Chapter Nineteen

With the dreadnought and the interceptors closing in, Lanoe had given up any pretense of hiding. He switched on all the cruiser’s active sensors, to try to get better imagery of his opponent.

The dreadnought and its escort were still six hours out from the cruiser. The alien ship’s engines were burning hot, pushing it faster and faster toward them, but the two ships were still so far apart it took long seconds for millimeter-wave pulses to bounce off the dreadnought’s hull and return to the cruiser’s parabolic antennae. The data he got back made little sense to him. With Valk removed from duty, he needed someone else to look at the numbers. He called up the IO on the carrier to get an analysis of what he’d found.

“Interesting. See, here’s the problem,” the man said, “the reason why when we fought them before, disruptors didn’t even slow them down.” A display popped up near Lanoe’s elbow, showing a series of cross sections of the alien ship. “Disruptors work best on a ship that has big interior cavities. This one—”

“Sure,” Lanoe said. He saw it right away. The cross sections showed that the dreadnought was almost completely solid. Or, rather, almost completely made up of a hard material riddled with millions of tiny bubbles, some as big as two meters in diameter, some no more than a centimeter across. It looked very much like a cutaway view of a coral reef. There was nowhere a creature as large as an adult Blue-Blue-White could move around inside the giant ship—no passageways, no chambers a jellyfish could even squeeze into. “So you’re telling me most of the ship is just dead space.”

“I don’t think so, no,” the IO replied. “I think they use those little cavities to store fuel, like a giant sponge. And maybe the bigger ones could be used as ionizing chambers. With so many of them, it would explain how they can charge up those plasma balls so quickly. It’s weird. I mean, it isn’t like any kind of human technology. I guess that makes sense, since humans didn’t build these things.”

Lanoe touched the display, got it rotating. He examined the blisters, the cagework canopies that studded the outer skin of the coral. The blisters were hollow inside—and much bigger than the bubbles they’d seen in the main hull. “These have to be crew spaces. Cockpits, or something like that. But if the blisters are the only places the jellyfish can move around in, there can’t be more than a half dozen of them on the entire ship.”

Which, frankly, fit with what he’d seen down in the disk, in the city of the Blue-Blue-White. As enormous as that structure of white pylons had been, he’d only seen one adult jellyfish in the whole place. One adult, and a brood of its young.

Perhaps even calling the place a city had been wrong. Perhaps he’d been thinking in human terms, frames of reference that were useless when applied to the habits of an alien species. He’d seen a large structure and assumed it must be densely populated, just like the cities back on Earth or any human planet. Instead what he’d seen had been much more like a reef ecosystem, a vast structure made by tiny creatures, populated by small animals and dominated by a single apex predator.

It got him thinking. He’d estimated that there were a few hundred cities the same size as the one he’d flown through. Maybe three hundred lacy constructions of floating pylons in the entire unimaginably huge volume of the disk.

If every one of those reefs was the territory of just a single adult Blue-Blue-White, then even including the immature ones he’d seen (don’t call them babies, he reminded himself, babies are little humans), the entire population of the disk could be measured in the thousands. The disk might be seventy thousand times the size of Earth, but it only carried a tiny fraction of the population.

Just a handful of them. And they were going to wipe out humanity, just as they had wiped out so many other species.

Pain lanced through his temples suddenly. He felt as if someone had jabbed dull knives up under his eyelids, into his brain. He reached up to rub at his forehead, careful not to let the IO see his pain.

“Good work,” he told the man. “See what else you can find. Look for weak points. Look for … I don’t know. Just find me the best way to kill these things.”

“Yes, sir,” the IO said.

Lanoe ended the call. Once he was unobserved again he brought both hands up to his head and rubbed vigorously at his eyes. The pain receded slowly, but eventually he could see straight again.

He blew out a deep breath. Leaned back in his chair. His eyes ached and he closed them, thinking he would give them a rest. He’d been staring at displays for hours now, studying reports, reading tiny print. He was three hundred years old, for the devil’s sake. Of course he was going to get eyestrain.

He opened his eyes, but made a point of focusing on nothing, of staring into space.

Just a few thousand, he thought. A tiny population. They used so many drones because they didn’t have the crews for more than a handful of ships.

Just a few thousand of them.

It wouldn’t take much to wipe them out.

“I have a plan for how we’re going to take this dreadnought,” Lanoe told Candless, via communications laser. “The interceptors are getting closer every second. If we wait for the dreadnought to come to us, they’ll catch up and we’ll be fighting them all together. I don’t want to let that happen. We’re going to move to intercept—swoop in and kill the dreadnought before the reinforcements arrive.”

“I suppose that’s a wise choice,” Candless said. “Sir.”

“We’ll screen the cruiser’s advance with fighters. They were all but useless before, but we have a better idea now of what we’re facing. A new strategy. If we can get a disruptor or even just an AV round into each of those blisters, we can kill every Blue-Blue-White on the ship. If even one of them is left after the first attack run, we hammer the thing with every gun we have.”

Candless shook her head. “I don’t understand. Why employ the fighters at all? The cruiser’s guns did satisfactory work against the dreadnought we encountered in the disk. Why can’t we simply turn them on this one as well?”

“We got lucky that time. We fired sixteen guns at point-blank range on a mostly stationary target. It’s too big a risk to try to pull off the same trick when both ships are accelerating. If we even get half a broadside in before they roast the cruiser with a plasma ball, it’ll be a miracle—and we don’t know if eight shots will be enough. I don’t think I need to remind you just how big these dreadnoughts are.”

