by David Weber
Marina Abernathy glanced up, then exchanged a few more hurried words with a knot of specialists before she turned to face the chief of staff.
"It's clear enough, Sir-we just never anticipated it. The Bugs have developed and deployed a system analogous to the jammer packs they've been using against our fighters. But this version disrupts the datalink systems of starships."
"But . . . but there's nothing bigger than gunboats out there!" McKenna waved at the master plot showing the oncoming torrent of tiny red lights that was coming up against the cruiser screen . . . and suffering far fewer losses from its fire than it should have. "They can't carry second-generation ECM on something that small!"
"They're not. It's a much weaker system than that, with what seems to be a maximum range of not more than two light-seconds-probably closer to one and a half. But within that range, it has the same effect."
Murakuma decided it was time to step in.
"Does it radiate an easily detected emissions signature, like the earlier generation jammer packs?"
"According to the preliminary reports, it does, Admiral."
"Very well, then." She turned to Ernesto Cruciero and pointed to the teeming plot, where the swarms of emerald fighters were still snapping at the heels of the masses of kamikazes. "Ernesto, get with Anson. Our fighters must understand clearly that their first priority is detecting and killing the jamming gunboats."
"Aye, aye, Sir. We'll pass the word-and it looks like several of our strikegroups are already doing just that, on their own initiative."
Murakuma nodded. She would have expected no less.
"I agree we need to kill the jammers," Abernathy put in, "but the destruction of the jamming system does not imply instantaneous restoration of the datalink it was jamming. It's going to take at least a little time to put the net back up, so no matter what our fighters can do. . . ."
The spook left the thought unfinished.
"Both points are well taken," Murakuma acknowledged formally. "But however well it works-or doesn't-it's still the only game in town. Send the orders, Ernesto."
"Also, Ahhdmiraaaal Muhrakhuuuuma," Kthaara said, speaking up for the first time, "it would be well to alert all fleet commands to what the battle-line can expect. They are already at General Quarters, of course. But . . ."
He indicated the plot, where the scarlet ocean was beating against the dam of the cruiser screen. The dam was already starting to spring leaks.
"The battle-line," the old Orion resumed, "including, needless to say this ship, should prepare for heavier kamikaze attacks than we had anticipated."
* * *
The battle rose, if possible, to an even higher pitch of insanity. The cruisers of the screen, many of them now fighting individually rather than as elements in the precision fire control of datagroups-poured out fire in a frenzy of desperation. Fighters corkscrewed madly through the dense clouds of kamikazes in grim efforts to seek out and destroy the jamming gunboats.
There weren't as many of those last as might have been expected from earlier experiences with the first-generation jammer packs. Probably, it was a new system the Bugs hadn't had time to put into true mass production. But great as that mercy might have been, there were still enough of them to make a difference. For all the frantic efforts of the fighters and the cruisers of the screen, more and more kamikazes broke through and hungrily sought out the massed formations of monitors and superdreadnoughts, and the carriers sheltering behind them.
Most especially, they hunted the command ships-like Seventh Fleet's Irena Riva y Silva, a ship by now almost as legendary as the admiral whose lights she flew.
* * *
A thunder god's hammer smashed home, and the entire world rang like one enormous bell. Even in the shelter of his armored, padded command chair and its restraining crash frame, Raymond Prescott momentarily lost consciousness as the latest kamikaze impacted.
That was the wrong word, of course. It wasn't the direct physical collision that not even a monitor could have survived. The last-ditch point defense fire had prevented that, and it very seldom happened in space war anyway. But what had happened as the searing ball of plasma reached out and slammed into the flagship's drive field was bad enough.
Prescott dragged himself back to awareness, shaking his head inside his sealed vac helmet. The reverberations of the kamikaze's death throes echoed through his brain, making it impossible to think quickly or clearly, but his eyes sought out the plot and the data sidebars that detailed his command's wounds out of sheer spinal reflex. But then his attention was pulled back away from them as his private com screen awoke with the call he'd ordered be automatically patched into it if it came.
