Part 3 – Counter Moves

HOLOGRAPHIC RECEPTOR ON>>>

>>>SCANNING>>>SCANNING>>>HYPER-CHANNEL 152435>>>RECEPTION>>> A starfighter tears along the curve of a blue-green world, shields flaring as it hits atmosphere and turns it into an artificial comet. The glare cools and there is a momentary metal flicker as the ship crosses the terminator and vanishes into the shadow of the world’s benighted hemisphere.

“Generations have gone before you,” a soft, yet stern proclaims.

A starship crosses above the same planet, drifting towards the holocamera and emerging fully into the glare of the primary, its hull shimmering gold. The ship crosses so close, details of turrets and blastcannon muzzles are clearly visible.

“Generations will stand with you.”

The view shifts to rank upon rank of Nova Terra Academy graduated in the gaudy braid and crimson finery of their dress uniforms. The holocamera pans to one side, pixelated into another scene of some of the same youths at action stations aboard a starship, faces pinched in concentration, eyes aflame with shared purpose.

“The Alliance Navy,” the voice rumbles like thunder over the horizon. “Take your place and stand with us among the stars.

SCANNING>>>SCANNING>>>HYPER-CHANNEL 422496>>>RECEPTION>>> “This is Sandra Brookes, for Galactic Daily, speaking to you from Nova Terra.” The anchorwoman leans forward over a desk that gives an advantageous view of her revealing top. “And this is the news of the hour.”

She pivots as a holoscreen flutters to life behind her, showing images of fire, of running people, and of black-clad ranks advancing through smoke. “Another food shortage, another riot, and fresh complaints about the conduct of the Council Guard, this time from among the Foundation World, on Tartan. Governor Gleeson has been vociferous in his condemnations.”

The view changes to a red-eyed man in a rumpled suit, looking as though he’s gotten little slip, standing in front of a hospital. “It’s just outrageous, I tell you! The Guard was supposed to supplement local security, not take it over. Not do all of this.” He holds up a holopad set to display a slideshow of injuries and bloody faces. “And I can’t get any answers! We didn’t ask for them here. They arrived and we were told to cooperate.”

The holocamera focuses once more on Sandra. “We did attempt to get answers this week,” she says, “starting with Tartan’s Assemblyman, Harvey Grantholm.”

The holoscreen behind her flares once more, takes up a different view of the Assemblyman adjusting one of his notoriously-flamboyant ties as he hurries down a corridor. A question echoes from off-screen and he whirls to face the speaker. “No, I don’t know precisely why,” he snaps. “But you can guess, can’t you? They’re the Council’s errand-boys, and I’ve been particularly unpopular with the Council, of late.” He glares right into the holocamera. “But if they think I’m going to be intimidated, they’ve got another thing coming!”

“We’ve reached out to the security offices for the High Council for further comment,” Sandra says, “but so far, they’ve declined.”

She folds her hands on the desktop before her and leans forward, affecting an almost conspiratorial tone, as though she’s sharing saying confidential with her audience. “Through investigative work, we have uncovered something else of interest concerning the Council Guard, though. Galactic Daily has obtained personnel records, revealing that no small number of the Guard’s cadre are, in fact, former members of disgraced Syntar Fleet Corporation’s paramilitary private security force.”

The holoscreen shifts images as she pivots to it once more. The image displays a Guardsman with his helmet off, watching as his comrades clear an intersection. The image freezes and zooms in to show harsh features, hair buzzed to an iron-gray burr, and small eyes pinched in the sunlight.

“This man,” Sandra says, “Camden Alden, is known to have commanded a company in the now-disbanded and outlawed organization, which still has yet to face charges for accusations of atrocities on Santos and Loudon.”

She glares at the holocamera. “Needless to say, we will be pursuing this lead further.”

>>>SCANNING>>>SCANNING>>>HYPER-CHANNEL 152435>>>RECEPTION>>> “It’s everywhere,” a deep voice warns.

