Chapter Fourteen

The destroyer slid over to one side and then fell from the air, unable to support its weight. The searchlight flickered out—but another took its place, scanning the sky, looking for another target. It didn’t take long in finding one—it caught a cataphract from Beta wing and in a matter of seconds had reduced it to a plummeting ball of slag. Its pilot didn’t have time to scream.

“Brother!” the surviving Batygin shouted. “Brother! I’ll come for you!”

“Belay that,” Lanoe demanded, but clearly Rhys Batygin wasn’t listening. The remaining destroyer nosed down and burned toward the cloud layer, its many guns firing indiscriminately into the red billows.

“Batygin—get back here,” Lanoe ordered.

“Revise your course, you damned fool!” Shulkin insisted.

But the destroyer stayed on course, vast plumes of red vapor swirling around it as it pushed into the clouds. In a moment all Lanoe could see was the occasional flash of light from below, as the destroyer fired off one of its heavy PBW cannons.

“Candless,” Lanoe said, “they’re using some kind of laser—”

“Yes, thank you, I saw it,” she replied. He could hear the tension in her voice.

“I didn’t think that was possible,” Lanoe said. Laser weapons were supposed to be impractical because of the amount of power they needed to be lethal. “They taught us that back at flight school, remember?”

“On behalf of teachers everywhere, I apologize for that misinformation. But, sir—we need to recall all of our vehicles this instant. And we need to retreat.”

“What?” Lanoe said. “Retreat? We can’t retreat, not now. We’re winning.”

Even as he said it he realized how foolish it sounded.

This new weapon had changed everything. Vector fields couldn’t stop the lasers. They ate through armor without slowing down. Nothing Lanoe had could resist the energy being pumped through those lasers.

Which left only one option. “Forget what I just said,” he told Candless. “Recall all the fighters. Get the ships out of here—our only chance is to move fast, make ourselves bad targets. I’m giving you control of the fleet—keep our people alive. I’ll need them later.”

“Sir?” she called. “Lanoe? What are you talking about? Where are you going?”

Lanoe didn’t bother to answer. She could track him on her tactical board. He pushed his control stick forward and dove for the clouds, chasing the destroyer.

The marines on the cruiser—the gun crews that took down the dreadnought—were still whooping with excitement when the signal for new orders came in. Ehta lifted one hand for quiet, thinking she was about to get a new target, that she would need to get her people moving and motivated again. “Go ahead—we’re ready to fire on your command.”

She’d also expected that it would be Lanoe who’d called her. Instead it was Candless. “Have your people stand down and report to their bunks. We’re in for some heavy maneuvering.”

“Understood,” Ehta said. “But—why?”

“I have a lot more important things to do just now than explain. I want you with Valk. I need someone monitoring him at all times.”

Candless cut the connection without another word. Ehta, deeply confused, turned and looked at her people. “All right, marines,” she said, “passable job there, killing the biggest ship anybody ever saw. Passable indeed!”

That got her a cheer and a few laughs.

“Now, get someplace safe. We’re moving again. Gutierrez, you’re in charge of tucking everybody in.”

The cruiser was already moving by then, in a new direction. Ehta didn’t even bother worrying about which way was up or down. She flipped into the axial corridor, intending to head straight to Valk. But then she stopped.

She had another chance now. She could go down to the brig. Free Ginger from the chorister. This might be the perfect time—there wouldn’t be any guards on the alien’s cell.

No one would know.

For a long, bad moment, she hesitated. She thought about what it would mean, about what it might change. She thought about never going home again.

She thought about the promise she’d made.

She hesitated—and then she sighed in frustration. Not now, she thought. I can’t do it now.

She spared one last glance downward, toward the brig. Wasted some mental energy hating herself. Then she started up the ladder, headed for the wardroom. When she arrived she found Valk motionless and dead to the world. As soon as she set foot in his domain, though, displays started opening all around her.

What she saw made her forget all about Ginger.

“Hellfire,” she said, watching the displays. She saw a cataphract-class fighter reduced to molten metal in the space of a few heartbeats. “Lasers?”

“Lasers,” Valk confirmed.

“Devil’s kneecaps,” Ehta swore. She found a seat and strapped herself in, knowing that if Valk needed to dodge lasers he was going to be making some very dicey maneuvers.

