Chapter Thirteen

Multiple radar signatures just below the top layer of clouds,” the IO called out. “It’s hard to get a fix on them—those clouds are full of particulates that block my scans. I can only get a sense of things moving around down there. None of them are as big as the—I’m sorry, I don’t know what to call that thing,” he said, gesturing at the giant ship on the display.

“Dreadnought,” Shulkin said, startling a few people near him. Most likely they had forgotten he was there, Candless thought.

“Sure,” Lanoe said. “It’s a dreadnought. Good a name as any. What’s our ETA?”

“Two minutes,” Giles said.

“Commander,” Candless said, “there’s a decision to be made, and it should be done now. If you want the cruiser to warm up its coilguns, they’ll need about ninety seconds.”

She turned and looked Lanoe directly in the eye. Because what he said next was going to determine a number of things. Perhaps most saliently, their strategy. If they arrived with the coilguns hot, and if the Blue-Blue-White had sensor technology comparable to their own, the jellyfish would see that they had come for a fight. It would be the end of any attempt at negotiation or diplomacy.

If, however, he failed to give the order to ready the guns and they got into a fight anyway, the guns would be useless for ninety seconds. Many battles didn’t even last that long. He would essentially be removing one of his best weapons from the fight.

There was another layer of consequence to his decision, though. If he readied the guns, then she would know he never had any real intention of seeking redress. That he had come here for pure, simple revenge.

She saw his jaw move as he gritted his teeth, thinking it through. He’d always been a man of action, and she knew she wouldn’t have to wait long for her answer.

He turned to look at Ehta. “Have the gun crews stand ready,” he told her. “But don’t warm them up, not yet.”

Candless allowed herself a sigh of relief.

“I should be over there, with my people, sir,” Ehta said.

Lanoe just nodded at her and turned back to the display. Ehta exited the bridge in a hurry—she just had time to get someone to fly her back to the cruiser.

“Should we scramble the fighters?” Candless asked next.

Lanoe looked deeply annoyed as he answered. He waved one hand in a chopping motion. “Have all pilots report to their ready stations. But keep them on standby.”

“Very good, sir,” Candless said. She tapped at a virtual keyboard to give the order. Every pilot on the carrier would move immediately to the corridors that flanked the flight deck, ready to jump into the cockpits of their carrier scouts and Yk.64s at a moment’s notice. “And M. Valk?” she asked, because there were more fighters—BR.9s—in the cruiser’s vehicle bay, but the AI was the only available pilot to fly them. Knowing what it meant to have him operate those cataphracts, Candless did not relish the prospect. “I presume we don’t need his help at this time.”

He gave her a very nasty glare. He knew that she was trying to keep him on the straight and narrow, and he didn’t like it. She did not care in the least.

Candless had been a teacher once. Bury and Ginger had been her students and she would have done anything to keep them safe. Lanoe had put both of them in incredible danger, and the fact that they were still alive was little short of a miracle. Candless had failed, then, in her duty to her pupils. Perhaps by way of atonement, she’d extended her obligation to the entirety of the fleet. She would not let anyone—Navy, Centrocor, civilian—get hurt now, not if she could prevent it.

“M. Valk is not exactly in my good graces right now,” Lanoe said. No, in other words. He looked up at the identical holographic heads floating over them. “Batygins. I have orders for you. Keep well back of the carrier, but be ready to move in fast when I give the order. Ready firing solutions for your missiles, but don’t shoot until I give the word.”

“Understood, Commander.”

“Understood, Commander,” the twins said, just a split second out of synch.

Candless bent over her console. “Thirty seconds to close approach,” she said. “All hands prepare for maneuvers. May we please clear the bridge of all nonessential personnel?”

It was a rhetorical question. The carrier’s off-duty officers filed out of the bridge in a hurry, probably anxious to get to the safety of their bunks. Bury lingered for a moment, watching the displays. He looked downright wistful. Eventually he left, though, and only M. Bullam remained.

Candless had to give the Centrocor woman a long stare before she seemed to realize she’d been ordered off the bridge. “Hmm? Oh, sorry,” she said, with a warm smile. “Back under the old management, I used to observe from here during combat and maneuvers,” she said. “If I’m not welcome, though—”

“You aren’t,” Candless said, seeing no point in sugarcoating it.