"Raaymmonnd!" Zhaarnak'telmasa's voice was as torn by static as his image was shredded by interference. "You must abandon ship immediately! The Bahgs have realized you can barely defend yourself now. They are closing in from all sides!"
Intellectually, Prescott knew his vilkshatha brother was right. But there was a difference between what intellect recognized and what the wellsprings which made a man what he truly was demanded.
"All right. But first I want Admiral Meyers and his staff to get off." Riva y Silva was doubling as Allen Meyers' flagship for Task Force 71. "After that-"
Amos Chung had always been bad about delaying the moment he helmeted up. That probably explained the blood streaming down from his lacerated scalp . . . and it certainly explained how he overheard the vilkshatha brothers' hurried conversation.
"Admiral Meyers is dead, Sir!" He shouted over the whooping of the emergency klaxons, the screams of the wounded, and the creaking groans that arose from the ship's savaged vitals. "Direct hit on secondary Flag Plot! And the same hit buckled the escape pod tubes from Flag Bridge! We'll have to use the elevators!"
"All right," Prescott said to Zhaarnak as he unlocked his crash frame and sat up, then turned to Chung. "Amos, tell Anna-"
"She's dead, too, Sir," the spook said harshly.
For a moment, Prescott sat amid pandemonium, head bowed, unable to move.
"Raaymmonnd!" The voice from the com unit was the yowl of a wounded panther.
"Incoming!" someone shouted from what was left of Plotting.
"Come on, Sir!" Chung pleaded. Jacques Bichet joined him. Together, they dragged the admiral physically to his feet and started him towards the hatch. After a few steps, he started moving under his own power. Soon, he and Bichet were helping Chung.
They'd just gotten into the elevator and started toward the boatbay when the next titanic sledgehammer smashed into the wounded ship.
* * *
Irma Sanchez blinked away the blinding dazzle of the fireball. Well, the Ninety-Fourth was the only multispecies squadron, she thought, seeking with bitter irony to hold her grief back out of arm's reach where it couldn't hurt her.
But there was no time to mourn Eilonwwa. She'd broken free momentarily of the battle pattern, where she could at least take stock. They'd stayed with the kamikazes as the latter passed through the collapsing cruiser screen, and on towards the battle-line. Now some of those gargantuan ships were close enough to be naked-eye objects.
She managed to study her HUD through muffling layers of fatigue. The nearest one-a Howard Anderson-class command monitor-was an atmosphere-haloed wreck, shedding life pods, shuttles, and pinnaces as it signaled its distress. Then she noticed the ship ID: it was Riva y Silva, flagship of her own Seventh Fleet. With the years of experience that made the fighter an extension of her own body, she wrenched the little craft into the kind of tight turn that only inertia-canceling drives made possible.
The Code Omega arrived just as her viewscreen automatically darkened.
* * *
Not even the shuttle's drive field saved it from the shock wave that rushed out from the bloated fireball astern where Riva y Silva had been, and small craft carried only the most rudimentary inertial compensators. It was hard to see-the secondary explosion inside the elevator shaft had damaged his helmet viso
r badly, and the HUD projected on the inside of the scorched, discolored armorplast showed strobing yellow caution icons for at least a quarter of his suit's systems. But Raymond Prescott could see as well as he needed to when the brutal buffeting was over and he knelt beside the motionless form of Amos Chung. The intelligence officer's shattered visor showed the ruin inside only too clearly.
He heard a voice over his own helmet com. The com seemed to be damaged, like everything else about his vacsuit, and it took him a second or two to recognize it as the young voice of the shuttle's pilot.
"Admiral . . . everyone . . . our drive's gone, and there's a gunboat coming in fast! Stand by for ejection!"