“No, you don’t,” Candless said. She fought the urge to sigh deeply. “When you’re asking me to take such a ridiculously dangerous action that will put my entire crew at risk, I do tend to pay attention.”

He almost smiled at that. On her display he looked tired. Wrung out. Admittedly he was three hundred years old. His face was as wrinkled as a bedsheet after a dirty weekend, and his hair was more salt than pepper. It was rare to see someone who looked that old these days. Most people got cosmetic treatments to make them look like they had when they were twenty-five. The truly rich would just skip the treatments and have their consciousness downloaded into a fresh new body.

Not Lanoe. He’d been old before any of those measures were even available, and he had never bothered with the rejuvenation treatments that might have erased all those wrinkles, those deep bags under his eyes. He’d taken only the injections and procedures that kept him from dying of old age. Anyone but Candless—his oldest comrade-in-arms—might not have noticed how exhausted he looked. By modern standards, he always looked tired—frankly, he always looked like he was three days dead. But now there was definitely a look in his eyes as if something was dragging at him. Sapping his energy.

The last time they’d spoken, he’d treated her like a disobedient child. He’d been rather harsher than she thought was strictly necessary. She had plenty of reason to gloat a little if he was looking harried, she supposed. Yet she couldn’t help but feel something for him, after all they’d been through. To wonder if something was wrong. If perhaps the burden of command was weighing on him. Or perhaps something else. “I’d like to inquire as to your health,” she told him. “If you won’t take it the wrong way. Is something the matter?”

“Never better. Talk to me about what we can field in the way of cataphracts. Your Beta wing is relatively intact, right?”

Candless pursed her lips. Apparently they were no longer friends—or at least he was not going to open up to her just for her asking. Very well, then. If he wanted to be her commanding officer, she would treat him as such. “If by that you mean their ranks weren’t quite as decimated as those of Alpha wing, then, yes, you are technically correct. They can put ten fighters in theater.”

“One squadron.” Lanoe shook his head. “Not enough. Get Alpha wing ready to scramble as well. What’s that? Another eight?”

“Yes, but … that leaves us with no reserve—”

“Carrier scouts,” Lanoe said.

“—except the carrier scouts,” she finished. There was a good half second of lag in their transmission, but that didn’t excuse him from trying to talk over her before she could complete her sentence. “Which is not much of a reserve at all. If we lose too many cataphracts to the dreadnought’s plasma balls we’ll have nothing left when the interceptors do arrive.”

“You don’t win a war by avoiding risks,” Lanoe told her. “Maybe when they see the dreadnought fall, the interceptors will run away. And maybe we’ll need to fight them with just the cruiser’s guns. It doesn’t matter. We need to remove the dreadnought from play—otherwise we’ll never accomplish anything, sitting out here in the dark. Are my orders clear now? Do you have any more questions?”

Candless could think of a few dozen. The first, however, and most preeminent was one that she’d been silently asking herself since they arrived in the system.

Why in Earth’s name are we doing this at all?

What exactly did Lanoe hope to achieve? They couldn’t talk to the Blue-Blue-White, thanks to Valk’s failure to understand their language. They couldn’t make demands, or negotiate a surrender.

She couldn’t see a single military objective that they could hope to achieve—even if, against all odds, Aleister Lanoe managed to win yet another war.

She could hardly say that aloud, though.

“No,” she said. “No questions.”

“Good.” His image on the display winked out of existence.

Only then did she allow herself the long, elaborate exhalation that she’d been holding in. The silent release of breath that was the closest thing she would allow herself to an exasperated sigh.

It was quiet in the wardroom. With Valk sent off to one of the bunks, there was no one around for Lanoe to talk to, to bounce ideas off of, to listen when he grunted in frustration. Even beyond the control station there was no one around, no one in the axial corridor, no one moving around the bunks. Ehta and her marines were sealed up in the gun decks, waiting to fight. Ginger and Rain-on-Stones were locked up in the brig, feeling each other’s pain.

It was just Lanoe and his displays, and the steadily approaching dreadnought.

Waiting. But not for very long.

Hours of maneuvering and burning the cruiser’s engines had brought them to the moment of decision. In less than a minute, the battle would begin.

He kept an eye on a readout that told him how far away the dreadnought was. “Thirty seconds until the enemy is in range,” he said, his words swallowed up by static. The cruiser and the carrier were moving too fast now to use communications lasers. He was broadcasting on an open radio band. Normally that was against protocol—but the protocol had been written for battles fought against other human beings. The Blue-Blue-White might be able to hear him, but they couldn’t understand what he said.

“Twenty-five seconds. Scramble fighters.”

Finally something did change on one of his displays. He saw a camera view from one of the carrier’s cupolas, saw Yk.64s stream past as they launched from the carrier’s flight deck. He counted them as they went, knowing he would count them as they came back, too. Knowing there would be fewer of them when they returned.

The fighters moved quickly into a standard line formation, flying so close their airfoils nearly touched. Lanoe tapped a virtual control and saw the enemy’s interceptors, still half a million kilometers away, their spherical glass canopies silhouetted by the flare of their thrusters. They were still half an hour out.

Plenty of time.

Fifteen seconds. The dreadnought’s weapon pits were warming up, getting ready to throw plasma balls as soon as a target got close enough to be worth shooting at. Those plasma balls were deadly, capable of frying a pilot inside his fighter even on a near miss, but they were only useful at short range. Once the plasma ball left the weapon pit it immediately started losing heat, cooling as it radiated away its energy into space. At even just a few tens of kilometers out they were harmless, barely capable of making a pilot sweat.