“Sorry! Sorry,” Bullam said, laughing. But she vacated the bridge.

Which left six of them. Giles the IO, a pilot, and a navigator at their stations. Lanoe and Candless—and Shulkin. Candless caught Lanoe’s eye and nodded at the old zombie.

Lanoe started to look even more annoyed than he had before, but then he must have realized what she was trying to convey, because his face cleared and he nodded. “Captain,” he said, putting a hand on Shulkin’s arm, “I’m running this show, but from here the carrier is yours to command.”

Shulkin’s only response was to lean forward slightly.

Candless didn’t like that much. She didn’t trust Shulkin—frankly, she thought the man was incapable of the job he’d been given. Perhaps Lanoe wanted to send a signal to the Centrocor forces that they were all working together now. She knew better than to challenge his order.

She found a seat near the back of the bridge and strapped herself in. Lanoe checked the displays one last time, then did the same.

“Beginning deceleration,” the carrier’s pilot said. They needed to slow down if they didn’t intend to just shoot right past the dreadnought at high speed.

Powerful retro thrusters in the nose of the carrier burned hard, shoving against their direction of travel. The shift in gravity was disorienting, and for a moment Candless felt queasy as the bridge turned upside down.

“Sir,” the navigator said, “how close should we get to the dreadnought?”

Lanoe looked to Shulkin, but it didn’t seem the captain had any thoughts on the matter, at least none he chose to share.

“Stand back about fifty kilometers,” Lanoe told the navigator. “We’ll let them get a good look at us, but there’s no need to be aggressive about it.” He glanced over at Candless. “At least not yet.”

As they approached, Lanoe had eyes for nothing but the main display. The IO had expanded the image to fill half the bridge, and it showed the Blue-Blue-White dreadnought in enormous detail. What had before seemed lumpy and shapeless now seemed intricate in its design. The hull of the ship was smooth but riddled with narrow pits, few more than a meter across. Much smaller than the weapon ports on its top side. He peered hard at the cagework blisters that encrusted its surface like giant greenhouses. Were there jellyfish behind those windows? Were they staring back at him?

“Fifty kilometers, sir,” the navigator said.

“Full stop,” the pilot told him.

Lanoe forced himself to inhale. “Talk to me about the other ships, the ones under the clouds,” he said.

“It’s hard to get a good count—they’re in constant motion,” the IO said. “I estimate there are fifty of them, with an average diameter of fifty meters each.”

“Why are they loitering down there? Do they think we can’t see them?”

It was a rhetorical question. No one bothered to answer. Lanoe probably wouldn’t have heard them if they had. “Valk,” he said, “is there any way to send them a message?”

“Yes,” the AI called back. “I can modulate the running lights on the carrier to shine in the fifteen colors. The lights won’t be strong enough to be seen through the clouds, but they’ll be visible from the dreadnought.”

“Good,” Lanoe said. “Send them the message I wanted originally.” You must answer for your crimes. Candless shot him a cold look when she heard his order, but he didn’t care.

He’d bent over backward to try to talk. To give them a chance to explain themselves. It had taken every bit of restraint he had. If it were just up to him he would have come in shooting, and not stopped until every last jellyfish was dead.

He’d held back for one simple reason. He couldn’t win this war alone. He needed Candless if he was going to succeed, and he knew she didn’t share his burning need for justice. If he attacked the Blue-Blue-White without immediate provocation—if he shot first—he knew he would lose her forever.

So he’d given the aliens a chance, and they’d blown the Screamer out of the sky. Lanoe knew perfectly well there was only one way for this to end. All he needed was to nudge them a little. Make them show their true colors. They’d wiped out countless alien species before now—surely if he just irritated them a little, they wouldn’t hesitate to open fire.

And then he would be justified in any course of action he chose. He could start his war, and no one could question his right to do so.

If the bastards would just take the bait …

“Sending now,” Valk told him.

