by David Drake
“All right then.” Johnny Prescott moved his command chair back and opened a channel to the cruiser’s flight deck. “Hawker Mayfly Control, this is Ranger Zero Three, at the perch and on course. Intercepting glide slope threshold in seventeen seconds from my mark, bay Bravo-Two docking clearance confirm, over?” Long before the reply came back, Johnny slid his hands out of the primary control gauntlets and grinned sidelong at his co. “You have control.”
“But sir, I—!” squeaked Istvan, then made a grab for the secondary command grips and jabbed his fingers into them. “I have control, sir!”
“Zero Three, this is Mayfly. You have a go for dock, Bravo-Two confirms clear, acknowledge, over. “
“Zero Three, acknowledged, over. Well, you heard the lady,” said Prescott, and leaned back to look as ostentatiously relaxed as his pressure suit allowed. “Take us in.” In his headset he could hear someone else in the heavy fighter’s four-man crew laughing softly, and he smiled.
* * *
He was smiling again later, but this time there was no humor in it, just a cold skinning of lips back from teeth as his helmet gunsight laid itself squarely on the crew compartment of a Gerin escort.
The two ships had chased each other for fifteen seconds through a shrieking outer-atmosphere furball in which it seemed that every Gerin escort vessel in the quadrant and every other League fighter but themselves had appeared on screen or had gone flickering over, under, or on either side. The sushi’s more maneuverable ship had hammered into a tight right-hand left-hand scissors, both to throw the Leaguer’s gunnery off-track and in an attempt to force an overshoot beyond the three-nine line into a target position.
It might have worked with most people, but not with Johnny Prescott. He had laughed at the hasty scissors and rolled inverted through the Gerin’s six, then instead of pulling through into what should have been a standard split-S disengagement, rolled again and swept back up into his present perfect knife-range firing slot, where he sat, and sat, and did nothing, for two whole age-long seconds.
“Why don’t I shoot?” Prescott snapped suddenly. “FOD, sir,” Miklos returned just as smartly. Foreign-object damage caused by the bits of an enemy chopped up at close range could splash a fighter just as efficiently as being on the wrong side of that same enemy’s gunsights. In the instant of his reply, the junior co flared Zero Three’s drag brakes into whatever atmosphere was available for them to hang on to, and punched in just enough retro from the reaction thrusters to open the distance.
The Gatling laser pod scabbed onto Zero Three’s belly went active. Despite its apparent multiple barrels, the deuterium fluorine laser did not actually rotate like the old projectile weapon from which it took its name; but its variable-wavelength energy did, emitted from each lasing rod in turn at a rate of six hundred shifts per second and an average power output of ten gigawatts.
There were no ravening beams, and in deep space there would have been nothing to see at all except for the damage at point of impact. Here, skimming the atmospheric envelope, Prescott’s ship was linked to its Gerin target by a narrow string of sparks as what little air was present ionized in the blast of power.
The Gerin pilot ionized too, and became nothing more than Leaguer slang. Sushi-except that usually sushi was raw, and this had been most emphatically overcooked. Its ship tumbled out of control, hit denser atmosphere at far too steep an angle, and became just one more bright score across the sky above the unnamed planet’s nightside. .
“Splash one, splash all, that’s the lot.” The allcall was from Matt Devlin on the ECM and monitor station. “There’s not a sushi ship left on the screen, people. Hawker just nailed the command globe. Let’s go ho—”
That was when they hit the loose torpedo.
It might have been League, or it might have been Gerin. None of it mattered to the torpedo except that even though its propulsion charges had run out, its warhead was proximity-fused and there was something entering that proximity. Although none of that mattered to the target ship at all. . .
. . . Johnny...
Johnny...
“Johnny? . . . “
He came back from the darkness through a sheet of fire to air that was cool and fresh against his blistered skin. The suit and the armored chair back, had taken most of the blast, and then the automatic ejectors had cut in and blown him clear. Zero Three had been tumbling by then, swapping ends and top for bottom once every second after losing most of her main drive to the plasma torpedo.