A middle-aged woman sits at a kitchen table, pressing fingers to her temples, face creased in apparent pain. Outside the window behind her, overcast darkens as rain pummels the glass. On the wall beside her, a holoscreen flicks rapidly, seemingly out of her control, through one vignette after another. Scenes of street fighting, reporting from the war front, shouting politicians, and reports cast in grainy colors blaze from the pane.

“There’s no escaping it, the negativity—”

The women checks her wrist piece and a quadrant of the view divides off to show its face. Text messages scroll across it, communications from friends, family members. All are in caps or highlighted with exclamation marks and emoticons.

The woman tears off her wrist comm and flings it at a wall. Folding her hands together, elbows on the table, she sags forward, lips pressed into her knuckles. Despite obvious hesitation, red eyes flick back towards the holoscreen.

“—the lies—”

The hologram begins flicking back and forth between images of reporters and politicians. At first, it’s an evenly-spaced pattern, in time to a heartbeat that becomes louder and louder. But it begins to speed up, as does the heartbeat, which blurs into a thrum while the imagery distorts, morphing media figures and political ones into a gruesome, pixelating menageries.

“—the treason.”

The spasm of visions flashes away to be replaced by cyan streaks and splashes of flame before a star field. A fighter rips through the conflagration, spewing azure bolts. As it streaks by, a grinning skull-face, capped with a jester’s cap is clearly seen. Another flash blurs away the scene, brings into a focus a second one. Alliance Marines advance along a narrow trench line through smoke and swirling embers. Lightning-like flickers cast them in lurching freeze frame moments. Shouts fill the air. A fireball flash suddenly swallows all.

True lighting booms from outside the woman’s window and she flinches.

“But there’s help,” the deep voice of before says. “From Omnipresent Media, your partner in galactic news and entertainment, comes Clear View.”

On the kitchen tabletop a small control wafer crystal appears with a puff of colorful smoke. The woman’s eyes widen, but her face eases with unambiguous relief. She reaches for the device as the storm outside her window suddenly begins to clear.

“Based upon algorithms matched to your preferences and your holo-interactions, Clear View code will filter out content harmful to your positive perspective. No longer will you have to fumble through a jungle of memetic hostility for the holographic products you crave.”

The woman points the crystal control at the holoscreen which flashes and clears. A red band slashes horizontally across the blanked pane, emblazoned with a label stating, “HOSTILE OR UNPARTIOTIC CONTENT”. A moment later, the ribbon blinks away, showing refreshed imagery of a laughing family in summer colors, crossing a wind-tossed sea of grass under a blue sky and warm yellow sun.

“Coming to you now, from Omnipresent Media.” The deep voice brightens notably. “Clear View programming.”

The woman in the kitchen sighs and leans back with a smile of relief while sunlight streams in through the window behind her.

“With Omnipresent as your partner, your View will be Clear.”

>>>SCANNING>>>SCANNING>>>HYPER-CHANNEL 920549>>>RECEPTION>>> Ansolm Levine stands at a podium in a chamber reminiscent of the Assembly he once electrified with his rhetoric, but older in style, wood-paneled, darker, and more organic. It is the former House of Legislature on New Jefferson, converted these last two and a half years for use by the Senate of the Union of Free Stars.

Someone is banging a gavel from the desks arrayed before the podium. The wielder, a man of white eyebrows, red-tinged cheeks and nose, and a deceptively homespun suit sets the instrument down and fold his hands before him. “Thank you again, Mister President,” the man drawls in an accent of an Outregion world’s backcountry, “for gracing the people’s Senate with your presence.”

Levine nods. “Of course, Senator Cupp. It’s always a privilege.”

“That’s Mister Senate President,” Cupp corrects him.

“Of course, it is,” Levine replies with a mischievous grin that elicits chortles from some of the onlooking Senators arrayed in chairs all around the chamber. “My mistake.”

The redness of Cupp’s nose deepens slightly. “We had been hoping for an audience with Grand Admiral Greer, but he has been understandably detained.”

“Well, there is a war on.”

“A point you never cease to make,” Cupp replied with narrowing eyes. “On and on and on it goes. We had been hoping for more clarity on its progress.”