Eight seconds. The cataphracts moved into a new formation, their line curling forward at the ends to make a semicircle so they could envelop the enemy.

Lanoe wished like hell he could have been out there with them, but somebody had to fly the cruiser. Candless had volunteered to fly one of the fighters, so at least there would be one competent pilot leading them.

“Five seconds,” he said. “Four. Dreadnought is entering the battle area. Combined wing, engage at your first opportunity. And good luck.”

Three seconds. The battle area was an arbitrary designation, just a set distance away from the cruiser that Lanoe had decided was the best place for a scrap. Still, as he counted down, his blood absolutely sang. It screamed with the need for red vengeance.

His voice was as calm and cool as ever.

“Two seconds. One. Dreadnought is in the battle area.”

One of its weapon pits lit up as bright as a sun. A plasma ball shot forward, rolling toward the line of fighters like a ninepins ball. The cataphracts scattered—and swarmed, falling on the dreadnought like a cloud of gnats. He could see just how tiny they were compared to their quarry.

It didn’t matter. They had the weapons, the ships, that could do this, that could win. If they were good enough pilots, they would prevail.

If.

Time to find out—the battle had begun.

“Alpha wing, move up—there’s a gap there, exploit it!” Candless shouted, even as she threw her Yk.64 over to the side to avoid an incoming plasma ball. “Beta wing, circle around and aggress on the thrusters.” Below her the dreadnought’s enormous pitted mass looked like a heavily cratered moon. She saw a weapon pit opening before her, a dark cave so big she could have flown into it if she was feeling suicidal. She leaned on her control stick with one hand and loaded a disruptor round with the other. “What is the matter with you lot? Who taught you how to fight?”

It had been a very long time since Candless led a wing of fighters into battle. She hoped very much she remembered how.

“Uhl, Singh, Forster,” she called, picking the three pilots closest to her position, “screen my advance!”

Candless could hear the sneer in Forster’s voice as he replied. “You want us to be decoys for you? Bait for those plasma balls?”

“I want you to do your damned job,” she told him, almost growling in anger.

Her fellow pilots weren’t incompetent, she knew. They had all been in the Navy once, and had received Naval training—some at one of the prestigious flight schools, like Rishi, some just getting two weeks’ instruction in the field. For various reasons, though, they’d been drummed out of Earth’s service, and then hired by Centrocor. Flying for the poly—flying for a paycheck—had made them soft, made them worry more about their personal safety than about accomplishing anything. Centrocor couldn’t give them commendations, nor did it promote them or raise their pay for superior flying. They were unmotivated and sullen long before they’d come to her.

Even worse, they lacked esprit de corps. They had no sense of camaraderie with one another—much less with her. Seasoned, disciplined pilots would throw themselves into the very teeth of the devil if it meant protecting their squaddies. This lot were just in it for themselves.

It was still possible to get real work out of pilots like that. It took, however, the application of the greatest, oldest motivator of all. Fear of one’s superior officers.

“Uhl,” she called, “Singh. You will cover my advance. Or when we get back to the carrier, you will sit through a personal multihour debriefing with me. We will go over, in excruciating detail, exactly what you did wrong and how to improve in the future.”

At least that got the two of them moving, swinging into position behind her. Well behind her, though, where they would be useless for drawing fire.

“Suckers.” Forster laughed.

“M. Forster,” she said, “you may return to the carrier. Your services are no longer required.”

“Wait—what?” Uhl asked. “You mean, if we don’t want to fight, we can just—”

“M. Forster is no longer a member of this wing. He is no longer employed. When we return, he can figure out for himself how he’s going to eat, because food is for people who work. He will also need to find a place to sleep, as we don’t have bunks for people who don’t pull their weight.”

“Come on,” Forster said. “We’re all in this together, damn you!”

Candless allowed herself a nasty grin. If he was going to quote the Centrocor corporate slogan at her, she figured she was justified in using one of the Navy’s unofficial mottos.

“Fly or die, M. Forster.”

“Devil’s sake, you pompous—”

“Fly,” she told him, “or die.”

He swung into position right behind her. Uhl and Singh closed ranks, giving her the cover she needed.

Time to strike.

Plasma balls spat in every direction as the dreadnought started to turn around, trying to run for the safety of the onrushing interceptors. Lanoe felt his lips pull back from his teeth in a painful rictus, but he couldn’t relax, couldn’t look away until it was done, until the dreadnought was obliterated.

A cataphract got too close to the big ship and was caught dead on by one of the plasma balls. He saw it pass through the fiery projectile and come out the other side as nothing but slag, as molten debris that came apart in pieces, each flying on with its own trajectory. He smashed his fist against the side of his chair. One less fighter—that made the battle just that much tougher to win.

It wasn’t the first cataphract they’d lost. Most of Centrocor’s pilots were smart enough to stay clear of the huge, slow-moving plasma balls, but occasionally one of them couldn’t roll away in time. If they didn’t take the dreadnought down soon, they could lose this battle purely by attrition—and have nothing to show for it.

At least it looked like Candless had the right idea—he could see her streaking across the surface of the dreadnought, a torpedo fish swimming fast over a bleached coral reef.

“Shulkin,” Lanoe called, because he’d seen something out of the corner of his eye, a blip on a tactical board. “Move back—you’re in danger of straying into the battle area.” The carrier itself could do no good in there, now that it had loosed its cargo of fighters. “I appreciate your enthusiasm, but not if it costs me one of my ships.”