Prescott obeyed like everyone else, out of the sheer auto-response of decades of training. But even as he sat, his eyes were locked once more upon that uncaring, damnable HUD and the blazing scarlet icon of his suit's location transponder. Even with a working transponder, the chance that an individual drifting survivor would be detected by search and rescue teams-assuming there was anyone left to worry about SAR-were considerably less than even. Without one, there was no chance at all.
Raymond Prescott stared at the blood-red death sentence, and a strange, terrible calm flowed through him. The death that every spacer feared more than any other, if he were truly honest. The fear of falling forever down the infinite well of the universe, alone and suffocating. . . .
He began to reach for a certain valve on his vacsuit.
* * *
It was only because she was following the gunboat that Irma Sanchez detected the crippled shuttle. She pressed on after the Bug, crushed back into her flight couch by the brutal power of the F-4's drive. Grayness hovered at the corners of her vision, but it wasn't acceleration alone that bared her teeth in a savage grin.
There was no time for a careful, by-The-Book attack run. The only way she was going to be able to get any kind of targeting solution was by coming insanely close.
* * *
The damage the shuttle had already taken must have affected the circuitry. The pilot's first attempt to eject his passengers and himself failed.
Surprise at that stayed Prescott's hand.
Someone screamed. The gunboat was lining up on them. Prescott prepared for a quick death instead of a slow one.
Then the pilot yelled something about a fighter.
* * *
The F-4's computer screamed audible and visual warning as a Bug targeting radar locked the fighter up. Irma knew where it was coming from. There was no more time-no time for a proper target lock from her own fighter. She laid the shot in visually, the way every instructor at Brisbane had told her no one could do, and her internal hetlasers stabbed out with speed-of-light death.
In the fragment of an instant before it erupted into a ball of flame, the gunboat birthed its own, slower-than-light death darts.
* * *
The second time, it worked. With a g-force that almost induced blackout (and finished off his suit com once and for all), Raymond Prescott was out into the starry void, just in time to be dazzled by the gunboat's death.
His rank meant his was the first seat in the sequenced ejection queue, and the old-fashioned explosive charge hurled him outwards. But even it was damaged; it fired erratically, its thrust off-axis, and the starscape swooped and whirled crazily . . . and then the shuttle blew up behind him.
A fresh stab of grief ripped through him. So much grief. Grief for all the men and women who'd never gotten off of Riva y Silva at all. Grief for Amos Chung . . . and for Jacques Bichet and the other shuttle passengers he knew were still sitting in their seats, still waiting for their turn in the queue. Still waiting, when the dead man without a transponder had already been launched because he was so "important" to the war effort.
The charge stopped firing, and his hands moved mechanically, without any direction from his brain as he unstrapped from the seat. He thrust it away from him almost viciously and watched it go pinwheeling slowly off across the cosmos. There was a huge, ringing, silent nothingness within him-one that matched the infinite silence about him perfectly-as he watched, as well as he could through his damaged visor, while the seat vanished into the Long Dark that waited for him, as well.
Strange. Strange that it should come to him like this, in the quiet and the dark. Somehow, he'd always assumed it would come for him as it had for Andy, in the flash and thunder and the instantaneous immolation of matter meeting antimatter. In the fury of battle, with the men and women of his farshatok about him. Not like this. Not drifting forever, one with the legendary Dutchman, the very last of the farshatok who'd planned, and fought, and hoped beside him for so many years.
His vacsuit had never been intended for extensive EVA. Its emergency thrusters' power and endurance were strictly limited . . . and they showed another yellow caution light in his HUD. It made no difference, of course-not for a single, drifting human in a vacsuit with no transponder-but he reached for the thruster controls, anyway. The life support of his damaged suit was undoubtedly going to run out soon enough, yet it was important, somehow, that he exercise one last bit of self-determination before the end.
He tapped the control panel lightly, gently, almost caressingly, and the thrusters answered, slowing his own spinning tumble.