Levine shrugs and spreads his empty hands before him. “In the interests of security and not risking the lives of our fighting men and women, you can understand why that’s not as easy as it might sound.”

“Yet you have declined even a closed session with this body,” Cupp points out. “Security could be guaranteed, yet you invoke it as a reason to evade. And we continue to have to settle for what scraps the Great President Levine will toss us.”

A growl goes through some in the Senate. But Levine smiles it off. “There’s a saying about secrets, Senate President; two people can keep them, if one is dead.”

That earns Levine some laughter, but Cupp’s face pinches and crimsons further. “I’m sorry, sir, but was that a threat?”

Levine sighs, obviously recognizing the mistake he’s made. “Certainly not. Merely pointing out the challenges of complying with the Senate’s desire for information.”

“So, it’s a joke?” Cupp snaps. “The people’s right to know how their blood and treasure is spent is a joke to their President?”

The growls of the Senate resume, but there’s also an undertone of irritation between factions. This isn’t the first time they’ve seen Cupp’s theatrics, either.

Levine swipes his thinning hair back and the lights catch a glint of perspiration. “As is often the case, Senator Cupp, you seem interested in hearing what you want to hear.”

“Senate President,” Cupp insists in a raised voice.

Levine sighs loudly and sets his fists at his hips, looking around at the glowering Senators, but notably ignoring Cupp. “What is it that you all want to hear? You called me. I’ve come. Are there questions, or is this just another chance for the Senate President to make scenes for Union Free Media?”

“You made promises to us, Mister Levine,” Cupp snarls over the rising clamor between factions in the Senate. “You promised an end. Yet the war rages on. And a lot of people, your people, grow weary of the platitudes and excuses!”

>>>SCANNING>>>SCANNING>>>HYPER-CHANNEL 666789 - NOVA TERRA - GOVERNMENT SPONSORED>>>RECEPTION>>> A squirrely-looking suited man whose profession is almost certainly bureaucrat squirms at a table, accompanied by a significantly better-dressed woman in her thirties at his left who’s obviously a High Council staffer.

Harvey Grantholm, seated opposite them in the chamber—one of the sub-committee rooms adjacent the main Assembly complex—on an elevated dais, clears his throat and straightens a bright yellow tie. “For the record, you are?”

“This is Director Benton Klein,” the woman speaks up before the bureaucrat can.

Grantholm smiles unpleasantly at her. “This would probably go better if Mister Klein could answer for himself.”

The staffer smiles while chuckles go through onlookers seated around the chamber behind her. Hover drones circle above, recording the session. The glare of their spotlights highlight sweat on her companion’s brows, stains darkening at his armpits. “Of course, Assemblyman,” she replies.

“Mister Klein,” Grantholm resumes, “you are Director of what, exactly?”

Klein’s bulbous eyes dart momentarily to the woman at his side. “P-personnel and Assignments, Mister Assemblyman.”

“Personnel attached to the Assembly and High Council, yes?”

“That’s correct, sir.”

Grantholm pauses deliberately to take a drunk. “And is it correct that hiring and allocation to the Council Guard would fall under your auspices?”

Klein’s eyes flutter with a suddenly frantic light and flick towards his companion once more. “The-the Guard has its own command structure and hierarchy.”

“But you would have oversight of that, yes?” Grantholm presses. “Your office would have records of that?”

Kelin fidgets with his tie, which appears to have been hurriedly and poorly-knotted. “I suppose that’s true, yes.”

“Then why has your office declined to provide those records,” Grantholm asks, “even under threat of subpoena?”

“I-I wasn’t aware...”

“Director Klein is in the process of producing those records,” the staffer speaks up, setting a hand upon Klein’s sleeve at the same time. “The timetables from the Committee for the Conduct of the War were tight and—I might add—unreasonably short.”

“Again,” Grantholm says with mildness that is anything but, “I don’t recall addressing my questions to you, Miss...?”

“Tamara Hall,” she replies crisply.

“And you are here why?”

“I’m on hand to assist with this investigation” she pauses and offers a practiced smile “on loan from the offices of High Councilor Noovin.”