“Understood,” Shulkin called back. He left the channel open and Lanoe could hear him shouting at his pilot, but didn’t bother paying attention. He was too invested in watching Candless edge closer and closer to one of the dreadnought’s giant canopies. There would be a jellyfish in there, he thought, an adult Blue-Blue-White. When the disruptor went in, when it exploded inside that crew space, it would—

A green pearl rotated in the corner of Lanoe’s eye. He thought it might be Ehta, calling to tell him her people were ready to fire. He absentmindedly flicked his eyes across the pearl.

“Sir,” Bury said, “I know this is a bad time—”

“Bury? Damn you, kid, I have a battle to run here! Why are you calling me?”

“I just thought … that …”

“Spit it out or clear this channel.”

“I’ve been watching the battle on my wrist display, and I saw you’ve lost some pilots, and you didn’t have very many to start with, and—”

“You want to fly?” Lanoe asked.

“Yes, sir.”

Lanoe shook his head. He didn’t have time for this. “You’re on the medical list, last time I checked. Anyway—I have every cataphract we’ve got out there right now. There’s no ship for you to take.”

“There are the carrier scouts, sir,” Bury pointed out.

Lanoe almost laughed at that. Yes, it was true. There were ten carrier scouts still nestled inside the carrier’s flight deck. Tiny ships, fast but lacking in firepower—they didn’t carry any disruptors, just PBW cannons, and those were useless against the dreadnought’s homogeneous hull.

He had to respect Bury’s willingness to fly one of those crates. Though not enough to actually let it happen. “Sorry, Bury. It’s not happening.”

“Sir,” Bury said, and Lanoe could hear the pitch of his voice rising. The kid didn’t like what he’d heard. “Sir—I have four confirmed kills to my name. If we lose this battle, I might die without ever getting my blue star. As a pilot yourself, surely—”

Lanoe cut him off.

He reached for a squeeze tube of water. Bit off the plastic end and spat it out. Took a deep drink, while calling up a new display with his free hand—a highly magnified view of Candless’s fighter. The view shook and wavered in and out of focus as the adaptive telescope lens tried to stay centered on her. She was moving fast enough even the cruiser’s imaging algorithms couldn’t keep up.

“Do it,” he muttered. “Do it. Get that shot.”

The dreadnought below her was just a blur. Candless flew as fast as she dared—too slow and she risked making herself a prime target for one of those plasma balls. Too fast and she wouldn’t be able to aim properly when she reached the blister. “We’re going to do this strictly by the book,” she told her wingmates. “Uhl, you’re up first. On my mark, break formation and get the hell out of here. Accelerate hard and you’ll be all right. Fall back and rejoin the main formation. Singh, you’ll be next—but don’t move until I give the word. Forster, you’ll have the signal honor of staying with me until I’m ready to make my run. If you three stick precisely to my orders, there’s a very good chance all of us come out of this alive. Have I made myself understood?”

All three of them replied in the affirmative. If there was a deep grumble hidden in Forster’s answer, she pretended not to hear it.

The blister was dead ahead, an extrusion of thin white pylons like the frame of a greenhouse. Glass, or whatever the Blue-Blue-White used in place of glass, filled the interstices, dark enough she could only see shadows moving within.

Her disruptor was primed and ready. She kept one eye on a display showing an infrared sensor sweep, a scan measuring the temperature of the three nearest weapon pits. The second one of them started warming up, she—

There. The temperature was spiking, ramping up at an improbable rate. In a second, a plasma ball would form inside that pit, and be launched outward by its own heat. Any moment now, any moment …

“Uhl, break!” she shouted.

The Yk.64 to her left peeled off, rolling on its positioning jets as Uhl punched his throttle. He twisted upward into open space, and just as Candless had predicted, the plasma ball shot after him, so hot, so bright her display flared with light that forced her to turn her head. The plasma ball was fast. A cataphract could move faster, if the pilot didn’t care about damaging his engine. She watched Uhl on a tactical board, as a blue dot being chased by a red blur. For a second it looked like he wasn’t going to make it, as if the plasma ball was going to catch him, but then he shot forward with renewed speed, even as he banked off to the side. The plasma ball shot past his new position, cooling as it rocketed through the emptiness, shrinking and fizzing out as the ionized gas lost its heat.

“Yes!” Singh shouted over the open channel.

“No chatter,” she told him. She needed to focus. The blister was so close now, close enough she could make out shapes behind the dark glass. Something big and round in there. A damned jellyfish, certainly. But already a second weapon pit was heating up. “Singh, break!” she called.

Singh, perhaps excited by seeing Uhl survive the foolhardy maneuver, tried to get fancy with his flying. He pulled up in a sharp loop, the positioning jets in his undercarriage flaring as he curved high up over the dreadnought’s back. As the plasma ball coalesced inside its pit, growing bright as a magnesium flare, he crested at the top of his loop—then rolled over on his side and shot off at an angle. The plasma ball blasted past him at high speed, close enough she was worried he might have been cooked alive inside his cockpit.

“Singh, report,” she called. “Singh. Report!”

“I’m, uh, here,” the pilot called back, sounding short of breath—but alive. “I’m okay, got a little toasty in here, but I’ve got plenty of coolant pressure, I’ll be—I’ll—”

A second plasma ball erupted from a weapon pit directly beneath him. There was no warning—it was not one of the pits that Candless had been monitoring. There was no chance of him maneuvering out of its way. It engulfed him so fast and at such a high temperature that Candless could actually see his fighter incandesce inside the plasma ball, a negative-image silhouette, white inside the blue heart of the plasma projectile. In a moment the plasma ball had passed him by, heading upward and into dead space. Candless looked for any wreckage, any debris from Singh’s fighter, some irrational part of her thinking that maybe, just maybe he was still alive somehow. But there was nothing.