He nodded, knowing there were enough cameras on the bridge that the AI could see him. “Move us closer,” he said to the pilot. “Twenty kilometers.” That would still leave plenty of room for maneuvering when things got hot. “Valk, keep repeating that message until I say otherwise.”

“Understood,” the AI said.

Beams of light shot upward from the clouds. Searchlights that roamed around the sky before converging on the carrier, one of them momentarily washing out the display of the dreadnought. The carrier’s imagery systems compensated almost immediately, filtering out the incoming light.

“Are you receiving?” Lanoe asked Valk. “Getting anything you understand?”

“Yes and no,” the AI said.

“What’s going on, Valk? You’re our translator. You’re supposed to understand their language. Why is this a problem?”

“It’s impossible to say, precisely,” Valk replied. “The signals they’re sending just don’t make sense—they look like random words, or at most like they’re encrypted. It could be just that, that they’re sending in some code that they assume we can decipher. Or maybe they’re just using complex idioms, and my vocabulary is too basic to understand what they’re saying.”

The AI paused for a moment.

“Lanoe—I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

Candless cleared her throat. “Commander?” she asked. “What does Valk have to say for himself?”

Lanoe looked up. He realized, suddenly, that she couldn’t hear the AI. That Valk was speaking directly to him, and only to him. Well, Valk always had been smart. He knew what Lanoe wanted before he even asked for it.

He opened his mouth, planning on telling Candless exactly what Valk had told him. That they couldn’t understand the incoming signal. Then he reconsidered.

He could lie to her.

He could make up any answer he liked. Valk, he knew, would cover for him.

There were times, in war, when you had to limit what people knew. Even your closest fellow officers. Don’t think of it as lying, he told himself. If she knew that they’d failed to communicate with the Blue-Blue-White, she might insist that they back off. Try some other approach.

But that meant losing the initiative. It meant deferring justice, and that simply wasn’t acceptable.

“They’re refusing to listen,” he told her. “They’re threatening us.”

He made a point of not looking at her. Lanoe knew how to bluff—he’d learned that in a hundred battles. “Closer,” he said. “Ten kilometers.”

Gravity tugged gently at him as the carrier accelerated, easing its way forward.

The display grew even clearer as they got closer to the dreadnought, but still he couldn’t see through its blisters. He wanted to know they were there. Wanted to see at least one of the Blue-Blue-White onboard that thing. Back at Niraya they’d fought nothing but drones. He wanted to kill a damned jellyfish.

Damn you, he thought. Take the shot.

“Are they scanning us?” Candless asked. A good question, one Lanoe should have thought to ask himself.

“I’m not detecting any electromagnetic radiation from the dreadnought,” the IO said. Which wasn’t a complete answer, not by a long shot. “No sonic pulses … We’re being swept by a laser, but it’s a very low-energy beam. Not even powerful enough for spectroscopy. Of course, they could have sensors we don’t know about.”

“Understood,” Candless said.

Shulkin suddenly slapped the armrest of his seat. “Is this a damned scrap, or an Admiralty cotillion?” he demanded.

Lanoe turned to look at him. The captain’s glassy eyes were burning like coals. He felt a strange and not entirely pleasant kinship with the man. Shulkin wanted the same thing Lanoe did—a fight. But it was never enjoyable to look at a madman and feel like you were looking in a mirror. In fact—

He didn’t get to finish that thought.

“Thermal signature,” the IO said, his voice a worried squeak. “There!”

On the display one of the dreadnought’s weapon ports was circled in red. A subdisplay came up, showing an infrared view, with the port glowing a brilliant white.

“Maneuvering thrusters, now!” Shulkin called out. The Centrocor bridge crew snapped into action, the hands of the pilot and the navigator flying over their consoles. A panel opened at the pilot’s position and a manual control yoke sprang up into her hands.

It happened before Lanoe even saw it. A ball of orange fire had emerged from the weapon port on the dreadnought, an incandescent mass of plasma a hundred meters in diameter, and it was headed right for them.

Lanoe wanted to laugh. He wanted to sing. He had his first shot, his justification. If he didn’t die in the next few seconds—he had his war.