“Of course, you are,” Grantholm sighs. He turns his gaze back on Klein. “And these complaints about timelines are ones this body has heard already.” He glances at the glowering Assemblymen seat to either side of him. “The Director of Finance did not even bother to make an appearance. So, you’re to be commended for even being here.”

Klein smiles and nods jerkily, oblivious to Grantholm’s obviously mocking tone. “Of course. Thank you.”

Giggles go through the onlookers and Grantholm rolls his eyes. “Moving on. Are you aware of reports circulating in the HoloMedia that dozens of new members of the Guard have been recruited from the now-defunct Syntar Security Forces?”

Klein’s smile collapses and, at his side, Hall’s carefully-guarded expression becomes even less readable. “I...have seen the reports. But we don’t—”

“You don’t what?” Granthom snaps. “You don’t do background checks on what are, in fact, government employees?”

“I...I...”

“You don’t double-check to make sure recruits into an organization in the employ of the Alliance taxpayers—which I might add has grown far beyond its chartered size and purpose—are not” he pauses to pick up a holopad and apparently read from it “under investigation for illicit cyberware abuse, brutality, or murder?”

“Assemblyman Grantholm—” Hall begins to say.

“Or,” he cuts her off, “are former members of an organization cited for crimes against humanity and ordered—by the High Council, itself, I might add—broken up as a result?”

“I...I...”

***

“GOT SOMETHING WEIRD, here, Lieutenant...”

Kia took a last bite from her protein bar, ignored the way it felt like chewing mud, and stuffed it back into the cargo pocket on her sleeve. She picked her helmet up off the floor of the trench and hefted it over her head. Her earbud mated with its onboard electronics instantly and the visor dropped over her eyes to show her a view transmitted from Cintas’ helmet.

“What?”

Cintas’ perspective bounced as the sergeant led his patrol onto the still-smoking ridge the Shiny had held a few days ago. She felt bad about that, but she couldn’t lead every sweep and it was his turn. After a quick jog that brought him to the reverse crest of the rise, the view stilled and glanced about as he waved the rest of his people down and into cover, amongst craters and wreckage. His gaze lingered for a moment on a chewed Alliance helmet that still contained the antimatter-scorched remnants of a skull.

“We sent the drone forward,” the sergeant said, looking away from the carnage so violently the view wobbled. “Looks like the Shiny pulled out like we thought, last night. Drone’s getting data from the next line of hills, ‘bout ten clicks distant. We really sent ‘em packin’.”

“Don’t get too bold with the drone,” she told him as she worked a bit of the protein glop loose from the back of her teeth with her tongue. “We’ve got hardly any of ‘em left and I had to promise Rogers a card game in exchange for prying it out of the reserves.”

“Lousy deal,” Cintas replied with a snort. “Captain cheats. Everyone knows.”

“Well, it’s better than risking any of our hides, if the Shiny take offense to our snooping.”

“And no one appreciates it more than me!”

The drone was a modified UI-11d surveillance type, liberated from some bankrupt firm’s storage racks and purchased en masse and on the cheap by the Union’s perpetually desperate quartermasters. A frisbee-shaped hover model, it had reasonable stealth measures, including a light-bending hide, and ran with a low power signature. Active sensors or a good, hard look would reveal it, but it wasn’t totally useless in sneaking around. And it swapped out weapons for a pretty robust sensor suite of its own.

And, as Cintas had pointed out, it was better than Marines risking their asses.

“So, what’s so damned weird?”

“Check it out.”

The view switched to the visual feed from what she presumed was the UI-11d. Haze draped over everything in the early morning light, most of it still the fumes of the previous days’ fighting. A counter blipped up to the right of the view, showed radiation levels elevated well into the red. Unsurprising, as the Jesters had pounded the snot out of everything with those damnable antimatter rockets of theirs. But Kia was glad not to have to cross that half-glassed moonscape.

