Crisis

by David Drake

  Dalle groaned. “I’m not that good. The action at the end would likely be me. I’d never hear the end of it if I came back wounded, kill ribbon or no.”

  “Whatzamatter, you can’t get professional courtesy around here?” Pat slapped Mack on the shoulder and edged past him into the hall. “C’mon, I’ve got to report. You can walk with me down to the shuttle bay.”

  He was acting with more bravado than he felt. Admiral Abe Meier himself had addressed the assembly of medical corps pilots. For the big battle they needed every pilot who could handle a one-man ship. The number of converted Khalian fighters brought up the total to more ships than there were qualified men to fly. The Fleet couldn’t fall back on its nonhumanoid complement; there wasn’t time to refit all the units to anything but quadrupedal operation. Without hesitation, every medical courier had stepped forward to volunteer to do their part. They hadn’t needed much convincing.

  Besides, Pat wanted a crack at flying a real fighter. He didn’t mind being on the behind-the-scenes courier squad, picking up after the fighting was over, but he had originally trained with the combat pilots. He envied them their repertoire of adventure stories with themselves as the heroes. Silently he shook hands with Mack, and turned away, leaving the medic at the hatchway.

  He joined his fellows in the shuttle bay. There was a lot of slapping on the back and false cheer, but they all knew that this was the Fleet’s biggest test, and they were an integral part of its defense. Most of the men and women assembled had already seen years of war service. By all rights, they should have been back on their home worlds and stations with their families, enjoying their mustering-out bonuses. They were tired. Otlind knew he was comparatively fresh, and it made him feel a little guilty.

  A small squad of Khalia huddled by themselves in one corner of the bay. Otlind found it hard to call the rabid Weasels brothers-in-arms, but there was no choice. Orders came from above. Too many of his friends had died fighting them, and he’d picked up too many dismembered Alliance corpses where the Khalia had passed. It seemed an unbelievable about-face for any reasonable mind to have to make, but then, this was the military.

  The flight deck sergeant signaled “scramble,” and the pilots ran for their assigned craft.

  “Otlind? You’re my wingman,” a burly woman in a dark green flight suit informed him. Her dark brown hair had red highlights in it that looked yellow under the harsh spots in the bay. She had tiny, slim-fingered hands and capable wrists at the end of her massive arms: power to back up superior small motor control. She clasped his right hand in hers.

  “Right, Lieutenant Marsden. Nice flying with you,” he said, following her toward their row. As soon as Otlind leaped for the cockpit of his craft, the lights in the bay darkened from white to red. He settled his muscular frame into the impact padding of the pilot’s chair, fitting the webbing across his chest and adjusting the headrest against his neck.

  As many times as he had practiced the takeoff and fan-out in the combat simulator, nothing equaled the feeling Pat got from actually powering up the fighter. It was immediately evident how much more oomph it had than his shuttle did. The fighters flew by attracting or repelling against the magnetic fields of larger bodies: planets, stars, and, in a pinch, other ships. They also featured repulsor fields that prevented the attraction from becoming fatal, sometimes providing the pilot with that one moment’s grace to respond and swerve aside, with the help of tiny impulse jets, to avoid becoming a space-going hood ornament. You couldn’t do anything with terminal velocity except loop around, and that took some skill. Otlind hoped that his was sufficient.

  Marsden was wingleader for Charlie squadron, a regular fighting unit. She had offered to pair with Otlind instead of sloughing him off on a flank unit with the other medical couriers because she was impressed by his training record, and thought that his instincts were good enough to keep him alive. In the three days they had to train, Otlind had picked up on the tricks needed to fly the Khalian hot rods faster than most of the other medflies. At the moment, surrounded by ace fighters swimming alongside him like guppies out into the vast ocean of black, he didn’t see that as much of an advantage. The job of the fighter units was to provide a screen for the Fleet’s dreadnoughts. One by one the tiny craft left the protective shadow of the Elizabeth Blackwell, and joined the warships looming across the void over the glowing disk of Khalia.

