Chapter Twenty

Bury took a deep breath before he pushed through the airlock. Not because it was necessary—his helmet flowed up around his face before he was even exposed to the vacuum—but because what he was about to do was maybe the most foolish and headstrong thing he’d ever considered.

Bury didn’t lack insight. He knew who he was, why he felt this constant need to prove himself. Most people thought his home planet was a backwater, the exact middle of nowhere, and that its people were inferior. They laughed at a Hellion’s shiny face, the lack of hair. Ever since he’d left Hel and joined the Navy, everyone had laughed at him—his classmates first, and now the crew of Lanoe’s fleet. Behind his back they mocked him constantly. He’d intended from his earliest days in flight school to show the world they were wrong. He’d worked hard to fly faster, fight harder than anyone else. To become something special, to earn the respect of his peers—so he could rub it in their smug faces.

Hard to accomplish anything like that, though, when you were stuck on the medical list. If he was ever going to exceed prejudiced expectations, he needed to get out there and get his fifth kill. Earn his blue star.

What he was about to do was not only against orders, it was incredibly illegal. It could get him court-martialed, or worse. If it worked, though—

There.

He was in the carrier’s flight deck. Starlight streamed in through a hole in the carrier’s hull where the laser had nearly bisected it. The light fell across the ranks of docking cradles, each like the exposed rib cage of some ancient fossil. Almost all of them empty now. Far up ahead, near the open maw of the carrier, he could see the Centrocor woman’s yacht, a bubble of soft light. Closer to him was the bulbous side of a troop transport, and the deconstructed pipework of a maintenance tender.

The ships he wanted were right at the back, clustered at the bottom of the flight deck as if they were huddling there for warmth. The slender carrier scouts looked unimpressive, even in the deep shadows. Their designers had spared no effort cutting them down to as small a size as possible. They lacked almost everything you expected to see on a cataphract-class fighter: they had no airfoils, no armored fairings, no heavy weapon panels. A single PBW cannon stuck out from underneath a bare-bones cockpit. The engines were powerful but largely unshielded and unprotected, just a trio of long thruster cones sticking straight back from the pilot’s seat.

No real pilot would ever let themselves be seen flying one of those crates. Sometimes, though, you ran out of choices in life. Sometimes, Bury thought, you took what you could get. And if he could earn his blue star while flying such a worthless piece of junk—well, the glory would be all the sweeter for it.

He opened the canopy and slipped inside. He wasn’t very big, but the seat still felt cramped and his helmet almost touched the canopy once it flowed back over him. He looked to the controls, wondering how different this was going to be from flying a cataphract. The carrier scout was so stripped down that all of its command options fit on a single display, which lit up as soon as he was in the seat. He pulled the straps across his chest—the scout lacked the automatic straps he was used to—and took a second to focus on his heartbeat, which was thundering in his chest.

It sounded like it was beating out time. Like it was beating out the same number, over and over. Four. Four. Four.

What came next was going to be the hardest part, he thought. The scout was still clutched tightly in the arms of its restraining cradle. He wasn’t going anywhere until he could release those arms, and normally they could only be triggered from the carrier’s bridge by a flight control officer. The approval process was meant as a safety feature—in the middle of a general scramble fifty fighters could all be trying to get out of the flight deck at once. Someone had to make sure they didn’t collide with each other in the mad dash. Even now, when the flight deck was all but empty, Bury couldn’t launch without approval.

There was a way, he thought, to override the restraint’s clamps. If he could convince the carrier scout that there was an emergency—say, a fire in the flight deck, or an incoming asteroid collision—the clamps would release immediately. The problem was that meant hacking, and Bury didn’t know much about computers. He’d had a class in information studies back at Rishi, of course, but he hadn’t bothered paying much attention.

The first thing he had to do was reroute the scout’s logging process so that it reported only to itself, not the bridge, and that meant getting root access, which … he had no idea how to do. He stared at the board, trying to think. There had to be a way. He’d come this far, and surely fate wouldn’t fail him now, surely he would think of something, anything. There had to be some way to—

Motion out in the flight deck startled him so much that he hit his head on the low canopy. He cursed as he craned his neck around, trying to see if someone was coming. The light streaming in from the carrier’s open maw was obscured, turned to shadows that shifted rapidly. It took him a second to realize that it was a cataphract coming back from the battle, maybe a damaged fighter limping home. There was definitely something wrong with its silhouette—it looked all lumpy on one side, as if something had gotten stuck on one of its airfoils.