Singh had been utterly vaporized.

Candless squeezed her eyes shut, if only for a split second. She’d lost another one, another of her charges. Singh had never been her student, she had barely known his name. She had been responsible for his safety, though. She’d told him he was going to be okay if he just followed her orders.

She had failed him.

“He … he just …”

It was Forster, ignoring her order regarding chatter. She lacked the moral strength to upbraid him.

“He’s gone,” Forster said. He sounded utterly surprised. As if such a thing were physically impossible. As if a cataphract pilot couldn’t possibly die.

“Ma’am,” he said, “I think maybe—”

“Stick with me, Forster,” Candless insisted. “We can do this, but only if we stick together.”

“Sorry,” he told her. “I’m … I’m sorry.” He peeled away, climbing fast to get out of the range of the plasma balls. Soon he was just a bright spot, a moving speck of light against the myriad fixed stars of the galactic center.

Candless growled in frustration. She was so close—within seconds of the blister. She was utterly unprotected in her run. The only intelligent choice in that situation, the only sane choice, was to break off, to open her throttle and get clear.

To hell with it.

She reached for her throttle. Not to accelerate so she could get away. Instead she punched for a negative burn, the retros in the nose of her fighter burning hard—to slow her down.

If she was going to risk everything for just this one shot, she intended to make it a clean, direct hit.

Lanoe grabbed his knees and rocked back and forth. His eyes bugged out of his head as he watched the display with growing tension, urging Candless on from afar. “Come on, come on,” he said. He knew exactly what she was doing, why she was slowing down. He approved—even if it put her in serious danger. Even if he couldn’t afford to lose her. She was the best pilot he had out there.

A green pearl spun in the corner of his vision. He glanced at it, thinking if it was Bury again he would demote the kid on the spot. It wasn’t Bury—it was Ehta. He flicked his eyes sideways, never turning his head away from his display.

“Sir,” she said, her tone icily formal. Well, her tone shouldn’t surprise him—he had put a pistol to her head not long ago. “The guns are hot and ready. We can fire on your signal.”

Lanoe felt his teeth rasping against one another. He knew, on one level, that he should give the order. He should let Ehta fire the guns, and probably destroy the dreadnought with one quick salvo.

On another level, though, a less rational but far more compelling level, he had a reason not to fire. To let Candless prove his theory that if you took out the canopies the dreadnought would be removed from play. To save those guns for when he really needed them.

“Stand by,” he told Ehta.

“Sir, I … I don’t want to question your orders, but we have a perfect firing solution right now. The dreadnought is maneuvering. If we wait, even ten seconds, we’ll lose our shot. We’ll have to start target acquisition over from scratch, and—”

“Stand by,” he told her again.

She cut the link. Lanoe knew she was probably fuming, down there on the gun deck. Cursing his name. He could live with that, as long as she followed his orders.

Sometimes in war a commander had to make choices his troops didn’t understand. Couldn’t understand. Sometimes that had to be okay.

“Come on,” he told Candless. “You can do this.”

Weapon pits all over the dreadnought were heating up, plasma balls gathering strength before they were launched. Candless was low enough, close enough to the giant ship’s hull, that it would be difficult for the plasma balls to actually hit her. Difficult, but not impossible. From what she’d seen they could fire at any angle, even with an elevation of zero. From the enemy’s perspective, a shot that low might be too big a risk to take. The plasma ball that took her out would graze the very skin of the dreadnought. It would damage the ship it was trying to protect.

The alternative, though, was to let her take her shot. To let her kill some of the dreadnought’s crew. She doubted they would take that chance.

On instinct she threw her control stick over to one side. Hit her maneuvering jets and sent herself zigging and zagging across the dreadnought’s skin. She did it just in time—a plasma ball launched in the same moment she started evading. The coral-like hull of the dreadnought bubbled and flowed like candle wax as the plasma ball rocketed toward her, right on her tail.

Candless banked off to one side and let the plasma ball shoot past her, close enough that she felt her eyebrows start to curl and smolder, felt sweat pour like a waterfall down the back of her suit. But then it was past.

And she was right where she needed to be.

The blister was enormous, maybe a hundred meters across—the size of one of the late Batygins’ destroyers. It filled most of her view. She could have rammed right through one of the panes of glass that filled in the cagework, burst inside, and startled the hell out of the jellyfish in there.

She could see it. Not clearly—the tinted glass dulled its colors and her velocity blurred its features—but she could see a reddish spherical mass in there, pulsating with motion. A Blue-Blue-White. This was the closest she’d ever gotten to one of them.

She had a firing solution. She tapped her weapons board to confirm, then pulled her trigger.

The Yk.64 lurched as the disruptor’s tiny thruster fired, throwing the projectile forward at hundreds of meters a second. The moment it was clear of her undercarriage it started to detonate, a Roman candle shedding fire as it raced toward the blister.

Candless streaked past the blister, accelerating hard as the hull disappeared beneath her and she saw only empty space below. She didn’t even watch to see what the disruptor was doing to the dreadnought because some ugly premonition told her she might not survive long enough to see the fruits of her labors.

A quick glance at her tactical board proved out that hunch. Behind her, two weapon pits were blazing hot, already launching plasma balls. Both of them headed in her direction, on intersecting trajectories. She was right in the middle of a crossfire.