On the displays two more cataphracts were caught by the searchbeams. Ehta winced—it wasn’t that long ago she would have been flying one of those crates. Cataphract pilots prided themselves on being able to dodge just about anything their vector fields couldn’t shrug off—but you couldn’t dodge a weapon like this.

“They got one of the destroyers,” Valk said. “Since then they’ve been shooting down fighters, but it’s just a matter of time before they remember what we did to their dreadnought.”

Ehta’s blood ran cold. “How many hits can we take from one of those?”

“Depends where they hit us. Two, maybe three,” Valk said. “The carrier will do a little better, but if we don’t retreat right now this could be one of history’s shorter wars.”

Another display came up, this one showing the interior of the carrier’s flight deck. Cataphracts were streaming in, two and then three at a time—as risky as hell, all of them crowding in together like that, inviting collisions. Especially when the carrier was moving. The alternative was worse, though—Ehta saw one fighter get blasted just half a kilometer from the carrier’s maw.

Ehta called up a tactical display, but at first it didn’t make much sense. It looked like there was only one wing of Sixty-Fours out there, but then she realized that both wings had been so heavily degraded there were fewer than twenty cataphracts left, total. Both destroyers were missing—and so was Lanoe. “Where’s the boss?” she asked. He couldn’t be dead. A guy like Aleister Lanoe didn’t just die.

“He went for the clouds. I think he’s going to try to knock out whatever’s shooting those beams.”

Ehta swore again—a real profanity this time, one harsh enough to make a civilian faint. “Valk, that’s a suicide mission. He can’t possibly—”

“He’d better,” Valk said. “Count those beams.”

A new display popped up right in front of Ehta’s face, a wide-angle view of the battle area. At first all she could see was smoke and clouds of dust left over from the destruction. When she actually saw the beams, just pale cones of radiance cutting through the murk, she couldn’t even swear, she was so terrified.

There were fifteen of them now, sweeping around the sky, looking for targets. And every time a cataphract made it back to the carrier, that was one less object for them to focus on.

It was only going to be a matter of seconds before those beams started converging on the carrier—and the cruiser.

She shot out one hand and grabbed one of Valk’s gloves. Held it tight.

For a long time Lanoe could see nothing but red mist streaming across his canopy. Droplets of sooty liquid spattered the view and then streaked away as he hurtled downward, deeper into the disk.

A laser shot past him in the murk, bright enough to make him squint. Just to be able to punch through the clouds, much less to burn ships—the amount of power the Blue-Blue-White were pushing through those beams was staggering to think about. More energy, he thought, than the cruiser’s engines could put out in a day of hard acceleration. More energy than a commercial fusion plant could put out in a year.

He supposed a species that could dismantle a star to build themselves a habitat like the disk might have that kind of technology. Might have the power to spare on a laser defense system like this.

More beams flicked past him. One burst after another. Lanoe knew perfectly well that every single one of those shots meant a dead pilot, another cataphract lost from the fleet.

He couldn’t let this stop him. He couldn’t give up, not even in the face of this kind of firepower. How he would move forward, how he was going to win this war—that was an open question. But he would think of something.

He would have to.

“You’ve traveled twenty kilometers through these clouds,” the fighter’s voice said. “I’m still getting inconsistent sensor readings from what’s below.”

“We’ll see for ourselves soon enough,” Lanoe told her. He wished he was as certain as he sounded. What if these clouds never let up? What if he couldn’t find the laser emplacements at all, what if he just kept shooting downward like a meteor, until he came out on the other side of the disk?

What if one of those beams found him first?

A green pearl appeared in the corner of his vision, startling him. “You’ve got a call from Rhys Batygin,” the fighter’s voice told him.

Lanoe flicked his eyes sideways to acknowledge the signal.

“Commander,” Batygin told him, “I’m sorry. I’m very sorry—I’m not turning back. I know I made a promise to follow your orders. But there are some things more important than military discipline. Maybe you don’t see it that way.”

“They killed your brother,” Lanoe said.

“Yes. And I’m going to chase them all the way to hell, if I have to. I’m going to kill every last one of these bloody jellyfish, until—”

“Sure,” Lanoe said.

“—until I feel I’ve … killed enough. Wait. Repeat your last transmission, please?”

“I said sure. I’m not giving you any orders, so you don’t have to worry about disobeying them. You do what you have to do.”

“Commander,” Batygin said, and then he broke the link.

Lanoe had no interest in forestalling the man’s revenge. He knew that pain, that need, that hunger himself.

