Chapter Twenty-One

When he’d been back on the cruiser, watching the interceptors approach on a tactical board, they had looked bad enough—forty-five enemy craft, burning hard to support the ailing dreadnought. They were huge compared to his cataphracts, and they outnumbered him, too.

Now they were here. And things looked so much worse.

The interceptors looked a little like the airfighters Lanoe had seen down in the atmosphere of the disk, but the resemblance didn’t hold up to close scrutiny. Big spheres of cagework and glass, studded with powerful thrusters. A crown of spiky projections that had to be weapons stuck out from the front of each ship. The interceptors measured a hundred meters across—they were as big as destroyers.

And there were forty-five of them.

They swerved back and forth as they came, running some kind of evasive pattern. The cruiser’s guns wouldn’t be able to hit them, even if he’d been willing to try—the slow-moving guns wouldn’t be able to get a lock.

He’d thought he still had some time, at least ninety more seconds to blast away at the last of the dreadnought’s blisters. Valk had given him some idea of how fast the interceptors could move, and he’d based his projections on that. It looked like Valk had failed him yet again. The leading edge of the cloud of interceptors was already on them, advancing on the formation of Yk.64s around the dreadnought. They must have poured on a little extra speed at the end, in a desperate attempt to reach the dreadnought before it was destroyed.

He looked down between his feet at the dreadnought. It was ailing, wounded—maybe mortally so. An entire edge of its hull had been cracked off by Bury’s disruptor, reduced to a cloud of tumbling debris. Its thrusters pushed it in wide, lazy circles, unable to stabilize its trajectory. One of its command blisters remained intact, though, and clearly it was designed to keep operating right up until the last of its pilots was killed. Plasma balls were still streaming from its weapon pits, though not as fast now.

The interceptors were the greater threat. There was no question. He didn’t know what those weapon spikes could do, but he had no doubt they could chew up a cataphract-class fighter with ease. If he didn’t stop the interceptors, and soon, they would plow right through his useless wing of Yk.64s and move on to the cruiser and the carrier, which were ill-equipped to hold them off without support.

Just one blister left, though, on the dreadnought. One Blue-Blue-White pilot left to kill, when the interceptors were almost certainly just drones—

Lanoe bit his lip. Then he tapped at his communications board. “Alpha wing, Beta wing, move to block those interceptors,” he called. “Don’t let them get past you—if you were ever going to start fighting like real pilots, this is the bloody time.” He tapped another key. “Bury, you’re in charge of them—keep them in formation, keep them shooting, and for the devil’s sake do not let up.”

“Yes, sir,” Bury called back. “But won’t you be leading the charge?”

“I’m finishing off the big bastard. It’s up to you now. You’ve already shown me you can do it. Don’t fail me.”

Bury was shaking so hard he thought his teeth might crack when they chattered. He stared out through his bubble canopy with wide eyes. The interceptors had just been bright dots a moment ago. Already they were growing in size.

Getting closer.

Four, he thought. He tried to focus on that. Four.

He’d been put in command. He needed to be strong now. To be fierce. “Alpha wing,” he said.

And couldn’t think of what to do next.

The interceptors were getting closer all the time.

“Sir?” a woman asked him. He tore his gaze away from the forward view and looked down at his communications board. It was one of the Centrocor pilots, the highest-ranking one in Alpha wing.

He ran a dry tongue along his slick, plastinated lips. He had to think.

Candless had taught him how to do this. He might have had his differences with his former teacher, but she’d drilled basic tactics into his head, forced him to go over and over the standard Navy protocols and strategies.

“Cluster around me,” he said. “Let’s try a loose cloud formation. Nothing fancy—just make a wall and force them to punch through it. Everyone fire at will. Evade as necessary.”

There. That almost sounded good. Like a real set of orders. Even though he’d basically just said, “Shoot the bad guys, and run away if you get scared.”

Well, that was half of space combat right there.

He pushed his throttle forward and his fighter jumped ahead. He didn’t wait for the others to gather around him—he needed to lead by example here.

Even if he felt like he was about to throw up.

One of the interceptors was right in front of him, only a few kilometers away. He hit his maneuvering jets and approached it in a loose corkscrew, making himself a tricky target. The interceptor bobbed back and forth, heading toward him on a serpentine course.

His sensor board lit up with new information he hadn’t thought to ask for. There was no indication of significant cavities inside the interceptor’s hull, which meant there were no crew compartments. No jellyfish pilots inside. Well, they’d known these things were probably drones—good to get confirmation on that.

The sensors couldn’t identify any crucial weak spots in the interceptor’s configuration. That was … frustrating. The sensors were calibrated to look for fuel tanks and ammunition magazines, things that would blow up if you shot them just right. But they were designed to look for human versions of those things. Who knew what an alien ammo supply looked like?