Lanoe could see nothing but the disruptor, could only watch as it plunged through the dark glass of the blister. A sheet of transparent material twenty meters across starred and then shattered, and for the first time he could see inside the crew space of the dreadnought. Not that he had time for a long look. He just made out a bewildering scene, strange shapes and surfaces that were designed for the comfort of entirely nonhuman creatures, before the disruptor filled the blister with smoke and light, pulverized coral bursting outward in an ever-expanding cloud, fizzing liquids that caught fire and then extinguished themselves almost instantly as they were exposed to the vacuum of space, and then—yes—

An adult Blue-Blue-White, scorched, battered, and oozing fluids, came tumbling out of the ruined blister, its tentacles twisting around each other as it tried to cover its mouth, as it tried to protect itself against the sudden decompression. Lights flared inside its translucent mantle, desperate signals Lanoe would never be able to understand, blue and orange and white, purple and purple and purple, some kind of distress call, but the lights dimmed, even as Lanoe watched, even as the creature slowly died. Its body squelched and throbbed, de-forming until it was stretched out like a long tube, then contracted to a tight, muscular sphere—and then relaxed.

Its lights went out, one by one. The tentacles went limp.

Lanoe leaned his head back and laughed, a nasty, howling guffaw of a laugh that sounded repugnant even to his own ears, but he couldn’t stop, couldn’t help himself. The damned thing was dead. Dead, dead, dead.

Candless was moments away from death, with nowhere to go. The two plasma balls were racing toward her, competing to see which one could immolate her first. Even if she shot straight upward, away from their intersecting paths, she would be flash-fried by their radiant heat. She didn’t have time to breathe, didn’t have time to think.

Marjoram Candless was a hell of a pilot. She’d fought in almost as many wars as Lanoe, had won more than her fair share of battles. She’d been trained by the finest flight instructors the Navy ever had, then—when she’d tired of war—she’d joined those ranks herself. She didn’t need to think. She had reflexes honed by countless hours in the cockpit, by hundreds of hair’s-breadth escapes.

Her fingers moved across her engine board, sketching out a maneuver that might save her. The board flashed and required that she confirm she actually wanted to do what she’d asked it to do.

She hit YES before the screen could even finish rendering the text. Then she punched her throttle and yanked her hand away from her control stick, as it snapped around like a snake.

She had switched off the compensators on her rotary engine. Her cataphract responded, as cataphracts always had—this being the oldest trick in the book, the rotary turn. Her engine turned into a massive, incredibly energetic flywheel and she turned ninety degrees in less than the time it took her heart to beat, even with her pulse racing. Her thrusters kicked in and she shot forward, not up, away from the plasma balls, but down.

She grabbed the stick and banked hard. The plasma balls met each other atop the dreadnought’s hull, colliding in a massive burst of plasma that would have vaporized her as surely as they’d vaporized Singh—except for one thing.

By the time they met, she wasn’t on top of the dreadnought anymore. She was underneath it, sheltered by the giant ship’s own mass.

She wanted to whoop for joy, for relief, for the sheer terror of still being alive. She wanted to punch something, she wanted to cry out.

She didn’t get a chance to do any of those things. Because even as she was making her crazy turn, even as she was maneuvering to safety—she heard something whine and scream and then break loose with a terrifying snap.

Navy regulations strictly forbade rotary turns. Pilots used the trick anyway, because it could save their lives. The reason for the prohibition, though, was that it also put an enormous stress on your engine mounts.

In a well-built cataphract like a BR.9, the Navy’s workhorse, that danger was minimal. The BR.9’s engine mounts had been reinforced specifically to take that stress. But Candless wasn’t in a BR.9. She was in a Yk.64, a fighter built by one of Centrocor’s many subcontractors. Designed and fabricated by the lowest bidder.

Candless touched her control stick, nudging it just a hair. The Yk.64 moved, twisting away from an incoming plasma ball that was still a few seconds away. But something behind her rumbled and groaned and a red light popped up on her engine board.

“Hellfire,” she breathed. She had no idea how far she could push the engine before her engine mounts gave way entirely. If they did, if her engine came loose inside its compartment, it might just leave her stranded, unable to maneuver.

Alternatively, it could misfire. And explode.

“Hot damn!” Lanoe shouted, loud enough to hurt her ears. “You did it! Candless, you did it! I knew this would work.”

“Lanoe,” she called. “I have an engine fault. I have to withdraw. Right now.” A second red light came on, this one warning her that heat was building up inside the engine compartment. That … was bad. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry, but—”

“Candless,” Lanoe called back. “I need you in there. There’s five more of those canopies to pop.”

“I understand, but—”

“You’ve seen just what Centrocor’s pilots are worth. You’re the only one who can do this. The only one who can kill this thing.”

“Perhaps,” she said, in the tone of voice that worked on him—sometimes—“you would like me to steer and fire with one hand, while I use the other to physically hold my engine together? Perhaps, if I had three hands, I could use the third to throw my disruptor like a dart. I’m telling you that I have a fault, and—”

“I can see your telemetry from here. I’ve won battles with more heavily damaged fighters than yours. Get in there and do it. That’s an order.”

Candless frowned but she knew that she’d lost. She could hardly refuse a direct order from her commanding officer. She had always lived her life as a concrete example of the value of Navy discipline. To refuse now—

“Very well,” she said. “I’ll do it.”

Lanoe didn’t even bother to reply.