And besides, as long as the destroyer was ahead of him, directly ahead of him on the same trajectory—it would give him cover. Any beam aimed at his Z.XIX would have to go through Batygin’s ship first.

It might give him a fighting chance.

“Give me some cover! Give me some cover!” a pilot shouted, doing his best to jink around the battle area, trying to make himself a poor target. He was one of the last of the cataphracts that hadn’t made it back to the carrier yet.

“Valk, turn off that channel,” Ehta said. “I don’t want to hear—”

Too late. The man’s final scream didn’t last very long, but it echoed around the wardroom until Ehta felt her head would explode. On a display just to her left the Yk.64 turned luminescent as a laser beam speared through its engine, tearing open its magnetic bottle. The explosion was bright enough to make Ehta turn her head.

“Two fighters still haven’t made it back,” Valk said. “Not including Lanoe. No word from the destroyer.”

“What about the carrier?” Ehta asked.

“So far it’s managed to avoid the beams. That won’t last.”

Ehta wanted to roar in frustration. “Damn you, I meant have they sent any new information, any orders. Anything?” She was still holding out hope that Candless would think of something. She hated the woman with a burning passion, but she had to admit that the ex-teacher had a brain for tactics.

“No,” Valk said. “She’s been too busy arguing with Captain Shulkin. He keeps insisting there’s no need to retreat. That we can still win this somehow.”

“Guy’s a lunatic,” Ehta said. “Hellfire, Valk. Is this it? The end?”

Valk took a while responding. He didn’t have a face, so she couldn’t read his expression. Most likely he had some subroutine to simulate human emotions, and hesitation was one of the options.

“Yes,” he said finally. “Yes. Even if Lanoe can take out those emplacements … well. There’s something I didn’t want to tell you.”

Ehta dropped her head. “Go on,” she told him. “I’m a tough old bird. I can take some bad news.”

“I’ve been doing some long-range scans,” he told her. “Making sure our avenue of retreat isn’t cut off. I found a bunch of moving objects. I mean, a lot of them. At least three more of those dreadnoughts are coming, and they’re bringing airfighters with them.”

“How many airfighters?”

“At least a thousand,” Valk told her.

Ehta slammed one gloved fist down on the wardroom table. “A thousand? How is that even possible?”

“We need to get to space, as soon as we can,” Valk said. “The airfighters can’t follow us once we leave the atmosphere. I’m not sure about the dreadnoughts. I don’t know if we can outrun them. If we can’t—”

“Stop,” Ehta said. “Just stop. You know as well as I do that’s academic. Any second now the laser emplacements are going to kill us, and that’s it. How did we get ourselves into this mess?”

“Lanoe,” he said.

Ehta snorted out a kind of exasperated laugh. Lanoe. Every damned adventure, every bad scrape, every bedeviled mess in her life she owed to Lanoe.

It figured.

And as usual, if anyone was going to save her, that would be Lanoe, too.

The clouds parted.

Lanoe shot through the last of them into clear air. And almost perfect darkness. He could make out a few smudged shapes, a pale line somewhere far below, but nothing he could work with, nothing that made sense.

“Let me give you a light-amplified view,” the fighter’s voice said. The Z.XIX’s canopy flickered and changed. Colors faded away, shadows shrank, and the image was distorted by a flickering grain of static—but he could see.

He kind of wished he couldn’t.

Up ahead of him was Batygin’s destroyer, its guns firing nonstop. The streaking rays of particle beam fire looked like chalk lines on a blackboard. For a second Lanoe couldn’t make out what the destroyer was shooting at, but then something in his eyes shifted and he realized that the target was just so big he’d mistaken it for the landscape.

Below them, right below them, was a city of the Blue-Blue-White. A forest of white pylons joined together at weird angles. Like the spicules of a sponge, or the airy rafters of a cathedral the size of a continent.

Seen up close the pylons were fantastically complicated—ramified and recursive, almost fractal in their intricacy. Each major pylon was covered in substructures. Spiky subpylons that stuck out in every direction. Thick nodelike structures that reminded Lanoe of knucklebones. Clusters of what might be balconies or shelf fungi, hanging below high pierced windows or clusters of tiny apertures barely ten meters across. All so devilishly complex, and so very much of it—the effect was mesmerizing, downright hypnotic. It was beautiful in an unearthly way, delicate and yet immense, baroque in profusion and yet simplistic in its lack of color or any kind of decoration.