  “Count off, Charlie,” Marsden barked into her com unit as she shepherded her squadron into position. “Charlie One!”

  “Charlie Two!” Otlind said, concentrating on staying dead level on the plane with his wingleader. His armament consisted of laser cannons and two missiles, one on either side of his undercarriage. The tiny holotank showed a handful of minute blips moving out into space before the larger dots that represented the Fleet’s transports and destroyers. Voices of the other four pilots of Charlie squadron registered on his ears, but his mind was pinned to the controls in front of him. As little as he liked to admit it, he was scared. He was the least experienced of the six, and he wondered where it would show.

  “There is nothing out here but me and my voice and your targets. Got that?” Marsden growled into her pickup. “Never mind what the brass are thinking, or what the Syndic scum throw at you. Acknowledge!”

  “Yes, Lieutenant!” the pilots chorused.

  What the hell, Otlind thought, it was better than sitting on the Blackwell twiddling his thumbs. The medflies worked twelve hours a day shuttling bodies back and forth, including under fire, and they had yet to receive any of the credit or glory for helping the Fleet keep running. Still, he kept thinking of coming back a hero, an individual in a small ship, lauded for beating the odds against the evil Syndicate, blowing hell out of the bastards.

  The enemy ships showed up on his small holotank long before they would have become visible to the naked eye. Immediately Marsden started arraying her small squadron, matching the moves made by her opposite number, still halfway across the solar system. In his earpiece Otlind could hear the squadron leader replying to unheard chatter from other units strung out across the face of the Fleet’s planetward flank.

  We look like gnats, he thought, catching a glimpse of the activity in the holotank. Red blips indicated the Syndicate; white, blue, or yellow were classes of Fleet ships. He was flying a blue blip.

  The enemy closed quickly. There was no element of surprise possible except, he hoped, that there were a lot more Fleet fighters in space than they expected. After all, where could the Fleet raise trained pilots in the middle of nowhere? Thousands of light-years from their main planets and on the edge of a sector they had occupied for less than a year. He grinned ferally, feeling that he had put one over on them already.

  Immediately Marsden gave the order to engage. Indicators glowed around the red blips that she wanted them to take. The blinking one forward of Otlind’s position was his. He altered course slightly as he flew toward it, computer-matching its moves for his best advantage, like a 3-D game of chess.

  After all the hurrying up to wait, the action came quickly. The holotank revealed the laser shots flashed from the enemy craft. Otlind veered back and forth, dropping toward the planet with an impulse thrust to avoid a dead-shot that might have drilled him right between the eyes. He threw more power to his forward shields just in time for his computer to inform him that it had deflected a hit.

  His suit suddenly felt too tight, as if it would constrict his arms, grappling them away from crucial controls. He was going to die, in the lousy first five minutes of battle.

  “Dammit, Charlie Two, what are you doing? Peel left!” Marsden’s voice barked in his ear.

  That broke his mood of self-pity and woke up the pilot in his head. His hands moved before his mouth could make the acknowledgment, and the tank showed laser traces lancing from behind him and impacting on the Syndic’s shields. He looped under and up, planting his sights straight into the belly of the enemy craft, peppering it along with Marsden until he saw its shield
give. His craft flew onward, through the shower of hot white sparks it left as it exploded. Otlind could hear the rain of particles bounding off his hull. One down, a million others to go. He veered around to rejoin Charlie.

  “That’s my kill, Charlie Two,” said the squadron leader matter-of-factly. “Wake up over there! That could have been you!” The holotank showed another red dot blinking, and he set his craft’s nose toward it.

  All at once Otlind’s muscles settled. He’d already made his mistake, so the suspense was over. There was something about a pressured situation that brought out the best performance he could give. He flew high, left, and behind Marsden as she engaged a distant fighter in a fire fight. It launched a missile toward her that he picked out of midspace with a lucky shot. It imploded in a cloud, which was shortly swelled by the remains of the craft from which it came.