When the end came, he would choose a single star he could see through his damaged visor, fix his gaze upon it, and watch as the darkness came down at last.
* * *
Somehow, Irma had managed to punch out in time.
She had no idea how. Nor did she have any true memory of the death of the faithful little fighter which had served her so long and so well as it ate the Bug missile. Now, as she tumbled through space, amid the horror of vertigo, she clung for her sanity's sake to the thought of the extremely powerful transponder every fighter pilot's vacsuit contained.
Actually, a pilot's suit had a number of goodies that went beyond the standard models that everyone aboard a warship wore in combat-and not just its greater capacity to absorb body wastes before overloading with results best not thought about. For one thing, it had a considerably more powerful thruster system than a standard suit.
That thought drove through her brain at last, and she forced control on herself and used the thrusters to stop the tumbling. Then she shut them off. No need to waste the compressed gas. She had nowhere in particular to go. If anything was going to save her bacon, she told herself philosophically, it was the transponder, not the thrusters. Not that it was likely to. She'd probably survive for the short run, for the battle had receded, turning into a distant swarm of fireflies. But that had a downside: no one was close enough for her half-assed helmet com to communicate with, and the odds of anyone coming close enough to pick up even her transponder signal were slim, to say the very best.
So she simply drifted. There was nothing else to do. She drifted for a long time. Eventually, she stopped looking at her helmet chrono. Periodically, she took sips of the nutrient concentrate the suit's life support system dispensed, with no great enthusiasm-the stuff would keep you alive, but it tasted like puke. Mostly, she let her mind wander listlessly through the landscape of memories.
Then, after some fraction of eternity, she spotted another vacsuit.
Somebody from the shuttle, maybe? she wondered. If so, he's probably dead already.
But if he isn't . . . That's a standard vacsuit, but from this close, I ought to be able to pick up even its dip-shit transponder code. Assuming it was transmitting. So it must not be. And with no transponder, he's got no chance.
Without further thought, she maneuvered herself into the right alignment and activated her thruster pack.
The gas was nearly gone when Irma was still about fifty meters short of the other suited figure. She cut the thrusters and let herself coast onward. She managed to snag the other suit en passant, and they tumbled on together in a clumsy embrace for a few seconds before she was able to use the last of the gas to halt the sickening motion.
Well, that's just da
ndy! No more thruster.
Irma brought her helmet into contact with the other's for direct voice communication with a certain resentful emphasis. She gazed through the helmet visor, but whatever this poor bozo had been through, his suit hadn't gotten off unscathed. It was so badly scorched she couldn't even make out the rank insignia, much less the name which had once been stenciled across the right breast, and there were spatters of what had to be blood daubed across it. The enviro pack didn't look any too good, either, although at least the external tell-tales were still flashing yellow, not burning the steady red of someone who would no longer need life support at all. Even the visor's tough, almost indestructible armorplast was heat-darkened. She could barely see into it at all, but she caught the impression of open eyes, looking back at her, so at least the guy was alive and conscious.
"You all right?" she demanded.
"Yes, more or less." The answering voice was badly distorted by the transmitting medium of their helmets, but it sounded a little old for regular space crew. Not weak, or shaky. Just . . . like it ought to be accompanied by gray hair.
"Thank you-I think," it went on. "You must be a fighter pilot, from the looks of your suit."
"Yeah-Lieutenant Commander Irma Sanchez, commanding VF-94. If," she added bitterly, "there's any VF-94 left to command."
"So you have a chance of being found, by someone tracking your transponder. And now I have that chance, too. Yes, I definitely thank you, Commander. By the way, I'm-"
"Can the thanks, Pops," Irma cut him off rudely. "I just pissed away my ability to maneuver-not that it was doing me much good. And before that, I'd gotten my fighter blasted out from under my ass to save that shuttle you were on. So don't thank me, all right? I wasn't doing you a favor. I was just being stupid-as usual!"