The bang-seats were designed to fire sequentially, so that the rocket igniters of one wouldn’t roast the occupant of the next in line. That sequence was once every quarter second. Johnny had gone first, then Matt, then Miklos, and finally Jules back in navigation. He had been fired upward at twelve o’clock high, away from the planet, out toward where the rescue tenders were already vectoring on his ship’s last known position. And as he left, Zero Three pitched inverted, so that Matt and Miklos and Jules had gone the other way.
His co had been lucky: Miklos was shot ballistically at six o’clock low, a fifteen-gee acceleration straight down into atmosphere, and lasted maybe seven seconds. The other two were fired out at three and nine level, skimming along the edge of the atmosphere envelope so that it took more than a minute for the gravity well to drag them down to where the air friction waited to do what the ejector exhausts had not. They were wearing nothing more heat-shielded than vacuum suits, and there was hardly even a streak of fire to mark their passing.
But Johnny saw. And right up to the point when the noises on the comm channel flashed to static, he heard. All the way.
After the medics had checked him over and declared him still intact, the brass gave him a medal. And then they put him right back in the line.
“Buckshot Red Leader to Buckshot Red Flight, I have twenty-plus bandits at green two-zero-five, range one-four-niner-seven, closing fast, tallyho, tallyho. “
“Red Leader, Red Two, roger your tallyho on twenty-plus,” said Johnny Prescott. “That’s only three apiece.” Then he half turned to the new co in this new three-man ship. “Ever flown an attack mission before, kid?”
Nguyen Van Bay shook his head. “First time, sir,” he said, unable to take his eyes from the hypnotic dance of sensor blips on the main targeting screen.
“It’s simple enough: we’re here, they’re there. Put a salvo of torpedoes down our approach vector, then follow up with beamers. Got it?”
“Uh, yes ...”
“Then you have control.”
“What ... l”
“Take it, kid.” Prescott pushed clear of the control consoles, then unbuckled his acceleration straps and grabbed the overhead, pulling himself back to the empty seat beside the navigator’s station. Dave Westley looked at him with worried eyes, but Johnny only grinned. “What’s the matter, Dave?”
Westley looked pointedly at the flight deck, then switched on his commpack’s privacy channel. “Johnny, it’s Van Bay’s first time out. Are you sure about this?”
“Don’t you trust my judgment, Lieutenant?” said Prescott softly, and though he was still smiling, now it was the smile usually reserved for a gunsight and the locked target beyond it.
Westley lifted his eyebrows at what sounded like an unnecessary threat to pull rank, and squashed down irritation that Prescott should think that it was necessary. “You know I do. But you’re the big hero and he’s—”
“—never going to get the chance to be one himself without something like this. So why not now, when there’s a ...” The grin thawed again. “... a big hero on board to keep an eye on him?”
“Hah.”
“And I’m not sitting up there beside him to breathe down the kid’s neck. If he needs help, he knows where I am. “Johnny Prescott settled himself into the vacant seat and secured its straps, glanced forward at where Van Bay was flying the fighter all by himself, and then did
something very odd. He polarized the faceplate of his helmet, taking it right down to opacity, and disabled his comm-pack’s output channel. Westley was tempted to say something, however rash that might have been, given Johnny’s apparent mood—except that right then the first Gerin single-seater lined up on the incoming raid, and conversation of any sort went right out of the window....
* * *
“I have control.”
Lieutenant Van Bay glanced jerkily at where Johnny Prescott had returned to the left-hand seat, and nodded, but it took him several seconds to unlock his rigid fingers from the control gauntlets, and rather longer for him to acknowledge. “Y -you have c-c-control, s-sir,” he managed at last. His voice was shaking, and there was so much sweat inside his suit that the environmental scrubbers hadn’t cleared all of it yet and a silvery cloud of water droplets hung in zero-gee just inside his faceplate.
“How many did we get?” said Johnny. Then he laughed, and if it sounded just a bit forced that was only to be expected. “I mean, how many did you get?”