  More fighters swarmed in to counter them, attempting to cut them off from the rest of the flank. Their shields glowed white where his bolts hit them, but none of the sparks was a killing shot. The other Fleet gnats seemed parsecs away in his tank. Otlind got separated from Marsden briefly, pursued by two Syndic fighters.

  “This way, Charlie Two,” crowed a voice in his commset. It was Charlie Five, an older man who had been flying a fighter longer than Otlind had been alive. “Bring ‘em to Daddy . . .”

  Tri-vid games were in some ways more satisfying than real-life combat. He couldn’t tell if the two bogeys had been blown up by Five and Six until he turned around to look. No kabooms, no triumphant electronic music, just a little encouraging chatter among the flyers on his squadron’s frequency.

  “Nice work!” he called to Five as he sailed below the others, seeking to reposition himself near Marsden. “That’s some good flyswatting.”

  “Thanks, Two. Hey, look out, we’ve got more company!”

  “Radio-silence!” Marsden growled. “Watch your tanks for assignment!”

  Three Syndic fighters had peeled off from the main force and committed to his position. There were more fighters coming this way than were attacking the spaceward flank. His three followed him as he flew an irregular serpentine pattern that sent their laser shots at his tail lancing harmlessly out into space, away from the bulk of the Fleet flotilla. Friendly fire was a problem, too. He didn’t want to cream one of his wingmen.

  More Syndics came out of the planetary glare and showed up big and bright in his tank. It was all he could do to elude their targeting mechanisms with fancy footwork. Their ships were nearly as fast as his was, and far more heavily armed.

  He began to congratulate himself on his near-miraculous reaction time. The bad guys were missing him. There should have been at least one hit, but the computer insisted he’d evaded them all. He was invisible, passing without trace. Suddenly Otlind heard the Death Knell, the warning alarm in the system that alerted him that a missile had acquired him. It was coming in on his starboard flank. As long as it read his telltale trace, it would pursue him. He couldn’t turn and blow it into dust wIth his three new buddies so close behind. The rest of Charlie squadron was involved in the thick of fighting. Flying straight to make it to them in time to knock out the pursuing missile was to leave himself vulnerable to a killing bolt.

  Twisting and swerving, Otlind dove over the heads of two of the Syndic fighters, looped between the second and third, and slingshotted around Khalia’s second moon. His tank told him that the Syndics had considerately blown up the missile that came hurtling toward them in Otlind’s wake. Then he plummeted into the Khalian atmosphere.

  “You Weasel bastards have never done me any good in your life. Now’s your chance to change my opinion of you,” Otlind mumbled through gritted teeth. His small ship bucketed as friction caught it in the magnetic/stratospheric envelope of the planet. The skin monitor whined as the outer temperature of his craft zoomed. But if anyone could handle dropping from vacuum to atmosphere and out again, it was one Patrick Otlind, ace scooter pilot. His subterfuge had worked. The Syndic fighters were nowhere in sight. They must have veered off when their ships began to buck against the friction, picturing him as a falling cinder. The radio exploded into life, blaring unmodulated atmospheric interference into his earpiece. He barked an order at the computer controller, and the noise died to a crackling hiss. There was no point in trying to break through the static to contact Marsden; she’d ordered radio silence, and the interruption might distract her from her job.

  He blew through the upper atmosphere, trusting his instruments rather than squinting through the condensation frosting his cooling canopy. If he took a sharp right toward planetary south, he could come out of the corona on that side of Khalia and surprise the fighters attacking the rest of Charlie squadron.

  Halfway around the world, Otlind saw a handful of big dots appear in his tank approaching atmosphere. They were red. Enemy craft, on this side of the planet? Khalian pirates? No, the computer said they were Syndicate troop transports, In his opinion, they had emerged from warp pretty close to Khalia. On the other hand, they had owned this world for fifty years and knew every wrinkle of space. It was a one-in-a-million chance that he had discovered them in the air before they made landfall. Those six ships probably held as many as two thousand troops.