“All pilots to their vehicles,” Candless called. “Cataphracts in Alpha wing, you’re out first. Beta wing, be ready to scramble on my order. Carrier scouts hang back but remain on standby.” Within seconds a wave of fighters launched from the carrier’s flight deck, streaming out like bullets from a gun.

“Batygins!” Lanoe shouted. “Move up, but watch for that projectile! Ehta, get those guns warmed up! Valk, get the cruiser moving, I want a broadside in ninety seconds!”

The plasma ball was still headed for them, blazing across a red sky.

Candless could almost feel the frenzied activity all around her, as more pilots jumped into their canopies, as ships maneuvered. All the blood in her body shunted over to one side as the carrier swung about, trying to get out of the way as the plasma ball tore toward them. “Are we going to make it?” she demanded.

“Yes, ma’am, but it’s going to be close,” the navigator said. Her eyes were as wide as saucers.

Shulkin sputtered, a series of sharp coughs racking his chest. “Keep those fighters in good order! I want a double arc formation now. If I have to come out there and teach you how to fly, I bloody well will,” he growled.

Candless brought up a tactical display, showing the cataphracts moving to form curving formations around the dreadnought. The pilots were keeping their distance, none of them moving in to attack, as if they were waiting for the rest of the wing to get in place first. Before Lanoe had taken command of the Centrocor vehicles, Candless had fought those pilots, and she hadn’t been impressed much then, either.

Lanoe was right behind her, one of his hands on her shoulder. “There’s a BR.9 with my name on it. Shulkin has the bridge. I’m going out there myself.”

“Of course you are,” she said. It was standard Navy practice that the commander of a fleet did not under any circumstances jump in the cockpit of a fighter and go haring off to join the fray. Command-level officers were far too valuable to risk in the chaotic welter of actual combat. Lanoe had never been the kind of officer who played by the official rules, though, and she didn’t have the time or the inclination to stop him. “What about Maggs’s fighter, though? The one with the new targeting algorithm?”

His face lit up as if she’d just given him a birthday present. He nodded and then disappeared without another word.

“Ma’am!” the IO said. “Ma’am—the plasma ball!”

A display popped up in front of her, a camera feed from the flank of the carrier. The plasma projectile swept across the view like a little star, too bright to look at directly. Tendrils of ionized gas snapped all around it, some licking the skin of the carrier and searing right through its armor. Red lights appeared all over her damage control boards, and the whole carrier lurched beneath her, but then the projectile was gone, shooting past them out toward the far end of the disk.

“Alpha wing, get in there and fight!” Shulkin screamed. “Beta wing, screen their advance! Batygins! By all the fires of hell, where are you?”

“Ten seconds out,” one of the destroyer captains said.

“Ten seconds out,” the other one repeated.

“Ma’am,” the IO said, “ma’am!”

“Hellfire, man, what is it now?” she demanded.

“The other ships, the ones below the clouds—they’re surfacing!” he said.

She glanced up at the big display, the camera feed from the nose of the cruiser, and saw them. All of them.

Lanoe dropped down through the narrow airlock and flipped over toward the Z.XIX. Maggs’s fighter was a nasty-looking machine, streamlined as sharp as the edge of a razor. The most advanced fighter the Navy ever built. Lanoe had never actually flown one of the things before—he’d always considered them overdesigned, good for making an impression but too complicated and difficult to repair for field use. He had to admit this one had style, though, with four PBW cannons protruding from its snout and wickedly sharp airfoils like sabre blades. Even its thruster cones had been installed with flare suppressors, so they looked like black crowns. This particular Z.XIX was equipped with the Philoctetes algorithm, too, a software package that doubled the effective range of its weaponry.

Lanoe kick-flipped into the open cockpit and let its canopy flow up and over his head. Boards flickered to life all around him. He started to reach for the controls.

“Good evening, Commander,” a synthesized female voice whispered in his ear. “Everything looks nominal. I’m ready when you are.”

Lanoe swiped through the displays in front of him, putting his weapon and flight controls right where he wanted them.

“Very good. Are you ready to deploy, Commander?”