“Shulkin!” Lanoe called. “Hang back! There’s no need to expose yourself to those plasma balls!” The carrier was edging toward the dreadnought again, in spite of his previous order. “What the hell are you thinking?”

“That you’re making a hash of this battle, sir,” Shulkin said. Sounding distracted, of course. “I have several antivehicle guns I can bring to play. I intend to savage the enemy, as you and Captain Candless can’t seem to hit a target five kilometers wide.”

Lanoe bit back a curse. The guns on the carrier were heavy-duty particle beam cannons—a little stronger than the ones the cataphracts carried, but totally incapable of cutting through the dreadnought’s coral-like hull. He didn’t know what effect they might have on the cagework canopies, but he doubted they would be more effective than disruptors. They had a shorter range than the dreadnought’s plasma balls as well, which meant Shulkin would have to put the carrier at risk just to get off a shot.

“I’m ordering you to back off,” Lanoe told Shulkin.

“With all due respect, sir, if you won’t use the cruiser’s guns—”

“I’ve got my gun crews on standby, damn you,” Lanoe said. “It’s my decision when they fire, not yours.”

“I realize that you are older than me, Commander,” Shulkin said, “but not by that much. You will remember a saying from the old days—if you’ll forgive a little profanity. Never try to bullshit a bullshitter.”

“Are you and I going to have a problem, Captain?” Lanoe asked. “I gave you a damned order. Back up and stay clear of the battle area. I have a plan here, and you’re stepping on it.”

“Very well, sir,” Shulkin replied. “I wish you much luck with your plan.”

Candless got herself turned around. Slowly. Found another blister, a smaller one hanging from the underside of the dreadnought like a malignant growth. She readied another disruptor round. “Someone,” she called on the common channel. “Someone cover me. I’m—”

She didn’t have time to finish the sentence. Even as she pushed her stick forward, as she started her run, a warning chime sounded behind her head. Red lights started popping up all across her boards, some of them flashing.

It was too late. She’d already opened her throttle. Her engine was blazing away, pushing her toward the blister in a perfectly straight line. It didn’t matter that behind her she could hear more engine mounts giving way, one after the other, like gunshots.

She glanced down at her engine board, dreading what she would see there. It was, indeed, bad. The engine was floating inside its compartment with no support at all. For the moment it was moving her in the direction she had chosen.

If she tried to use her maneuvering or positioning jets, though, or if she attempted to gimbal her thrust—in other words, if she attempted to steer in any way—the engine would tear right through its compartment. Rip through the shielding behind her back. Fry her like an egg—and keep going.

She could hear it rattling around back there, vibrating its way off of its broken mounts, roaming around in its compartment. The slightest jar, the tiniest deviation in her course would be all it took.

Meanwhile, she was on a collision course with her target. Unable to veer away. Plasma balls were coming in—she could see at least three of them headed in her direction.

She wanted to scream. She wanted to pound on her console until the warning lights went out, until everything worked again. She knew far better than to think that would work but the primal impulse was there.

Instead, she dragged her weapons board around until it was directly in front of her. The virtual display was something to focus on. It showed all of its systems as operating at optimal levels. At least there was that.

She brought up her disruptor’s preferences page and scrolled through the options, time slowing to a crawl as she contemplated how she could best make use of the last few seconds of her life. She found the option to have the disruptor explode on impact. Yes, she thought. Yes, that would do.

She confirmed her choice. Then she repeated the selection for each of the disruptors in her magazine, and for all of her antivehicular rounds as well. When her Yk.64 collided with the blister, it would make a highly impressive bang.

Then she locked her stick, so that the fighter wouldn’t deviate from its course by accident and ruin her chance to at least accomplish something with her death.

It was all happening too fast for her to be able to panic, or even truly process what was happening. She tried to organize her thoughts, to compose herself for the end. She had been a good teacher, she thought, as the blister raced toward her. She had probably saved a few lives in her time, though not as many as—

“Captain Candless,” someone said. It sounded like they were standing next to her, tapping her on the shoulder.

What now? “Present,” she said.

“I, uh, thought you might like some help.”

She turned her head, as if she would see who it was. In point of fact, she did see them. Uhl was right beside her, his fighter almost touching the tips of her airfoils, his cataphract streaking along at exactly the same velocity as her own. He gave her a polite wave.

“I’m afraid I’m beyond needing cover,” she said. She sketched out—briefly—her situation, and saw his face drain of blood.

“Then how about a ride?” he asked.

What he had in mind was ridiculous. Beyond foolish. As a flight instructor, it was exactly the kind of thing she had taught her pupils to never, ever do.

It wasn’t as if she had any better ideas, though.

“Thank you,” she said. “I’m much obliged.”

Then—as there was very little time left—she reached for a key recessed into the console before her. The key that would bring down her canopy. The Yk.64 had a large dome cockpit, the pilot sitting in almost a full bubble of flowglas. As it receded into the small craft’s fairings, Candless felt as if she were being thrown forward into the hard vacuum of space. Suddenly she wasn’t flying an advanced machine, but hurtling along on a narrow seat, completely at the mercy of the void.

“Hold yourself steady, please,” she called. Then she trigged the quick-release on her straps and simultaneously threw herself sideways, out of the seat, out of her fighter altogether. Uhl held their velocities perfectly, exactly even—otherwise she would have sliced herself in half on one of his airfoils. As it was she collided painfully with the leading edge of one of them, all the wind puffing out of her lungs and clouding her helmet with condensation.