“The destroyer’s taking a lot of damage,” the fighter told him.

Lanoe could see as much for himself. Searchbeams played all across the front of Batygin’s ship, searchbeams that narrowed as Lanoe watched. Lasers seared through gun pods and missile racks. The destroyer’s airfoils were pierced with a thousand holes. It looked like the closer you got to the laser emplacements, the harder it was for them to find the one perfect shot, the killing blow. But it was only a matter of time.

Lanoe could hear Batygin bellowing in defiance, or maybe agony. A wordless cry of hate that would not stop, could not stop short of death. Only a few of the destroyer’s weapons were still functional, still pouring heavy PBW fire into the cyclopean architecture below. A lucky shot from the lasers speared right through the destroyer, burning its way through the vehicle from stem to stern. It nearly hit Lanoe as it kept stabbing through the dim atmosphere beyond.

Somehow the destroyer kept moving. Batygin was holding it together by sheer willpower, by sheer hatred.

Right up until the moment he couldn’t anymore.

A beam carved through the destroyer’s fusion reactor and the whole ship went up like a firework, a vast plume of white plasma enveloping its rear half like a funeral shroud. Batygin’s voice cut off instantly.

But the destroyer kept moving. Hurtling toward its own destruction, hurtling down toward the city like a meteor, like the wrath of a god.

What was left of the ship slammed into the city at twenty kilometers per second, five thousand tons of metal and carbon fiber striking the joint between two pylons dead on. The cruiser was tiny compared to the giant pylons, but whatever they were made of couldn’t take that kind of stress. The joint buckled and then shattered in a trillion flagstone-like shards, and the two pylons shot away from each other.

The entire city shook and flexed, the impact strong enough to shatter substructures a hundred kilometers away. Debris pelted off Lanoe’s canopy, some of it hitting him so hard he could hear his vector field sizzling. A bony spar as big as a cargo ship came tumbling toward him and he had to throw himself into a barrel roll to avoid being smashed to pieces.

A laser lashed through the air right beside him and he winced, wanting to turn his head. But he didn’t dare. He’d seen it—the origin of that beam.

“You see those emplacements up ahead? Arm a disruptor,” he told the fighter.

“Done,” she said. “You’ll be in range in ten seconds.”

The lasers didn’t look like weapons. They looked like massive searchlights with silvered lenses. There were thirty of them, mounted on the edge of a pylon like mushrooms growing on a log. Light—noncoherent, nonweaponized light—streamed from them in great pale columns that swung across the sky as they searched for targets. There was no sign of the power source that was generating all of that light, but if he hit them just right that didn’t matter.

“Five seconds to maximum range for this shot,” the fighter told him.

Even as he approached, one of the lasers discharged, firing a ray of death straight up through the clouds. That shot could have killed the carrier, he thought. Maybe Candless was dead. Maybe it had been aimed at the cruiser and it had killed Ehta and Paniet and Valk.

He couldn’t think like that. He needed to focus—focus—

“Three sec—”

One of the beams sliced deftly through his upper portside airfoil, with enough energy left over to melt one of his armored fairings. The Z.XIX, down to just three airfoils now, tried to twist over on its side and dive nose first into the abyss. It was all Lanoe could do to wrestle his control stick until he’d regained something like stability, a kind of limping flight. His nose kept trying to swing around to the left, but he could compensate for that, he could do this—he could do this.

“In range,” the fighter told him.

He pulled the trigger.

The disruptor round launched from a recessed panel in his undercarriage. It streaked toward the searchlights, starting to detonate even before it arrived. It tore through one big light after another, throwing up sprays of broken glass and twisted metal. He opened up with his PBW cannon, just to make sure he didn’t miss even one of the lasers. He had to get them all.

On Ehta’s display, a searchbeam caught the side of the carrier. Before she could even cry out—long before she could warn Candless—the beam’s circle shrank down to nothing and energy surged up it, impaling the carrier on a spear of pure red light.

“No,” she managed to say, after the fact.

The beam had caught the carrier in the middle of its flight deck, passing right through the cylindrical hull without stopping. Where it touched the big ship smoke and clouds of incinerated debris leapt up, obscuring the view—but not so much that Ehta couldn’t see the beam carving through the carrier’s body, working its way backward toward the bridge at the rear of the flight deck. As she watched, a cataphract came tumbling out of the open front of the carrier, bisected so neatly the raw edges were as shiny as mirrors.