More important, the sensor board told him that the ring of spikes on the front of the interceptor was warming up. Gathering energy, getting ready to shoot.

Time to find out what the bastards could do. Bury leveled out of his corkscrew and raked the front of the interceptor with PBW fire. Glass starred and shattered but the interceptor didn’t even slow down. Bury suddenly became very aware, very terrifyingly aware, that the alien drone dwarfed his fighter, was nearly fifty times as big as he was. A few particle beam shots would barely scratch its surface.

The weapon ring started to glow visibly, the spikes incandescing as they heated up. It was about to fire. Bury twisted away in a snap turn, punching his throttle for speed.

The weapon ring turned cherry red, and for a second Bury thought he was going to die. Any moment now the weapon would discharge, and if it had a clear shot at him—

But then nothing happened.

The weapon ring didn’t discharge. No beam emerged from the ring, no kinetic projectile. The damned thing didn’t so much as give off a puff of smoke. Bury was deeply confused. He heard a loud repetitive clicking sound for a moment, but then it stopped.

What in the name of all hell’s dukes?

Well, at least he wasn’t dead, which was—

Without warning his entire vector field sparked and spat with energy, a shroud of high-energy plasma wrapping around him, obscuring his view. Red lights lit up all over his damage control display—but only for a moment. The display itself wavered and then winked out.

So did his weapons board. His tactical board. His engine board.

Suddenly he was staring at a blank console, at the dull gray face of a display surface that had lost power. He waved his hands around over the console, trying desperately to bring up something, anything, but to no avail. All of his electronics were gone. He couldn’t even switch on a cockpit light.

Then he noticed something far more worrisome. The flowglas bubble around him, the canopy that separated him from hard vacuum, was rippling. Starting to flow back into his fuselage.

It only lasted a moment. Inertia carried him out of the range of the interceptor’s weapon and the flowglas hardened back up. He heard a loud snapping sound right behind his head and then lights came on all around him, momentarily blinding him. A display popped up in front of him, advising him that the fighter’s systems were reinitializing.

One by one his boards came back. He swiped up a communications display and keyed for a transmission on the general band.

“Anyone—anyone at all—I just got hit by that thing, it knocked out all my electronics, I’m not sure what—”

“Microwaves.” It was Candless’s voice. Candless, who must have been watching him closely as he approached the interceptor. “It’s a microwave weapon, a very high power magnetron. Bury, are you all right? Are you wounded?”

“No, I’m fine,” Bury said, “a little—confused, I guess. What are you talking about, microwaves? That thing hit me with some kind of microwave weapon?”

“It knocked out all your electronics—anything using electricity. Your fighter is designed to reboot automatically in the event of a power loss like that. You were only in the field for a few milliseconds. Not long enough to actually burn out your systems. Or to cook you like a Fleet Day turkey.”

It had been bad enough. “Alpha wing, Beta wing,” Bury called. “Stay away from those weapon rings—try to hit these things from behind, or … or flank them, just—don’t approach them from the front, don’t … don’t …”

“Bury, get out of there,” Candless said. He saw she was calling him on a private channel now. “Just get away. Let Lanoe handle these things. They’re too dangerous.”

Bury stared at the communications board as if he could see her face there. As if he could look her in the eye. She ought to know him better than that. She ought to know how he would respond to being told that something was too dangerous for him.

“Four,” he said, and grabbed his control stick, already thinking in his head how he would wheel around and get another shot at the bastard who’d tried to fry him.

Lanoe swung back and forth as he made his last run at the dreadnought. He had no cover at all, no one even watching his back. Doing this without Bury was going to be tough, but he’d lived through worse attack runs.

He raced down through a screen of plasma balls and a cloud of white debris, bits of coral pelting off his vector fields as he readied another disruptor. The last blister was right below him, a big shapeless mass of cagework wrapped around one end of the dreadnought’s hull. The Philoctetes algorithm that extended the range of his weapons threw half a dozen crosshairs across his canopy in dark red, then eliminated them one by one, the remaining sights changing color as his computer assigned various levels of confidence to the potential firing solutions.

Eventually, one of them came up blue. Lanoe followed it straight down, barely dodging the plasma balls now. The projectiles were getting tangled in the debris cloud, fizzling out long before they could reach him. He felt like a spear pointed straight at his enemy’s heart. He felt like a meteor crashing toward an evil planet.

The last set of crosshairs turned green. Lanoe pulled the trigger, his disruptor thrusting forward deep into the dreadnought’s blister, bursting it open.

Done, he thought. Just like that.

He felt—

Nothing.

The dreadnought fell quiet, little by little. Its death throes were not overly dramatic. A final plasma ball launched from a weapon pit, streaming off into space in some random direction, not even getting close to him. The big thrusters sputtered out one by one, leaving the dead city-sized ship rotating slowly in place.

He’d thought he would feel … something.