As it came closer Bury saw a person riding there, clinging to the side of the fighter like a barnacle. What the hell? A beam of light caught the rider’s helmet and he saw, to his immense surprise, that it was Captain Candless.

His old teacher. His old nemesis. Riding on the side of a cataphract, her legs swingly wildly as the ship maneuvered toward a cradle halfway up the deck.

Bury shut down his control display so its light wouldn’t give him away. If she caught him here …

As Bury watched, the cataphract’s canopy came down and the pilot—nobody Bury recognized—clambered out. He helped Candless move into the airlock next to the cataphract’s berth. The outer door closed behind the two of them.

Bury had been holding his breath. He let it out now and started to relax a little. He reached to switch the carrier scout’s display back on, to get back to his task.

Except before he did that, he took one last look at the cataphract. The only one in the flight deck—the rest of them were still out at the battle area, their pilots no doubt covering themselves in glory. This particular cataphract had been left half-docked, as if the pilot had forgotten to complete his post-flight checklist. Its canopy was still down, for one thing, exposing the cockpit to vacuum. Tsk tsk, Bury thought. If it was his fighter he would have taken better care of it. He would have—

He would have fully engaged the docking cradle.

The cataphract was perfectly stable where it lay on top of the cradle. But the restraining arms hadn’t been closed around its fuselage. The pilot hadn’t bothered to secure the fighter. Maybe he’d just forgotten, or maybe he intended to come back in a minute and take the fighter back out to the battle area. Rather than worrying about getting permission from the bridge, he could simply jump back in his cockpit and go.

Bury licked his plastinated lips with a dry gray tongue.

When destiny comes knocking at your door, he thought, it’s rude not to answer.

Useless.

The bloody Centrocor pilots were useless. They made a good show of trying to swoop in toward the dreadnought, to get close enough to launch a disruptor, but every damned time a plasma ball would come streaking toward them they would swerve away, running for safety.

Not a single one of them was worth a wet damn, as far as Lanoe was concerned. Even after he’d risked life and limb over and over, trying to show them the way, trying to lead by example, none of them had the courage to actually take a shot.

They couldn’t even give him proper cover. He’d managed to take down one blister all by himself, and it should have just been a matter of time before he’d got the other three. Instead, now that he was the only real threat in the battle area, he’d also become the only meaningful target for the dreadnought’s plasma ball guns. The Blue-Blue-White weren’t stupid—or at least they’d learned from their previous mistakes. They didn’t bother shooting at the Yk.64s at all, instead concentrating all their fire on forming a defensive net that Lanoe couldn’t punch through.

Not that he hadn’t tried. He’d pushed as hard as he could to break through that net, and had more than his share of near misses. He felt like he was roasting in a furnace, his skin dried out and crisping. He’d gotten so dehydrated that every time he blinked it felt like sandpaper rubbing against his eyes.

“Somebody get over here, now,” he shouted over the open channel. A couple of the Centrocor pilots made a halfhearted stab at it, swinging down to fly beside him—until they were scared off by incoming plasma. Lanoe scowled at them as they ran away. Without a wingmate to cover him, there was no way he could get close enough to use his disruptors, even with his fancy targeting algorithm.

“Give me cover!” he bellowed. A Yk.64 came corkscrewing down toward him, and he nodded to himself, planning out his next attack. Knowing perfectly well he would have to abandon his run when this fool ran away like all the others. “What’s your name?” he asked the pilot, thinking maybe he could shame them into sticking around long enough to actually accomplish something.

“Sir? It’s … it’s me. Lieutenant Bury.”

Lanoe swiveled his head around to look at the cockpit of his new wingmate. Damnation—it really was the Hellion. “I thought you were on the medical list,” he said.

“I got better,” Bury told him.

Lanoe laughed at that—a hoarse, dry sound, but one with real joy in it. “I take it Candless doesn’t know you’re out here?” he asked.

“No, sir,” Bury said. He could hear a diffident catch in the kid’s voice. Lanoe was honor bound to send him back to safety. Hell, Lanoe was required by Naval regulations to arrest Bury on the spot and escort him back to the carrier so he could be formally charged with disobeying Candless’s orders.

Well, damn them. Damn Navy regs. Rules and codes of conduct hadn’t won the Century War, or the Brushfire, or the Establishment Crisis.

Pilots had.

“It’s good to see somebody with fighting spirit,” Lanoe said. “Take my left flank, and don’t break away until I give the word. Now—dive!”