It took every bit of strength she had to clamber up onto the airfoil. She got her fingers wrapped around a handhold on one of his fairings. It wasn’t much to hold on to—it was designed to help the pilot climb into his cockpit when it was sitting motionless in a docking cradle. It was better than nothing. She flicked her eyes across the tiny display built into her collar ring and the fingers of her gloves locked into place, forming a far stronger grip than mere human muscles could manage.

Would it be enough? There was only one way to find out.

“I’m as secure as I’m going to get,” she told Uhl. “Go!”

Plasma balls were incoming. Her damaged fighter streaked past them, locked into its collision course. As Uhl peeled off, veering away from the chaos, headed for the lines of fighters out at the edge of the battle area, Candless felt as if her hands were being torn from her body, as if they would come off at the wrists at any moment. G-forces pummeled her inside her suit—she lacked the protection of an inertial sink out there in the vacuum. As the fighter pulled away from the dreadnought her feet flew out behind her. She swung back and forth like a pendulum as she clung for dear life to the side of Uhl’s ship. She gritted her teeth and tried to breathe and desperately, desperately hoped she was going to live through this, that she hadn’t put herself through all this pain for nothing.

She glanced back just in time to see her Yk.64 smash into the dreadnought’s blister. The light of the ensuing explosion was so intense that it left bright green spots swimming through her vision long after she looked away.

“Perfect,” Lanoe called. “Perfect! Just four more of those to go!”

Candless took a deep breath. At least, as deep a breath as her precarious position would allow.

“Terribly sorry, Commander, but that was it for me,” she said.

“What? What are you talking about?” Lanoe demanded. “We need to get the other four. It has to be done, Candless.”

“Alas, not by me.” She told him where, exactly, she was, and why.

For a long moment he was silent. She knew him well enough to know he was thinking. Planning. Scheming.

What he came up with, however, was utter rot.

“I’m headed in,” he said. “I’ll take the Z.XIX, finish the job myself.”

“That means leaving the cruiser without a pilot,” she said, trying to keep a level of calm in her voice. What a fool he could be sometimes. What a damned fool! “And the fleet without a commander. It will be supremely difficult to oversee the battle when you’re right in the midst of it.”

“I’ve done it before,” he said. “I’ll be there in two minutes. Unless you think Centrocor’s pilots can finish this before I can arrive.”

The disdain in his voice made her cringe. The disrespect for his own pilots. Candless looked over at Uhl, and saw him looking back. Of course he’d just heard that. She mouthed an apology.

The Centrocor pilot just shrugged.

“Lanoe, just—one more thing,” she said. “How long before the reinforcements arrive? The Blue-Blue-White interceptors?”

He paused for a moment, perhaps to check a display.

“Eight minutes,” he told her.

“Ah,” she said. “Then you should get moving, shouldn’t you?”

The Z.XIX’s engines pulsed with life as Lanoe slid into the seat. The straps snaked forward across his chest. He tapped a recessed key and the canopy flowed up around him.

“I’ve run a full set of preflight diagnostics,” the fighter said. “All systems look good.”

“How many disruptors have we got?” he asked.

“I see ten in our ammunition loadout,” she told him.

More than enough. He released the fighter from its docking cradle and tapped the stick to send it lurching forward, out of the cruiser’s vehicle bay. In front of him, at first, he saw nothing but stars. He banked around to one side, giving the engine plenty of throttle, and there it was—the battle area. Less than a hundred kilometers away.

On his displays it was anarchy, a welter of blue dots swarming like gnats around the elephantine shape of the dreadnought. He brought up a magnified view and saw what Candless had been able to accomplish. One blister torn open, the spars of its cagework twisted and shattered, broken white fingers gesturing in futile desperation at the sky. The other blister she’d hit was gone altogether, nothing more than a jagged crater of broken coral there now. Cracks radiated away from the site where her fighter had detonated, deep fissures in the pitted hull.

He leaned hard on his stick and went zooming in toward the giant ship. Plasma balls were everywhere—so many they dazzled his eyes, so thick in the volume of space around the dreadnought he couldn’t look away from them. He polarized the flowglas of his canopy to protect his vision, darkening the view until the plasma balls were just bright patches of color, the dreadnought itself a pale shadow hanging in space.

It was fine. He didn’t need to see much. There was an intact blister not too far from his position, one he could probably hit without the benefit of other cataphracts to run cover for him. He nudged his stick and hit his maneuvering jets, coming in fast in a loose corkscrew that just avoided a passing plasma ball. He felt sweat break out on his upper lip and his forehead but he ignored it.

“Give me a firing solution,” he told the fighter. He would probably need to manually aim his disruptor, but—

“There,” she said. Yellow crosshairs appeared right in the middle of his view, centered on the blister. As the Z.XIX swung around and around in the corkscrew, the virtual sight never moved.

“How long until we’re in range?” he asked.

“We already are,” she said.

Damnation! He’d forgotten about the Philoctetes aiming algorithm the Z.XIX carried, that doubled the range of all his weapons. He’d risked his life getting this close when he didn’t even need to.

He laughed at his own folly. Armed the disruptor. Pulled the trigger.

The explosive round tore into the blister. Light streamed out from the dark glass interstices of the cagework. Heat and expanding gas blossomed outward as the blister burst like a lanced boil.

Lanoe watched it all happen, even as his hands moved as if directed by some other consciousness. His cataphract twisted away from the wreckage, dodging a plasma ball with ease. He flew out toward the formations of Alpha and Beta wings without a scratch on him.

“See, Candless?” he said on the open channel. “That’s how it’s done.”