Ehta could only hope the pilot had gotten out of that crate before it was hit.

The carrier tried desperately to get away, but as its positioning jets burned hard for a lateral maneuver the beam simply followed, never wavering a centimeter from its destructive course. In a few seconds that laser was going to cut the carrier in half. Far worse, when it touched the engine it would break containment on the fusion torus. It would turn the carrier into a bomb. No one would survive.

Ehta hated herself for it, but she had to ask. “What about us?” she whispered to Valk. “Are we going to—to get away?”

A tactical display popped up near Ehta’s shoulder, but she swiped it away.

“Just answer my damned question,” she said.

“I’m burning for hard vacuum,” Valk said. “Moving as fast as I can. We’re already a hundred kilometers out from the battle area. I’m evading as much as our jets will allow, trying to swerve in an unpredictable rhythm, making us a bad target. But the actual answer to your question is—I have no idea.”

Ehta grabbed the table in front of her hard enough to make its bolts squeal.

She couldn’t help herself. She knew that Candless probably had plenty on her mind at that moment, but she sent the witch a message request anyway. Maybe she could at least say something to—

Before her signal went through, a green pearl had already appeared in the corner of her eye. Candless was messaging her. She flicked her eyes sideways and said, “Go ahead,” even before the connection was complete.

“Ehta,” Candless said. “Valk—I know you’re listening, too. I’m going to do something rather foolish, but it just might give you a chance.”

“Listen, Candless, you don’t have to—”

“Be quiet, please, and listen. There is no time whatsoever for questions or comments. I’m going to jettison all of our cataphracts and carrier scouts. Set them all on remote control and have them fly around in circles. I doubt I’ll live long enough to give them any better instructions than that, but with any luck the Blue-Blue-White will target them instead of you.

“Lanoe wouldn’t approve, I know. He would say we need those small craft to keep fighting this war. But you and I both know—there is no more war. This is the end. I’m about to die, but I can give you one last order. Get the hell out of here.

“Get clear of these lasers, clear of the disk. Get as far away from these jellyfish as you can. Then I want you to force the chorister to open a wormhole. I want you to go home and forget all about this foolish mission.

“One last thing. Major Ehta, I’d like to say something to you personally. I know that we have not always seen eye to eye. I imagine you right now scoffing at my understatement. However, I have always found you—”

Candless’s voice cut off abruptly.

Ehta looked up at Valk.

“No,” she said. “No.”

She swiveled around to look at a display, to prove to herself what she suspected. That the carrier had just been destroyed, that Candless was dead.

One look, though, told her what had really happened. The laser that had been slicing the carrier in half was gone. It had just … vanished.

All around the sky, searchbeams started going out, one by one. Each flickered for a moment, then disappeared. Until none were left.

“Lanoe did it,” Valk said.

“Lanoe did it!” Ehta shouted, and punched the table so hard she thought she might have broken a couple of fingers. She didn’t care. Her hand hurt like the very devil, but she didn’t care. “He did it! Candless? Candless, can you hear me?”

Silence. Just silence.

“No,” Ehta said. “Candless?”

“Captain Candless, come in,” Valk tried.

The silence spun out for far too long.

And then it was broken. “I have … new orders,” Candless said. Ehta surprised herself by how relieved she was to hear the ex-teacher’s voice again. “It appears we have been given a reprieve. Please proceed to the coordinates I will attach to this message. We should still move quickly—the enemy’s reinforcements are still en route.”

“Understood,” Ehta told her. She shook out her hand. She was starting to care about the pain in her fingers. She knew in a second she would care about it a lot. A white pearl appeared in the corner of her vision, her suit telling her that it was ready to administer painkillers. She flicked her eyes across the pearl and felt warmth seep into her veins.

She closed her eyes and let it wash through her, along with a feeling of immense relief. “Candless,” she said, “one more thing. Just then, when you thought you were about to die—you were going to say something about me. Something nice, it sounded like.”

“Perhaps,” Candless replied. “But things have changed, haven’t they? That sentiment no longer applies. Please disregard it.”

She cut the transmission.

Ehta laughed and threw her arms around Valk’s shoulders. “Big guy,” she said. “We’re going to live!” She kissed him on the opaque black flowglas helmet that was the closest thing he had to a head. “We’re going to live!”

“Thanks to Lanoe,” Valk said.

“Right. Lanoe,” she said, her grin fading just a little. One more thing she owed the old bastard.