  Landing had to be prevented at all costs. If the Syndicate was allowed to return to Khalia, there wouldn’t be enough survivors left to cheer the Fleet’s victory parade. Besides, Meier had said that the Syndicate had left billions of credits worth of equipment that the Fleet wanted to claim for its own use. It would help extend the Alliance’s war chest, they were finding clues about where the Syndicate systems lay, and the stuff helped support the attack on the Syndicate’s home turf. He had also heard rumors of hidden bases and deeply planted atomic weapons just waiting to be detonated. Did anybody else know these ships were here?

  He buzzed toward them, breaking right then left, while the computer controller dialed through the radio frequencies, searching for a Khalian ground station. The Syndic ships became aware of him, locking on telemetry sensors, which set off the Death Knell again.

  Otlind could almost hear the belly laugh on the Syndic flagship’s bridge when they figured out what he was. “Yeah,” he agreed nastily, “I’m just a little fly. Nothing to worry about. But you’re going to have to come through me first before you land. Go ahead, try and swat me.”

  It occurred to him while the computer was trying to find him an open channel that it was stupid for him to take on six full-sized transports all by himself, but he was really too busy dodging to go away and think that one over. If one of those heavy guns managed to hit him, his shields would probably not be able to save him. He did not want to die. Fear kept his reflexes sharp, and adrenaline gave him speed.

  A barrage of laser fire showed up as white lines in his tank. He eluded them, the last few by the thickness of the paint on his hull.

  “You can’t get me that easy,” Otlind sneered, feeling cocky at his own skill. He punched the stud that armed the first missile, and peeled up and around to the right as the white contrail tore toward the flank of the lead ship. They had drifted down to the fringes of Khalia. Even in those wisps of atmosphere, the boom! of its impact was audible. So was the explosion that followed a split second later. The very air shook around his fighter. Otlind cheered. Telemetry indicated the lead ship was disabled. He must have struck it squarely in the engine room.

  With glee, he circled around them and punched the second missile-arming button, eyeballing a target on the next transport. “See! This fly’s got stingers, too. Take that!”

  The missile thrust away and missed. It soared out of atmosphere and headed for space, neatly penning a line of white between two of the transports.

  “Oh, frax!”

  But his attack had achieved a purpose. The lead ship hung in orbit still at the edge of atmosphere. It was only a matter of time before something else blew it up, or gravity yanked it down. The other transports were forced to replot their approach. Otlind swooped betwe
en two of the ships, firing his laser cannons wildly. The big ships threw up heavier shields, which changed their reentry calculations yet again as the magnetic silhouette altered.

  The edge of a laser bolt tipped Otlind’s fighter as he passed the last transport, causing him to somersault over and over up toward space. He had seen it coming, but the maneuvering thrusters were unable to respond quickly enough to save him. That was the biggest disadvantage the fighters had over the medical scooters. The little medships were designed for superior mobility and agility in atmosphere, and more leisurely pace in vacuum. He kicked himself mentally for forgetting that, and vowed to compensate next time for the differences, if he lived.

  The temperature rose uncomfortably in the cockpit until the whining life-support engines cooled it down again, but the shields held. Otlind fought the helm for control and gradually made the planet stop revolving over his canopy. He turned to make another pass, readying his laser cannons. The ships fired at him, but he had control of his ship now. He was going to keep getting in their way if it was the last thing he’d ever do. His fighter zinged into atmosphere. Immediately the canopy clouded up again. He felt, rather than saw, the bulk of the new lead transport ship on his starboard wing. By the time his canopy cleared, he was well past the ships and coming around for another pass. They had changed position again. Every time he got in their way, it pushed back the seven-minute time frame they needed to land. Otlind grinned.