The visual zoomed in and holographic pointers highlighted shapes scampering into position atop the distant ridge line. Kia frowned, didn’t quite recognize the silhouettes; weren’t the familiar Alliance gear and bulbous armor. The visual zoomed in further, distance and haze robbing her of some detail, but black uniforms and red trim becoming apparent. The AI in the drone froze a figure dashing from one boulder to another and holographic lines indicated markings—a dome on one shoulder plate; what looked like a gleaming skull decal on the helmet.

“What do you make of that?” Cintas asked.

Kia blinked a pattern that her helm visor would pick up and take as a request for further information. The little AI in her own helm immediately analyzed the imagery and returned an answer to her query. A schematic sprang up with notations and her frown deepened.

“Council Guard...?” she murmured.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought!” Cintas replied. “What the fuck is a Foundation World parade ground unit doing here?”

“The skulls are new,” Kia said, scratching her chin. “Maybe some kind of auxiliary group?”

“Maybe the Shiny are getting down to the bottom of the barrel? The Lucky Thirteenth wore the real marines out and now they’re stuck sending in the REMF’s.”

Kia chortled. Rear Echelon Motherfuckers. But something about this sent a tingling through her nerves. She keyed up the command channel on the tactical. “Rogers, is anyone else seeing these guys?” She blinked a command and transmitted the image sent to her on to the Captain.

A pause. Then, “Yeah, they’re popping up in other spots, too, and not just in front of us.” He grunted incredulously. “CG’s...I thought they were just for baby-sitting the High Councilors and their offices and properties.”

“Well, they’re here and it’s a bunch of ‘em,” Kia replied. “Looks like they’re shifting into positions as the First rotates out.”

“Mm-hmm,” Rogers said, “We’ve been getting signs of hover vehicles shuttling them forward—lots of them. Doesn’t look like they intend attack, though.”

“Not yet.”

“Always the optimist, Munro,” Rogers chided.

“I’ve got a patrol out,” Kia began. Her guts twisted. She didn’t want to go out there. Time spent back from the lines had been heaven—and stumbling across Wheeler, a miracle. But... “Should I probe with the whole platoon?”

Another pause. “Not now. No sense stirring whatever this is up. Let me send it up the chain. But call your patrol back in. That drone’s intact?”

Kia smirked. “Last I checked.”

“Then you owe me a few hands.”

She rolled her eyes. What he wanted to do with his hands was pretty obvious, and she wasn’t entirely unwilling. It’d been a while and she didn’t mind men—and Rogers was no slouch. But it all ended up feeling like such a damned chore. She missed living.

Seeing Josie had reminded her of that.

It’d been Alpha Company, 3^rd of the 505, back then, when they’d first crossed paths. Wheeler had already made First Lieutenant by the time Kia came in—which was saying something in the peacetime Corps, with little real action and little opportunity for advancement. She’d been the freshest thing Kia had seen, bright-eyed, driven, can-do. She’d been going places. Everyone said so. And she’d been adventuresome, too, and shared that with Kia, in more ways than one.

But things had changed. Peacetime suddenly wasn’t so peaceful, but it wasn’t war, either. The first sign was that landing on Cerelon, when the Alliance brought in the Thirteenth Division to back up the locals as they broke the Code-Slicers’ strike. Ugly business, even though the marines mostly sat back and watched cops and militia beat the shit out of people. Similar ops followed, all growing nastier, and all while tensions rose throughout the galaxy.

It was Tecumseh that had broken Wheeler. Kia knew.

Some Assemblyman’s properties—resorts, casinos, and pleasure domes—were threatened by a local insurgency. It didn’t seem like a conflict worthy of the Corps’ attention, but a junior officer didn’t ask questions. And Kia didn’t, as they blasted poorly-armed indigenes from their underground hideaways in endless games of cat-and-mouse through the dark that still haunted her sleep, sometimes. What haunted her more was when one of these partisan groups snuck a nuke into one of the tourist traps and vaporized not only the resort and thousands of lives, but crippled the spaceport.

The Thirteenth had spent weeks after that, fighting increasingly frenzied insurgent attacks, fighting against an environment turned instantly into horror. Wheeler had kept them going—she was Captain, by then—pushing them, encouraging them. But the smile dimmed. The eyes sharpened. When relief finally came and they were able to start putting the pieces back together, there was no reassembling Captain Josie Wheeler.