“Three, sir, one with the torp and two with guns.”
Van Bay’s voice was right back under control, and despite his very own private fog screen he was starting to look pleased with himself.
Johnny grinned at his co and once again took his hands from the gauntlets. “Okay, whiz kid, then I think you should be capable enough of taking us back to the Hawker in one piece. Do it.” He swung half around in the command chair and stared at Dave Westley, silently prompting him to get rid of whatever might have been on his mind. The navigator stared right back in silence and raised his right fist; then flipped its thumb up and began to laugh.
Buckshot Red Two slewed down and sideways in a manner its designers had never intended, its hull the bright, fast-moving source of a long trail of chaff and IR flares. Gerin fire from three points intersected at where it should have been, but wasn’t, and then one of the Gerin ships blew apart as Red Two broke hard left and its laser cut a ragged gash across the Gerin’s main drive compartment fuel cells. The second and third came through the expanding globe of fire and fragments that had been their companion in a staggered turn that was meant to catch Red Two in one or the other’s boresight. It should have worked, and given three seconds longer in the turn, it would have worked—except for the Leaguer ship’s wingman.
Larry Stewart in Buckshot Red Four had hosed his own Gerin by the time the sushi lined up on Two; now he pulled up into the climb and inverted roll of a high-speed yoyo that cut the curve on the Gerin’s more maneuverable ships and dropped him astern of the nearest. Luck or skill or judgment had the pipper of his gunsight already blinking a lock on the Gerin fighter’s main drive. Larry smiled thinly and squeezed his trigger twice.
As its remaining warrior apprentice disintegrated, the last Gerin pulled clear of the fight in a high half-loop that might have been an attempt to escape—or equally the beginnings of a move to get around and down into the lethal cone behind the two Leaguer’s tails. It didn’t work: as the Gerin made its play Larry and Red Four were already slamming into a vertical rolling scissors that tracked the enemy vessel’s climb and blocked both any getaway and any potential attack. At first, the two ships ran level, but when Larry’s barrel-roll reversals began to swing wider, the Gerin fell into the trap of a slow-speed overshoot and on line for Red Four’s off-boresight targeting predictor. It didn’t live long enough to realize its mistake.
“Red Two, this is Red Four: God damn it, Johnny, are you asleep or somethin’?” Stewart was furiously angry, the anger born of fear for a friend that can only really find expression in a shout. His rage cut off short, stumbling over surprise, when another voice than the one he had expected spoke to him over the comm.
“Red Four, this is Red Two . . . er, Captain Prescott isn’t available right now. . .”
“What the bloody blue blazes...?” Stewart rasped, shocked for just a moment into forgetting proper comm procedures. Then he got a grip again, even though he had to restrain himself from taking a precautionary sideslip down into firing position on Two’s tail. “Red Two pilot, identify yourself. Where is Captain Prescott...?”
* * *
Lieutenant Price listened miserably to the exchange between Dave Westley and what sounded like the entire crew of Red Four, wincing inwardly every time his own name was mentioned and cringing in sympathy as Captain Stewart savagely disposed of every excuse that Westley offered for Johnny Prescott’s conduct. Both ships had been set up for an autodock approach to the Hawker, which meant that he couldn’t even take refuge in pretending to be busy. Price could have shut off his comm-pack until Red Four broke its connection, but there was a horrid fascination in hearing what Stewart had to say about his piloting skills, and his combat abilities, and his prospects of surviving this tour, and a dozen other things.
It was the same fascination as he found in staring at Johnny Prescott, self-strapped painfully tightly into the navigator-B seat and staring ... at nothing at all. As Price watched him, a long dribble of saliva trailed out of the captain’s slack mouth and hung inside his helmet, unnoticed, just as everything on Two had gone unnoticed by him since the Gerin’s first attack had looked likely to kill them. One of the near misses had shorted out some of the cockpit circuitry, including the polarizer overrides to ports and helmets, and for the first time since the death of Ranger Zero Three, Johnny Prescott’s face was visible during combat.