Lanoe was. He released the docking clamps that held the Z.XIX to the carrier’s flight deck, then eased his way past the rows of fighters hanging from the walls. When he was clear he touched the throttle and felt the machine around him throb with life. He lurched forward out of the carrier’s maw, faster than expected—he wasn’t used to the power of the Z.XIX’s engines.

The fighter’s computer must have sensed his surprise. “Some pilots find the power of the Z.XIX intimidating. I can ramp down the engine response to compensate. Would you like to adjust the fine control on the throttle?” the fighter’s voice asked.

“Don’t you dare,” he told her, and peeled out toward the battle, his thrusters roaring like lions.

All around the dreadnought the fighters banked and rolled, taking the occasional long-range shot, which sparked off the giant ship’s hull. None of them dared get too close, as the dreadnought spat out plasma ball after plasma ball. Even a near miss by one of those enormous projectiles could engulf a cataphract in deadly flames—they would roast a pilot alive inside the cockpit, at the very least.

Shulkin kept shouting at the pilots to move in, to attack from a closer range. Some of the Centrocor pilots even listened to him.

Not that there was much point. One of the cataphracts actually got close enough to launch a disruptor right into the heart of the dreadnought. The most devastating weapon the fighters possessed. The disruptor cut right through the skin of the giant ship. It had been a solid hit, and the round functioned perfectly. The disruptor tore through the giant ship’s internal compartments, exploding continuously—doing the kind of damage that could tear a cruiser in half.

When the round sputtered out a kilometer inside the dreadnought’s hull, when the smoke cleared, Candless couldn’t even see any significant damage. The attack didn’t even slow the alien ship down. The dreadnought was just too big—disruptors wouldn’t be enough. If they were going to neutralize this threat they needed something much more powerful.

“Batygins, I’m waiting,” Shulkin growled.

And meanwhile the Blue-Blue-White continued to deploy more ships. Tiny compared to the dreadnought, perhaps. Huge compared to the human fighters.

They looked like bubbles surfacing on a pond. Spherical constructions of white cagework, fifty meters across. Long curved wings stuck out from their sides, and they trailed fire in their wake. There must have been a hundred of them, and more were emerging all the time.

“IO, scan those things—give me information,” she said.

Data scrolled across one of her displays.

“Alpha wing,” Candless said, tracking her fighters on a tactical board, “we have support inbound. Concentrate your fire on the smaller ships. Our best estimate is that those are airfighters.” The official Navy designation for aircraft that could not operate in the vacuum of space. “We do not believe at this time that they have vector fields.” Candless pursed her lips. “Engage them mercilessly. Unless you wish to prove you really are as cowardly as you seem.”

Sometimes people needed a little motivation.

Three of her cataphracts wheeled around and dove toward the clouds, ganging up on one of the spherical airfighters. They poured an endless stream of particle beam fire into its glassy sides, chopping it to pieces. Its wings went spinning away, falling toward the clouds below. What was left of the spherical ship followed them down a moment later.

Before the cataphract pilots could celebrate, however, three more of the airfighters surfaced directly beneath them. Guns mounted inside the wings spat high-temperature plasma that tore right through one of the cataphracts. The other two broke off in opposite directions, corkscrewing away from the incoming enemies. But there was no safety out there—in every direction, more and more of the airfighters were breaking the clouds. On Candless’s tactical board, it looked like there must be two hundred of them now. Ten for every cataphract in the battle area.

That fact must not have escaped Shulkin’s attention. “Where are the bloody Batygins?”

“Here,” the twin captains called.

“Here.”

The destroyers announced their presence with a salvo of missiles that streaked toward the dreadnought, contrails streaming out behind them. Heavy PBW fire from the destroyers’ guns lanced through airfighter after airfighter, popping them open faster than new ones could appear. The cataphracts broke from their formations to make room as the destroyers surged ahead of the carrier.

Candless’s heart thundered in her chest as she watched the missiles race toward the dreadnought. The first one caught the pitted upper surface of the giant ship, the explosion looking comically small in the midst of all that real estate. A second missile plunged in through one of the cagework blisters, filling it with dazzling light.

A green pearl appeared in the corner of her vision—a call from Ehta, back on the cruiser. “Sixty seconds until the coilguns are ready to fire,” the marine major said. “You think you can hang on that long?”

