees, very far below your position, closing fast. Doesn’t look like they’re making the same speed as before, sir.”
“Leino, I am to defer to you in this mission,” Viggen’s voice came through with a hard edge of desire. “What are your orders, engage or disperse?”
“My orders for my group were specific that Uossi Suomi ships were not to fire on your aircraft, nor to engage these things, Viggen.”
“You are breaking up, Leino. “Say again,” Viggen’s signal was crystal clear.
“Leino out.”
Good luck, Viggen, he thought. I would very much like to have met you. Leino banked his craft and watched the Redfielders position themselves for the interception courses that would perhaps allow them a firing pass at the spooks.
Forty-One
I
“Time to recovery of fighters?” First Rank Diettinger asked.
“Seven minutes, sir. Attack run to commence in twenty-seven minutes, by Second Rank’s program.”
Diettinger noted the tone in the mention of Second Rank, a respected officer, as dynamic as she was competent, and blooded as a Soldier; the bridge crew resented her re-assignment. Saurons, they believed, were Soldiers to fight, not livestock to breed.
Diettinger knew they were only half-right. Saurons were warrior stock, bred to fight.
He kept silent, however. Against his will, he realized he missed Second Rank, too.
“Vil, this is Stahler. Do you see what I see.”
The rhetorical question brought a grin from Fighter Rank Vil. The cattle were actually turning to attack them. Bright flashes of light along the cowls of the antique enemy aircraft revealed the firing of their archaic slug-throwers.
Vil held a straight and steady course, compensating for the loss of lift with vertical thrusters, cutting his speed back as much as possible to give the cattle a target they could not miss. The high velocity slugs flattened themselves against the Sauron fighter craft’s skin and canopy, to no effect.
“My turn,” Vil said quietly. He acquired four of the rear aircraft with his weapons radar; for some reason the attackers actually bearing down on him still did not register on his sensors. No matter. Four light missiles lurched away from the underbelly of his craft, lancing up to the rear aircraft in seconds.
Leino saw the missiles. Instinctively, he allowed the one bearing down on him to come as close as he dared before pulling the stick back and dropping into a hammerhead stall. There was a noise like a pickax piercing a steel drum, and Leino actually saw the missile pass through the thin metal of his upper right wing and fly on through, the fire from its rocket motor melting a hole around the puncture point and setting his sleeve and headgear aflame.
Either the wing hadn’t offered enough resistance to detonate the warhead, Leino thought in numb disbelief, or the proximity fuse had failed. Either way, I’m still alive.
The same could not be said for the remainder of his squadron. Clouds of blast-dispersed smoke hung over columns of flaming debris tumbling downward, glittering in the bright, late-morning sun.
Leino slapped out the fire on his arm and headgear before it could spread to the oxygen supp
ly in his mask; if that happened, he knew, he was gone. Not that he held much hope for himself, now. The vibration in the airframe was rattling his teeth, and he could barely hold the stick on a steady course.
He looked over the side to see that the pirates were actually hanging in midair. Resting, he supposed, on vertical thrusters, as the Redfielders circled and fired on them, to no apparent effect. One of the spooks began to ease forward, apparently readying to make another pass.
Leino made a decision and thought of his wife and unborn child. He hoped it survived. If so, he hoped it was a boy. Haven was a bad place for a girl without a father.
“I confess I’m beginning to enjoy this, Stahler,” Vil signaled. “One more pass?”
“We have to leave some of them to spread the news of the Dol Guldur ‘pirates’; recall time coming up, anyway. Leave that biplane alone and take out as many as you can of those triplane stringbags as we leave.”
He had decided Vil could have all the ‘fun’ he wished. Stahler had little stomach for slaughter. It was inefficient.
“Good enough,’’ Vil cheerfully agreed. Despite all their training as Sauron Soldiers, there was something of the freebooter in every fighter pilot who ever lived, and Vil was no exception.