It felt so damned good to be flying again. Bury hadn’t even realized how much he’d missed it. For all his anguish over his lack of a blue star, he’d forgotten that this was where he belonged, that being in the cockpit of a cataphract-class fighter wasn’t just a means to an end. It was what he’d been born to do.

He streaked down toward the dreadnought, tight up against Lanoe’s airfoils, and had to fight the urge to whoop for joy. Below them plasma balls shot across their bows, so close and so bright they blotted out his view of anything else. Hellions couldn’t cry—their bodies were engineered to conserve every drop of water, so the inside of his eyelids had been rendered almost frictionless. His eyes didn’t well with tears, but he found himself constantly blinking away the terrible light.

It didn’t matter. He felt like his fighter was flying itself, the connection between him and his controls so natural, so perfectly in tune that he didn’t need to see.

“Sir! The dreadnought’s maneuvering,” he called out. “Turning—we’ll need to adjust our trajectory.”

“Already on it,” Lanoe called back. “They’re retreating, do you see that? Check your tactical board. They’re running, Bury. They’re terrified of us.”

“As well they should be,” Bury said.

Lanoe laughed at that, a cackle of bloodlust. Bury thought maybe he should be afraid of that sound, but he wasn’t—instead he found himself laughing along.

“They’re trying to reach their escort, the interceptors coming up from the disk,” Lanoe said. “I don’t intend to let them get that far.”

Below them the screen of plasma balls momentarily cleared and Bury could see their target, a massive cage of white spars at one corner of the giant ship. It was close to one of the weapon pits, too close for any fighter to reach it without help. On his sensor board a green light lit up, telling him the pit was warming up, getting ready to loose a plasma ball. “Ready to break on your order, sir,” he called.

“Wait for it—wait for it,” Lanoe said, chanting it like a mantra. “Wait for it—wait—now!”

Bury shoved his control stick over to one side, even as the pit began to glow, even as the plasma ball started to form. His Yk.64 leaned over on its side and shot away from Lanoe’s fighter at an angle. The plasma ball came chasing after him, moving so fast he thought he couldn’t possibly get away in time. He pulled back on his stick, throwing his crate into a hard climb, and the plasma ball shot past right below him. Red lights flashed and warning chimes sounded all around him, but he’d made it, he’d avoided the—avoided—

He couldn’t breathe. His lungs were on fire and his whole body seized up. He felt like his skin was crawling with bugs and his vision started to turn red.

A display flashed up right in front of him, an emergency warning. Pilot in distress. Recommendation: seek immediate medical attention.

Bury could just make out the words. His vision had shrunk down to a narrow, dark tunnel and he couldn’t hear anything but a high-pitched whine.

He managed to check his status board and saw that his cockpit temperature had briefly risen above two hundred degrees. Hot enough to fry his plastinated skin—he couldn’t sweat, couldn’t shed that heat, it was roasting him alive—

“No!” he howled, and slammed one hand down on a control display. His fingers wouldn’t work, wouldn’t obey him, but he forced them to scroll through a page of options, forced them to choose an emergency fire control option that would spray him down with engine coolant, to lower his body temperature.

Foam flooded his cockpit, thick waves of the stuff washing over his helmet, the front of his suit. He couldn’t see through it at all, couldn’t feel his feet, his legs—but then—little by little—it worked. He cooled down, cooled to a temperature that wouldn’t actually kill him.

Someone was calling his name. Ginger? Candless? No, no, it was Lanoe—

“Bury, talk to me, damn you! You’re the only pilot out here worth my time. If you got yourself killed I swear I’ll—”

“Sir,” Bury croaked out. “Present, sir.”

“Let me guess,” Lanoe said. “You need to break off. Head back to the carrier and leave me alone out here. Again.”

Bury forced himself to breathe. To think—even that was hard. Had his brain boiled inside his skull? No. No, he would be dead, if—if that were—

“Sir,” he said. “Did we get the blister?”

“Yes, damn you, I hit it with a disruptor,” Lanoe replied.

“Very good, sir,” Bury told him. “What’s our next target?”

Lanoe started to say something. Closed his mouth and held it back. The kid was in trouble. He’d barely made it—he’d let the plasma ball get too close. The only thing that saved him was that it went underneath his Yk.64. If it had passed over him, the radiant heat it gave off would have gone right through his canopy and burned him alive.