Candless watched the missiles tear into the dreadnought, and shook her head. “Still too early to tell,” she said.

Lanoe swung low under a cloud of airfighters, his quad PBWs raking their glass sides, shredding their wings. It had taken him a moment to learn how to make use of the longer range of this new fighter—he had to lead his targets twice as much as he used to—but he was happy to make the adjustments.

“I have threats coming in on six different vectors,” the fighter’s voice told him. “Normally I’d advise retreat, but—”

“I’m just getting started,” Lanoe told her.

“I was going to say there’s no clear path out of the battle area. Please watch your six.”

Lanoe swung his head around and saw a plasma ball tearing through the air behind him. He goosed the throttle and plunged forward, away from its burning heat. “Thanks,” he told her.

Four airfighters were descending toward him, skidding around in a tight bank with their wings tilted almost vertical. He lit one up with a careful shot, then sprayed PBW fire wildly across the path of the others, missing two of them but tearing a wing off the other, sending it spinning down into the clouds.

The other two split off in different directions. Lanoe chased after one of them, never letting up on his trigger. It came apart in pieces and he twisted around just as the last of the four came screaming toward him, wobbling as it tried to recover from a sharp turn. He never gave it a chance to stabilize, sending a stream of PBW fire right through its spherical hull, bursting it open.

He’d hoped to see the jellyfish inside—rage was singing in his blood. When he saw what he’d accomplished, though, he spat out a curse. The glass ship didn’t contain a Blue-Blue-White pilot. Instead it was full of machinery, and nothing more.

“The damned things are drones,” he told Candless. “Just drones.”

Just like at Niraya, he thought. The Blue-Blue-White sent machines to do their fighting for them. Well, he’d won out against their drones before. He intended to do it again.

Safe for the moment, he pulled back on his control stick and punched his main thrusters, sending the Z.XIX soaring upward. Toward the dreadnought and the vacuum of space beyond. He put through a call to Candless and she answered immediately.

“If these things are really airfighters, we can get an advantage on them by flying up past their ceiling,” he said. “If they can’t fly in space, well, we can—and we can pick them off from relative safety up there,” he told her.

“I’ll inform Alpha and Beta wings,” she told him.

The dreadnought’s shadow crept across his canopy as he rocketed up toward its belly. Smoke billowed from a dozen wounds across its skin, but the giant ship was still fighting, still belching out plasma balls at a dismaying rate. Lanoe could just make out the long, thin shapes of the destroyers as they glided past it, one above, one below, all of their guns blazing away.

“This is more resistance than I expected,” he told Candless. “There was no sign that they detected us before we sent in the Screamer. We should have caught them flat-footed. Instead we’re outnumbered—how did they have this many ships just waiting to respond when we showed up?”

“Terror is a great spur to action,” Candless told him. “Try to see it from their perspective—they’re facing an alien invasion, perhaps the first one they’ve ever encountered. I imagine that if one of those dreadnoughts showed up in the atmosphere of Earth, even without warning, we would scramble our defense with some alacrity.”

Lanoe shook his head. “But they were here, ready to go, the second we arrived. It doesn’t—”

“Commander,” the Z.XIX said, “look out!”

A plasma ball from the dreadnought came smashing down through the thin air right above him. Lanoe had to swing over to one side and burn hard to get out of the way. As the plasma blast shot past him the air inside his cockpit grew as hot as a furnace. Sweat poured down his face and his lungs ached as he inhaled superheated air. The light from the plasma ball burned his eyes and for a second he could barely see—there could have been a hundred drone airfighters right in front of him and he couldn’t have done a thing about it.

“You’re in distress,” the fighter said. “You might want to—”

“I know what I’m doing,” he told her, his hand squeezing the control stick until his knuckles ached. He forced himself to keep the fighter from twisting out of control. Phosphor afterimages blazed green every time he closed his eyes. When he opened them all he could see was red—the dim red of the clouds all around him.

He pushed the stick over to one side and corkscrewed away from the dreadnought, trying not to make himself an easy target in case it loosed another shot. As his vision slowly returned, he called for Candless again. “Why isn’t that thing dead yet? We’ve got two destroyers attacking it with everything they’ve got, and two full wings of cataphracts picking away at it. How is it still flying?”