But if all fighter pilots are rogues, then all are heroes to some degree as well, and of that, Marinus Leino was a prime example.
The Redfielder craft, Leino knew, were even more fragile than his own. If his ship was rattling fit to shake apart, theirs could not survive another close pass by the spooks, and it was obvious to him that another such flyby was about to occur.
From above and to one side, he could see the spooks begin their vectors. Leisurely, almost insultingly slow, they were giving him a wide berth, letting him have plenty of room to run home and spread word of the godlike, star-spanning pirates who had come to call. Look on our works, Haveners, and despair, Leino thought with a grim smile.
The taste of blood from his face and gums was salty and warm in his mouth. He spat. Perhaps he could send these fellows back home with a message of his own.
“Surprise,” Leino whispered, as he pushed the shuddering stick forward. The biplane quivered, humming like a guitar string, as it nosed into a dive.
Fighter Rank Vil saw the kite above and to his right begin a dive, and promptly dismissed it from his thoughts. Its pilot had obviously decided to take the opportunity to make his run to safety. The recall signal sounded, and at the same moment, another tone went off in the cabin, this one a strident, warning. Vil’s radar proximity alarm had activated. And at that moment, Fighter Rank Vil’s Sauron reflexes did something they had never done in all his twenty-two Standard Years: they failed him. Shock had numbed them.
Stahler watched incredulously as the cattle’s obsolete kite slammed into Vil’s right front quarter. The fighter craft’s atmospheric intakes were wide open, supercharging air though the engines for the vertical thrusters. Great chunks of the ramming ship were gobbled up by the turbines, which proceeded to shred themselves to bits on the invading materials.
Fuel feed lines ruptured, spraying liquid hydrogen into the empty maw of the gutted turbine housing; most of its insides had been spewed out the rear and bottom fans, along with the remnants of the pilot and his plane. The fuel ignited in the superheated environment, in hundredths of a second
it spread to the fuel tanks, and Fighter Rank Vil and his ship vanished in a colossal blue-white fireball.
Stahler saw the other kites beating away, almost at ground level by now. He was intensely impressed. Vil had been a Sauron and a comrade Soldier, but even human norms deserved praise for such an act. Ignoring his own recall signal, Stahler executed a slow circle, standard tribute among fighter pilots to a downed enemy since man first took his wars to the skies. Then he nosed the fighter up and took her out of the atmosphere.
II
Diettinger was mildly surprised at losing one of the supraorbital fighters in combat. When he found out how, he too was impressed. Haven evidently bred warriors. So much the better. He would need such people.
The moment the docking bay notified him that Stahler’s craft was secured, Diettinger turned to Weapons.
“Weapons, stand by.”
“Acknowledged, First Rank.”
In the immersion display before him, Haven turned, filling the bridge with its blue-green immensity. The new homeworld, Diettinger thought. The Breedmasters were optimistic that the moon’s history and its rugged environment would have produced a hardy strain of humanity, many of whom would be acceptable for interbreeding with the Saurons settling there. And, according to Second Rank, they had already bred fine warriors in the past; Haven was the former home of the Seventy-Seventh Imperial Marines. A division that had been a thorn in the side of High Command on more than one occasion, especially at Lavaca.
But before the Saurons could settle, they would have to be sure they would not be discovered. The Race must survive, at all costs, Diettinger knew. And that meant Haven must not ever be found. Not until its new masters were ready. To that end, Weapons had sent one of the shuttles off to the Alderson Point, setting detection mines and missile pods. The next few ships which might ever enter Haven System, during those perilous few seconds of Alderson disruption, would find a fatal welcome.
“Status?”
“Primary communications centers coming into range of beam weapons now, First Rank. Low-orbit EMP satellite warhead armed, ready for detonation.” Weapons turned. “This is the main concentration in the large lowland valley. All electromagnetic transmission observed on our first pass has ceased.”