He wouldn’t make it through another near miss like that. There were limits to what the human body could withstand. Lanoe knew he needed to send the kid back, tell him to retreat to the carrier and—

No. They were close. They were so close to taking the alien ship down. He could see it—see it in the way the dreadnought raced to join its escort. See it in the very skin of the city-sized ship. Deep cracks ran through the coral now, long jagged wounds that told him the ship was dying. Just two more blisters. They were running out of time, but still, there was a chance—

A green pearl rotated in the corner of his vision.

Lanoe shook his head. Flicked his eyes across the pearl. “Candless?” he said. “Something I can help you with? This isn’t a great time.”

“How dare you?” she asked. She sounded upset. He figured he knew why.

“I’m in charge here,” he reminded her.

“He was my student,” she told him. “Bury is my responsibility!”

“He came to me. Looking to help.”

“You think that changes anything?”

Lanoe scowled at her, though she was dozens of kilometers away. “Did you call to yell at me, or—”

“Use the guns, Lanoe,” she said. “Turn the cruiser’s guns on the dreadnought. I know you don’t intend to. I know you have some secret reason why you won’t use your best weapon against this thing. But damnation, man! You can end this without anyone else having to die, without—”

Lanoe cut off the call.

He checked his tactical board. “Bury,” he said, “we have two minutes before the dreadnought reaches those interceptors. Before our lives get a lot more complicated. Are you with me? We have two of those blisters left to hit. I say we can do it. What about you?”

“I’m with you,” the kid said.

Lanoe nodded. All right, then.

The two of them looped out well beyond the battle area, then flattened their trajectory and dove toward the giant ship. Bury felt his blood singing as the two cataphracts flashed downward in perfect formation, their airfoils nearly touching. He spared a quick glance to his side and saw Lanoe through his canopy.

The old pilot was staring straight ahead, focused on the target. His lips had pulled back from his teeth in a grimace of pure bloodlust.

Bury forced the grin off of his own face. He scowled at the dreadnought below, at the blister that stuck out from its trailing edge. It was smaller than the others, barely fifty meters across, situated between a thruster and a weapon pit. Getting in there was going to be tricky, he knew, but he was sure Lanoe had a good plan for it.

“You had a hard time with that last plasma ball, didn’t you?” Lanoe asked.

“I came through just fine, sir. I’m good to fight,” Bury told him.

“That isn’t what I asked.”

Bury dropped his chin. The last thing he wanted to admit was that he’d nearly died, that he had to waste emergency coolant on lowering his body temperature. He guessed, though, that this wasn’t a time for evasions. “It was rough,” he said. “I almost blacked out, and—”

“You nearly went into cardiac arrest,” Lanoe said. “I’ve got your biometric data on one of my displays. You won’t survive another near miss like that.”

“Sir, I—”

“So this time you’re taking the shot. I’ll cover you.”

Bury felt his stomach turn over in his abdomen. “Are you … sure?” He shook his head. “No, sorry, sir, of course you are, I just—”

“You’ll do fine. The hard part is not veering off before you can loose your disruptor. Stay on course. Ignore your fear. You have a firing solution?”

“Working one up now.” A virtual Aldis sight bobbed around Bury’s canopy. Sensors in the Yk.64’s fuselage built up a profile of the open space inside the blister, looking for the optimal placement for the disruptor. A blue light lit up on his weapons board. “Got it!” he said.

“Then it’s your show. Don’t even worry about that weapon pit—I’ll draw its fire when you get close. Go!”

Bury opened his throttle and surged forward, maneuvering just a little when he thought he saw a plasma ball streaking toward him. It fizzled out long before it could reach him. He normalized his trajectory and poured on even more speed, until the blister grew huge in his forward view.

So close—but the disruptor needed to be launched from extremely short range, especially against a moving target. He dropped in low and raced across the dreadnought’s skin, cutting his speed for better accuracy, sure that Lanoe would keep him safe if the weapon pit started heating up. On his canopy the Aldis was locked tight to one pane of glass in the blister’s cagework. He held his finger over the trigger, fighting his natural impulse to squeeze it out of pure nervous tension.

A little closer … a little closer—a shadow passed over Bury and he looked up for just a fraction of a second to see Lanoe pulling away from him, spinning on his long axis as he burned hard to get out ahead of a plasma ball.

Bury hadn’t even seen the plasma ball launch.