She vanished on leave not long after that. There’d been no warning, but those who knew her weren’t surprised.

Part of Kia was still pissed she hadn’t asked her to follow.

But follow Kia eventually did, along with the whole Division. Corruption like what they’d seen on Tecumseh became commonplace. The stink of the Alliance’s rot became inescapable. And then the Secession Crisis brought choices. And the Lucky Thirteenth, whose membership was almost entirely recruited from worlds suffering under Alliance subjugation, made theirs, from General Teller down to the lowliest private.

“Munro?” Rogers’ voice crackled in her earbud.

She shook off her reverie. “Yeah, sorry.”

“I just checked and we’re being told to sit tight. Something else is going on. Looks like something with the Jesters.”

As if commanded by Rogers’ words, the skies to the north of them rumbled. A glance that way showed blastisteel flickers lancing into the sky, almost not seen, like heat shimmers. Only the false thunder confirmed the departure of ships, clawing for the sky on the power of their grav drives. The rumbling went on and on and she whistled. “Something, indeed. They sure aren’t keeping it secret, whatever it is.” For a moment, she hoped they were coming this way, to clean out these CG weirdos massing in front of her. But that clearly wasn’t the case.

“Call your patrol back in,” Rogers repeated in a hushed voice. “No sense poking the bear when bigger games are afoot.”

“Copy that.”

The artificial storm began to fade out, finally. Kia figured Josie wasn’t heading out with that. Her inexpert ear figured the racket to be starfighters, not the heavier bawl of the assault shuttles Wheeler apparently commanded. The Raiders. She also, apparently, commanded the attention of that Rodann fella, who’d joined them for drinks and loosened up eventually, after the booze had flowed a while. Kia sighed. Wheeler had always favored tall, dark, and handsome. Somethings just were what they were.

That didn’t make it any less amazing to see her again.

That didn’t make her miss her any less.

***

KELLY’S HELLHOUND SHIVERED around her as Fury’s atmosphere dragged on it. A little more power to the grav drives smoothed it out, but flying the starfighter planet-side always had that feel, like pushing through sludge. She banked to starboard and nosed off her northerly course, beginning a long arch that would bend south, over the horizon, and towards the Alliance base at Queen’s Point.

Two of her three squadrons curved after her, her First Squad, and Matyszak, commanding the Second. Third waiting behind at The Hole—as the Jesters were starting to call their home on Fury—in readiness, in case they needed them. But both Kelly and Red had felt like less was more, here; just a hit and run, nothing fancy.

Fury’s weird, bluish-pinkish dusk blazed into Kelly’s face as her Hellhound’s terrible power carried it out over the open water of its vast sea, the crags of its broken continent quickly left behind. The place felt wrong somehow, weird sun, weird gravity. She’d overheard Tim saying something to Cory. Things are changing. Everyone’s on edge.

Tim...

Stop. Kelly gripped the control stick, clenched her teeth. Can’t be thinking like that now.

“ETA to target, ninety minutes forty-three seconds,” the AI told her in its vaguely lecturing-sounding voice. “Maintain current altitude for minimum exposure.”

“And can I say,” another voice broke in and a globular materialized to accompany it, “that I feel pretty damned exposed, anyway?”

Kelly grinned tightly at the image her Second Squadron Leader. “This is the best way, Matyszak. Ground clutter will hide us from over-the-horizon detection until we’re ready to reveal ourselves.”

“You mean until I’m ready to reveal myself,” he replied. Matyszak was a slim-jawed, dark-haired brooder with a perpetual five o’clock shadow and a greasiness to him that couldn’t be explained. He was also very good at his job, a former mercenary and, at some point before that, an Alliance pilot. Tim couldn’t stand him.

Neither could Kelly, but they needed his skills. “Second Squadron will climb above the horizon when we’re in range. You’ll draw their fire, yes, and any Valkyries the Alliance has left, lurking around.”

“Always the plum assignments,” he growled.