Diettinger rubbed his good eye. My last one, he thought. The old myths spoke of the god Odin, who had traded an eye for wisdom. I should certainly hope it made him wiser to lose an eye. I know that it did me.
It occurred to him suddenly that in the legends Second Rank has appropriated for their use, the warrior-king Balor’s one great eye had been a weapon. An eye-like storm cloud dominated the surface of the gas giant around which Haven orbited, making Cat’s Eye the distinctive world of the Byers’ Star system which owned it. Now their disguise was as minions of a great, flaming orb. Diettinger wondered why, with all these eyes in his thoughts, he couldn’t discern the future of his people more clearly. He shook his head. Too tired, he thought. I’m beginning to ramble.
He had no real doubts about the course that he had set for his people; and certainly no compunctions regarding the effects that course would have on the teetering civilization of the world below them. Still, he had been at war for almost forty years, and the thought of it all ending with a final, eternal run-to-ground depressed him. He shook his head, sighing at the realization of his own fatigue. There were few things sadder, he considered, than a Soldier with no more battles to fight.
“Begin.”
Vessel First Rank Galen Diettinger gave the order that ended the world.
III
The first visible action was the detonation of the enhanced EMP devices in Haven’s upper atmosphere. Even as squabbling city-states on the surface finally began negotiating on how best to deal with the “pirates,” their communications ended in mid-word. Weapons’ timing and deployment were flawless.
The Fomoria - now the Dol Guldur - was large and low enough to cast her shadow on the clouds, lands and seas of Haven as she passed overhead.
As that shadow passed, it left a swath of destruction in its wake beyond the experience of any living Haveners.
The orbital surveillance monitoring station where Delancey and Alec waited for the end went in a massive nuclear fireball. The University of Haven communication center had been quiet since the Castell City nuclear strike. All three had been on the priority targets lists.
At the Uossi Suomi airfield where Flynn was listening to hysterical radio reports before the EMP, no nuclear weapons were employed. Here the Dol Guldur’s beams sufficed. The hangars were neatly, almost comically sliced into collapsing segments, their dusty, oil-soaked interiors quickly ca
tching fire, consuming themselves.
Men ran to and fro, no real sense of direction in their movement, only a frantic, desperate need to put distance between themselves and the scene of destruction. But the destruction was all around them, and running from one ignited hangar only brought them face to face with another.
Flynn, alone, retained some measure of calm as he trotted into the field office and spun the big telescope there over to the skylight. The day had been one of Haven’s razor-edged, clear-skied beauties, visibility unlimited. Flynn was sure he could get at least a glimpse of the attackers’ ships.
The sounds of explosions outside affected him little; he was, after all, nearly deaf. Looking back along the steepening angle of the beams, he found their source, the great tapered cruciform shape of a starship, long end forward. It was gliding almost directly overhead now, seeming to be moored to the surface of Haven by the dozens of threads of destructive energy connecting it to the carnage there.
Flynn could just discern the huge device of the flaming eye on its underbelly, but he recognized the general construction style and displacement of weapons. As a former Imperial Marine, he was not fooled for a second.
“Saurons,” he whispered, more in wonder than fear or loathing. “I’ll be a sonofa - ”
The last particle weapons discharge from the Dol Guldur was a direct hit on the Uossi Suomi airfield office. Master Mechanic Flynn died in despair, sure that the Saurons must have won the war if they were down to annexing places like Haven.
Forty-Two
I
John Claude Hamilton woke up very slowly, feeling unusually content and at peace with the world. He cracked opened his eyes to find himself in an unfamiliar room. The smell of perfume and musk lay heavy in the air. No, he amended, the room was familiar, but changed. It was his grandmother’s old room - What am I doing here?
My God! he thought, as realization of where he was sunk in. It took all his willpower to keep himself from bolting straight-up. He looked at the antique dresser and saw a picture of a young General Cummings in an Imperial Marine uniform. He slowly turned his head to the other side of the bed where the covers were bunched up over an unmistakably female form. What have I done now?