“I’ve been running scans but there’s very little I can tell you,” Candless replied. “Maybe it’s just that heavily armored, or perhaps the Blue-Blue-White simply build their ships to be indestructible. Ehta tells me her guns will be up and running in another thirty seconds. If their ships can stand up to that much firepower—well, then we’re already dead.”

The carrier swung and backpedaled, its pilot constantly working its maneuvering and positioning jets to keep it out of the path of the relentless barrage of plasma balls from the dreadnought. The constantly shifting gravity made Candless’s stomach churn, but she stayed focused, her eyes locked on her boards.

“Carrier scouts,” Shulkin bellowed. “Send the carrier scouts out, now!”

Candless didn’t feel that was prudent—the scouts lacked vector fields, which made them far more susceptible to enemy weapons than the cataphracts. More to the point, though, once they were sent out to fight, the carrier would have nothing left—no reserve of small craft at all.

Alpha wing had been chewed to pieces by the airfighters and by stray plasma balls. Of the twenty fighters in the first wave, only eight remained, and two of those were out of the fight. One was so badly damaged it was already limping back to the carrier. The other wasn’t reporting—it was possible the pilot was dead inside the cockpit, cooked by a near miss from a plasma ball, and the cataphract was running on autopilot.

Beta wing had acquitted themselves a little better. Once they realized that Lanoe was right, that they could simply climb out of the atmosphere and escape the airfighters, they’d actually started to fight. They’d quickly developed an effective strategy: one cataphract would dive through the battle area, luring enemy craft to follow it back up to the edge of the atmosphere, where five more human ships were waiting to carve them to pieces. The airfighters lacked any kind of armor or defensive equipment and—as might be expected from drones—they always seemed to take the bait.

Beta wing had taken its own share of losses, however—mostly from the dreadnought. Centrocor’s pilots might have military training, but they’d never faced an enemy like this before. Three of Beta had been utterly annihilated by direct hits, their fighters literally melting around them as they died. Four more ships were damaged but still capable of fighting.

“Fifteen seconds,” Ehta said. Candless had demanded that the marine keep a line open and that she provide constant status updates. Ehta had grumbled about it, but she knew how to follow orders in the middle of a battle. She’d been one of Lanoe’s squaddies, after all, just as Candless had. “Ten.”

Candless nodded and opened a new tactical board, this one showing a wider scope of the battle area. When the carrier had originally approached the dreadnought, the cruiser had hung far back. Its coilguns had far better range than any other weapon Lanoe could bring to bear, so there was no need to expose it to enemy action. Valk had moved it forward slowly as the coilguns warmed up, but still the cruiser was ten kilometers from the fighting.

Candless turned to face Shulkin. “Sir, I would recommend that the destroyers fall back. We’re about to have a lot of heavy fire coming in and I’d hate for one of them to take a stray round.”

The carrier’s captain studied her as if he’d never seen her before. He nodded carefully, then looked away from her. “Batygins!” he shouted. “Get out of the damned way!”

“Five,” Ehta called out. “Projectiles loaded. Target acquired. Three. Two. One.”

Candless looked to the camera feed. The dreadnought had taken a real beating—most of its blisters had been smashed open, and a column of oily smoke leaked from its upper hull. Yet somehow it was still flying—and still shooting.

“Lanoe,” Candless said. “The cruiser is ready.”

“Don’t waste time telling me,” Lanoe said. “Fire at will!”

On the tactical board eight blue dots appeared next to the cruiser. They moved so quickly they blurred as they shot past the carrier. Eight more dots appeared half a second later. Candless thought she could almost hear the shots whistling through the thin air as they hurtled toward their target.

Candless couldn’t tell if the dreadnought’s pilot saw the projectiles coming. The giant ship moved just before impact, but there was no way to know if it was trying to evade the incoming fire.

Either way, it didn’t matter.