Nothing exploded, nothing burst into flames. Lanoe scanned the dreadnought’s corpse and found no sign of activity, no electrical flows, no fuel pumps working.

He’d thought, once he started killing the jellyfish, that he would feel—vindicated, perhaps. Justified. Like he was finally getting justice. Like he was getting revenge for Zhang.

Instead he just felt empty. He’d risked so much for this battle, put so many lives on the line, and now—

“It’s a start.”

Zhang’s voice, coming through the Z.XIX’s speakers. Just as it had before. He was hallucinating again.

Lanoe opened his eyes. He hadn’t realized they were closed. He looked around and found himself in the middle of a debris cloud, a haze of white dust that surrounded him on every side. He could hear voices shouting—the others. Bury and the other pilots. They were engaging the interceptors, they were—

He checked his tactical board. Blue and yellow dots swarmed around each other. A lot more yellow dots than blue—and even as he watched, a blue dot winked out.

“Hellfire,” he said. Then he threw his stick forward and opened his throttle wide. If he didn’t get up there soon, if he didn’t get in there and show them how to fight, everything he’d done would be for nothing.

Bury wheeled around as another interceptor tried to get in front of him. He sprayed the machine with PBW fire that did little more than shatter its windows. He knew it was going to take more than that to actually kill one of the things.

There was a constant roar in his ears, the sound of pilots screaming in pain, others shouting requests for help. It all blended together into one sustained note of terror that he had to do his best to ignore.

He brought up a virtual Aldis sight. Loaded a disruptor. The damned interceptors weaved back and forth so much it was almost impossible to get a good firing solution—especially when, as soon as he started to get a fix, he had to swerve out of the way of another one trying to get in to fry him.

Big as they were, he’d have thought they would collide with each other as they crowded around him, as they surrounded Alpha and Beta wings. Their maneuvers had a digital precision, though, and they never even came close. With just human reflexes to work with, Bury had to fight his control stick constantly to stay out of their way.

His Aldis turned green and he reached for his trigger, but the crosshairs switched back to blue before he could fire. He spat out a curse and swung around to climb high over two more interceptors that had been converging on his position, even as their weapon rings started to glow.

He had no idea how many human pilots they’d killed. He’d seen at least two cataphracts taken out of commission by the microwave blasts. As the energy hit them their vector fields pulsed and crawled with lightning, and then their fairings burst open as the sensitive electronics inside overloaded and exploded.

He was sure they’d lost more than the two he’d seen. He was sure of one thing, definitely—they were losing this fight.

Most likely, they were all going to die.

He reached over to his communications board without looking at it. Set up a link directly to Ehta, on the cruiser. He didn’t have time to wait for her to answer, so he just recorded a voice message she could listen to later.

“Ehta,” he said, “it looks like we’re not coming back. It looks like this is it, so—so I wanted to ask you a favor. I know you don’t owe me anything. But … it’s Ginger. I know you care about her, maybe as much as I do.

“I want you to tell her I’m sorry I couldn’t help her more. That I couldn’t stop them from putting that thing in her head. And that I’m sorry I couldn’t … that I wasn’t brave enough to ever tell her I love her.

“She’s been the best friend I ever had, maybe the only real friend. She’s been like a sister, I guess. I don’t know, I never had one of those, I just—

“Just tell her she meant something to me, okay? Tell her I felt—”

Right in front of him, his crosshairs turned green again. Right there—an interceptor was turned away from him, its weapon ring on its far side. He had a perfect shot lined up with one of its thruster units.

He reached for the trigger, expecting the crosshairs to turn blue again, but they didn’t. He got his hand around the stick and squeezed the trigger. He felt the disruptor launch, felt it like someone had kicked the underside of his cataphract.

The disruptor flared to life and then disappeared as it cut right through the glass hull of the interceptor. For a moment he couldn’t see anything more. Then the entire alien drone came apart, pieces of it flying in every direction.

Bury could hardly believe it. He couldn’t credit what he saw with his own eyes, he had—he had—

Five.

Five—he had gotten his fifth kill, he was—

He saw that the communications panel was still recording. “Hellfire,” he breathed. “Ehta—tell Ginger I got my five. Tell her I earned my bloody blue star. Tell her—”

A dark shape cut off the starlight streaming down through his canopy. Bury inhaled sharply and knocked his stick over to the side, punched his throttle to get away from yet another interceptor.

Lanoe plunged into the fray, spraying PBW fire across every round hull he could see, knowing it wouldn’t damage the interceptors, just trying to get their attention. It didn’t work—they continued to chase after the poor damned pilots of Alpha and Beta wings, wavering back and forth as they quartered the battle area. From outside their formation they might as well have been cleaning robots sweeping a floor—their maneuvers were that methodical, that regimented.