He didn’t need to. He just had to focus on getting closer, the pale hull of the dreadnought a featureless blur below him, pits and craters just stuttering shadows, a little closer, a little—a little—

There! The blue light on his weapons board turned green and he pulled the trigger. The sputtering, sparking disruptor jumped away from him and his whole fighter lurched upward, just a tick. The disruptor round blazed forward, straight toward the blister, and Bury realized with a start that he needed to veer off to avoid colliding with it himself. He hauled back hard on his stick and punched open his throttle, even as the disruptor smashed through the glass and into the blister.

He didn’t look back, couldn’t spare any attention on checking to see if the hit was good, if—

Something hard bounced off his fuselage, sending up a welter of sparks as his vector field accelerated it away. If he’d been in the carrier scout, that impact would have—

Another impact. Another, and then a hailstorm of tiny projectiles smashed across his canopy, chunks of white stone that looked like, pieces of—Oh hellfire, he thought, those were pieces of the dreadnought’s hull—

His forward view filled with white.

The dreadnought had already been cracked. That last disruptor must have shattered a big piece of it, creating an incredible cloud of debris. Millions of coral shards, each of them flying free on their own trajectory. The chunk right in front of him was two hundred meters across, just a small sliver of the dreadnought but big enough to hit him like a giant-sized flyswatter, he—he—

He needed to move. Bury shoved his stick sideways and hit his maneuvering jets hard. The broken slab of coral rotated slowly as it came toward him, turning a jagged edge in his direction until it looked like the devil’s own sword coming down on his head, like it would cleave him in half if he didn’t—

Move, damn you, he thought, and kicked in his positioning jets as well. The edge of the shard came down so fast, seeming to accelerate as it—

It struck Bury’s fighter just before he could get free of it. He was thrown sideways in his seat, his inertial sink pinning him down as hard as it could, but it wasn’t quite enough. All the blood slammed over into one side of his body as he was sent spinning off into the dark, black dots swimming in his eyes so thick he could see nothing at all, if there was another piece of debris even a fraction the size of that one, if he was flying right into a cloud of broken coral, if he—

For a second there was nothing.

Not even darkness. Just—a cloud of nothing.

He heard nothing, saw nothing, felt nothing. He was pretty sure he was dead.

Then—

With a shocking suddenness, everything came back. Alarm chimes howled in his ears and red lights flashed everywhere around him. Voices were talking to him, dozens of voices shouting and babbling and asking questions, but his ears were ringing so loud he couldn’t tell what they were saying, couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe—

“I said,” Lanoe shouted, “are you alive in there?”

Bury fought his own rebellious tongue, fought the speech centers of his brain that were sparkling like fireworks. “I,” he managed to gasp out. “I.”

It must have sounded like “aye.”

“Hell’s bells, Bury, you do cut it close. Get out of that cloud—we need to regroup with the others and—”

“Five,” Bury managed to say, the word rattling around inside his mouth.

His teeth felt loose.

He looked down at his damage control boards. The slab of coral had sheared off half his airfoils and ripped free the armored fairing all down one side of his fighter. It looked like nothing crucial had been hit, though.

“Five,” he said again.

“What? Bury, talk to me—are you okay, or—”

“Five,” he told Lanoe. “That was my fifth kill. I’m an ace.”

“Bury—”

“Lanoe. Sir. I believe you owe me a blue star,” Bury said. A shiver ran down his spine.

“Why, because you killed that dreadnought?” Lanoe asked. “I have two pieces of bad news for you. No, scratch that. Three pieces of bad news.”

Bury reached for his stick. Moved to swing up away from the cloud of debris, back toward the formations high above what was left of the dreadnought.

“Go ahead,” he said warily.

“First—there’s one more blister on that thing,” Lanoe told him. “You hurt it bad, yes. You tore a big chunk off of it—but it’s not a kill. It’s still got power to its thrusters and a couple working weapon pits. Second, even if you had taken it down, you don’t get credit toward a blue star for killing capital ships.”

“What? But I … what?”

“I know, it doesn’t seem fair, but those are the rules. You have to defeat five small craft in single combat, and they have to be confirmed kills. Me, personally? I blew two dozen ships out of the sky before I got called an ace. Back then, it was a lot harder to confirm a kill, you needed two independent witnesses to—”

“Damn it, Lanoe! You said three pieces of bad news! What’s the third?”

“You just might get your chance after all,” Lanoe told him. “It took us too long to hit that last blister. The interceptors are about to arrive. Check your straps, kid. Things are about to get hectic.”