One after another, the shots tore into its thick hull. Seventy-five-centimeter high-temperature explosive shells designed to level cities smashed into it at a good fraction of the speed of light. Instantly a shroud of smoke and debris blotted it from view. Candless switched to an infrared view and saw the alien ship breaking apart. The dreadnought listed over to one side, ton after ton of debris raining from the sites of impact.

Shulkin let out a barking laugh, a cackle of excitement. The carrier’s navigator whooped in joy.

Candless didn’t want to be hasty. She checked her boards, running endless scans on the giant ship, making sure it had stopped firing, making sure it wasn’t simply wounded. She needn’t have bothered.

She could have watched on the camera feed as the damned thing fell from the sky.

There was an airfighter on his tail, but Lanoe swung around anyway to watch the dreadnought go down. His nerves sang with excitement and he barely managed to dodge as a lance of plasma rushed by him. He lined up a shot and blew the drone out of the sky as quickly as he could. The view was too good to miss.

The dreadnought took its time descending. It broke into sections, each one seeming to hover under its own power. As one whole side of the giant ship fell away, he had to work fast, jets of pure ions pouring from his thrusters as he zipped back and forth, avoiding the cascade of debris. One whole blister section fell away, the white spars of its cagework twisting and pulling apart.

No bodies. He didn’t see a single damned jellyfish falling from the wreckage. He scowled inside his helmet, where he knew no one could see him. “Ship,” he said.

The fighter’s expert system was smart enough to know when it was being addressed. “How can I help, Commander?”

“Scan that wreck—look for anything organic, any sign of life.”

The computer only took a moment to comply. “I’ve found a number of traces of organic carbon compounds, but no human occupants, living or dead.”

Lanoe bit off a curse. Of course the fighter wouldn’t know what a dead Blue-Blue-White looked like. It had never been programmed for fighting aliens—just other humans.

They knew next to nothing about the jellyfish—nothing of their culture, nothing of how they organized their society. They could have a completely different basic chemistry from humans. Their cells could be based on silicon, or even arsenic. They could have ammonia for blood.

Lanoe would just have to assume that some of them died when the dreadnought fell. That would have to be enough—for the moment.

A swarm of airfighters was gathering around him, clearly intending to box him in. He didn’t bother shooting at them, just pulled back on his stick and climbed for space. He had a lot to think about.

The destruction of the dreadnought proved that the Blue-Blue-White could be killed. Taking down a ship that size meant that the human fleet stood a chance, even against a world as huge and strange as the disk. In his head Lanoe started planning out the rest of his war for justice. They would have to start by taking one of the cities, as a base of operations and as a demonstration to the enemy that they were—

A beam of light speared up from below, from deep in the clouds. It swept across the sky like a searchlight or a beacon. Without warning it swung toward Lanoe as if it would transfix his fighter. Irritated, he swerved off to one side. The beam tried to follow him, so he corkscrewed off to the other side. There were more beams now, three or maybe four searchlights swinging back and forth across the sky.

He tried to ignore them. He’d proven that he could beat the Blue-Blue-White, defeat their best weapons. Now he needed to—

“Lanoe,” Candless called. “Lanoe, the airfighters are pulling back below the clouds. I think they might be retreating. I’m not sure how to say this, but—”

Not now, he thought, you can apologize for doubting me later. It took him a second to realize she’d stopped talking.

There were a solid dozen of the searchlights now, streaming up out of the clouds, radiating off into space. Above him Lanoe could see one of them catch the side of one of the destroyers as it sailed past the place where the dreadnought used to be.

The light played across the destroyer’s hull like it was hunting for something. Looking for something specific. It lit up a broad circle of hull, coloring it a dull yellow. As Lanoe watched, the spot of light shrank and started to turn red.

“Lanoe,” Candless said, “I’m getting some reports, some radio chatter—”

The spot of light narrowed down to a single point, a single point of glowing, ruby red. Instantly it brightened to a searing glare of light—and burned its way through the destroyer’s armor, through its equipment, through anything that got in its way, and kept going, spearing off into space, streaming onward forever.

Red-hot slag dripped from the belly of the destroyer as the light carved it in half.

“Lanoe,” Candless said, very carefully. But her voice was drowned out before she could say anything more.

“Brother!” Rhys Batygin screamed. “Brother!”