From inside the battle, it looked like all nine circles of hell, all at once. Debris was everywhere—pieces of cataphract fairings, broken thruster cones, blobs of loose flowglas that shifted and caught the light. Lanoe could hardly find a target in all of that mess. He kept a swarm of virtual Aldis sights up on his canopy at all times, his advanced targeting system looking for shots of opportunity. He loosed disruptors the moment anything turned green, fired and fired until he ran out of them. Switched to antivehicle rounds, even though the fighter’s voice kept telling him it was pointless. “I don’t see any cavities in that vehicle that would suggest a crew compartment,” she said, almost sounding peeved.

It wasn’t Zhang’s voice. It was the synthesized voice of the Z.XIX’s automated personal assistant. He could ignore it, knowing it was just a computer talking. Not a ghost.

“Bury,” he called. “Bury, give me a status update. Tell me what we’re doing here, it’s your show.”

“Lanoe?” the kid called. He sounded scared, but at least he was talking. “Lanoe? I got my fifth kill, did you see it? Can you confirm it?”

“Don’t worry about that now,” Lanoe said. “Come on, kid. Status update!”

“We’re—we’re pretty hard pressed,” Bury replied. “We—”

A whine of static rushed through Lanoe’s helmet speakers, his communications knocked out by sidelobe radiation from one of those damned microwave weapons. He stabbed at the virtual keyboard of his comms panel but nothing came up. He was cut off.

Hellfire. How had he been so distracted, how had he let things get this bad? He’d wanted to kill jellyfish—and now, pilots were dying all around him. He’d taken out that dreadnought, but the cost—

No. He couldn’t think like that. He couldn’t afford to. Not now, when he had a battle to win. He twisted away from an oncoming interceptor, corkscrewed up high over the battle area, dove back down firing antivehicle rounds as fast as he could pull the trigger, not even worrying about placing them well. The rounds were long, thin rockets with a core of allotropic copper. They slammed into the interceptors at hundreds of kilometers a second, fast enough and hard enough to liquefy the copper. Once it pierced the interceptors’ hulls the molten metal shot forward in a jet of superheated metal.

It worked—not well, it took several shots to kill even one drone, but it worked. Suddenly there was a clear lane in front of Lanoe, an empty space in the Blue-Blue-White’s formation he could fly right through. He corkscrewed between two rows of the things, looking for more targets.

And didn’t find any. The interceptors were moving—fast. Slaloming back and forth as they burned away from him, headed out of the battle area.

What was going on? Lanoe checked his tactical board and saw that the interceptors were all moving in the same direction. Away. Away from him, away from the wreckage of the dreadnought. Away from the carrier and the cruiser.

They were retreating. As fast as they’d come, they were backing off.

Maybe they’d recognized that the dreadnought had been destroyed. They’d been sent to escort it—maybe they saw that now their mission was futile, and so they were pulling back before Lanoe could kill any more of them.

Damn it, he would take it. They were just drones, with no jellyfish aboard. “Let them go,” he called, when he saw his comms board was back up. “Everyone—disengage. Return to the carrier—we’re done here.”

There were a few exhausted whoops of joy. A few nasty curses, a couple of half-veiled threats directed at him on the common channel. Lanoe ignored the chatter. He repeated his order, over and over, though most of Alpha wing and Beta wing had already withdrawn from the battle area.

The pilots who were still alive, anyway.

“Bury,” he called, painting the kid’s ship with a communications laser. “Bury—you got your five. You did it, Lieutenant. I am personally going to present you with your blue star. Unless maybe you’d prefer to have Candless do the honors. Yeah, how’d you like to see the look on her face, then, huh? You did a hell of a job, you—”

Bury’s Yk.64 hadn’t acknowledged the connection. It wasn’t receiving his signal.

“Bury?” he called again, on an open radio channel.

He found the kid’s fighter. It was hanging motionless right in the middle of the battle area, drifting slowly toward deep space. Lanoe banked around and headed over there. Maybe the kid had been hit by one of the microwave weapons. “Bury, if you can hear me—hang in there. Let your systems reboot, it’s all automatic. Bury, can you hear me?”

No response.

“Bury?”

As he approached the Yk.64 he saw at once that its canopy was down. Flowglas required an electric charge to hold its shape, so if Bury had been hit with a microwave burst, sure, it made sense that the canopy would collapse. It was all right, though. It could be a little scary, Lanoe knew, to fly through a battle with your canopy down, with nothing but your suit to protect you against hard vacuum, but he’d done it himself plenty of times. He knew it was survivable.

Lanoe maneuvered slowly around the Sixty-Four, coming about so he could look at the kid. Make sure he was okay. When he got there he saw …

He saw the kid’s face. Slack, but with eyes open. Plastinated eyes staring out at the stars. Seeing nothing.

The fighter’s canopy had come down.

So had the flowglas of Bury’s helmet.

The kid was dead.