Price shivered. During this tour there had always been something of a competition among the new pilots to get the co ‘on Johnny Prescott’s ship. It had never been admitted, but it was common gossip knowledge that if you” did get the right-hand seat, and were very, very lucky, Johnny P might just let you fly the combat mission itself—and then credit you with any kills, as well. He wondered, but didn’t want to know, what it took to make the face of a popular, much-decorated hero look like what he saw. Then Lieutenant Westley gripped him by one shoulder. Price realized suddenly that the comm channel was dead, and had probably been dead for several minutes now. He swallowed, and tore his gaze away from the drooling apparition that had been Johnny Prescott.
“You,” said Westley, speaking slowly and carefully as if to a child, “did not see this. You will not talk about this. You will leave the clearing-up of Red Two’s messes to its regular crew. Do you understand me, Lieutenant Price?”
Price nodded dumbly. It was the truth; he did understand, quite clearly. Even though it was the only thing about today that had been clear at all.
* * *
They grounded Johnny Prescott when the Hawker brought 217 Squadron back to Skandurby; but the grounding was for medical reasons, pending further multilevel checks concerning the long-term consequences of his involvement in the destruction of Ranger Zero Three and the death of its crew. When someone was an established hero, the phrase “lack of moral fiber” was not bandied about so lightly as it might be in the case of a recruit. Reputations had to be preserved: the reputation not merely of the hero, but of those who had made him so, for fear their judgment in this, and therefore other things, should be called into question.
To the more senior crewmen, those aware by one means or another of High Command’s little secret, the whole situation seemed unhealthy. Their opinion was straightforward—either restore Johnny Prescott to his former status and stature, or kick him out, ignominiously and with publicity so that the legend could be laid to rest; but whichever course was chosen, let it be chosen quickly, rather than trundle along in this half-light of doubt and double-talk. It seemed to make no difference to Johnny, either in the way he behaved or in the way that successive intakes of younger squadron members treated him, with a respect that seemed often to border on adoration. Red silk scarves were blossoming like poppies in Flanders, some of the young men were making their first spluttering experiments in pipe-smoking, and at least two of them were actively canvassing the civilian population of Skandurby Town for a dog, any dog, just so
long as it could walk to heel and fetch a stick the way Johnny Prescott’s Toby could.
Until the day when Toby was fetching sticks for the off-duty maintenance crews, and chased one right into the repeller field beneath the station tender. There wasn’t a great deal left to bury, but they scraped it up and buried it just the same, in a little grave out by the station boundary. And then they took the collar and their regrets to the officers’ mess, and to Johnny.
Who went right off the deep end. “You stinking gutless bastards!” he screamed at them, and would have lunged at the electronics corporal who had actually thrown the fatal stick if Dave Westley and two of the other officers hadn’t grappled him to a standstill. “You hadn’t the balls to chop me, so you did it to the bloody dog, didn’t you!” There was saliva glistening on his chin, and foam at the comers of his mouth. “That’s where you want to see me, isn’t it? Shoveled up and shoveled in! Just like Toby ....” And then he began to cry.
* * *
“The dog was his luck, sir,” Westley said later during an uncomfortable session with Squadron Commander Kincaid. “Apparently it’s been with him since he joined up in ‘35, and neither he nor it has ever come to any lasting harm. Not until Ranger Zero One, and now . . .”
“Now he thinks that someone’s trying to kill him by proxy?” Kincaid sat back in his chair and snorted derisively. “Ridiculous!”
“Sir, there’s little enough in the way of honors or decorations left for the man to win.” Jochen Piper hesitated as his commander’s full attention settled balefully on him, then swallowed down his nervousness and continued. “There might be a suspicion at the back of his troubled mind”—Christ, but that sounds stagy, thought Piper, hoping that Kincaid would let it pass—“that the only thing he hasn’t yet gained is a worthwhile death in battle. It’s possible that he believes he should have died with the crew of Zero One, and that he sees his continued active participation in the war as somehow . . . improper.”