“First Squadron is making the run straight at Queen’s Point,” she replied. “Ground-level strafing run right into whatever drones and point-defenses they’ve got. Does that sound like a picnic to you?”

“This whole thing, including being over this rock, at all, sounds like a bad idea.”

Kelly forced away the gut-tickle of unease to again hear that sentiment from a Jester. “You know, Matty” she knew he hated being called that “the only time I ever actually worry about you is when you stop complaining.”

Matyszak smirked. “Just don’t know why it’s always us, getting these rough jobs.”

“Because no one does it better,” she replied with zero irony.

The dark-browed pilot pinched his lips, but the smirk remained. “Yeah, I guess.”

“Did you have anything else illuminating to add, Matyszak?”

“I’d just be happier bringing in the whole wing,” he replied with some honesty. “Feels like taking a walk without one shoe.”

“Red wanted them hot and ready, in case those Valkyries we think are still planet-side make a run at the Hole or the Marine positions.” She shrugged. “I don’t like it either, but it made sense.”

“Watkins’ whole wing is just sitting on their asses,” he snapped and, by the flicker of uncertainty that instantly went across his face, looked to instantly regret it.

Kelly hid a grimace. Another complication of what she and Tim had. The Jesters were a small town and word got around quickly. It’s not like they’d been careful, at all. But she couldn’t let it appear to affect her judgement. “That was Red’s call,” she replied.

“She’s making a lot of calls I don’t like of late.”

Again, Kelly had to suppress a twinge of anxiety—particularly the part where she almost agreed with him. There’d really been no choice. The Union had bailed them out over Loudon on the condition that the Jesters folded in with the formal war effort. Red had agreed. But Kelly had been a cog in a big war machine, before, and didn’t relish the familiar feeling.

“Much as I love these heart-to-hearts, Matyszak, we’re rolling hot, so why don’t you cut the chatter?”

He snorted. “Oh, aye-aye, Commander.” His globular vanished.

Kelly glanced at the tactical, showing her two squadrons slashing due southward, now. Ten Hellhounds in her group, eleven in Matyszak’s—along with the Third Squadron, they’d left a couple fighters behind with damage and still a little uncertain. One shoe off...she didn’t totally disagree. But the plan hadn’t been Red’s; it had been hers—the right balance of risk and reward, with Overmind agreeing in its unknowable calculations.

So, whatever happened, that was on Kelly. And Matyszak could just stuff it.

They had a job to do.

***

“ALL RIGHT,” JERRY SAID, shuffling cards in sweaty fingers, “it’s straight poker this time, jokers are out, aces are high.”

Jesters and Raiders of the assault shuttle complement had improvised a card table out of a pair of ammo crates and an orphaned door whose real source Jerry supposed he didn’t want to know. They’d set up in the harsh light of work lamps suspended from the open waist hatch of a Basilisk, with the Fury dusk darkening around them and temperatures starting to drop. Cigarette smoke twined in the air. Someone belched and it stank of half-digested booze. Someone else forced a laugh.

The rumble of departing Hellhounds was still in the air. They all felt it.

“You going to deal or keep shuffling, Rodann?” Josie asked from the opposite side of the table. She grinned at him through a plume of smoke from a cigar—a habit that would’ve been unseemly on another woman but only added to her rakish appeal. A hint of concern twinkled in her eyes, though. She knew he was fretting.

“You’re always rushing me,” he replied with a little more force than intended and starting flicking the cards out to her, two of her Raiders, Li from Watkin’s Hellhound wing, and himself. He fumbled the deal a couple times, fingers shaking visibly, but no one commented.

“Gah,” Li quipped as he took up his cards. “Time we changed the dealer!”

That brought laughter from the other players, and from the ring of onlookers, some of whom were paying attention—Josie’s poker games had become legendary for their humor and gossip, if not their play—some of whom lingered nearby just for the company. Fury’s chill deepened and flecks of snow winked in the air. Crates or cases used for chairs squeaked as folk wiggled for warmth or slid closer to the space heaters plugged into the Basilisk.

“Hellhound jocks always blame someone else for their problems,” Josie replied to Li. “Raiders just take care of ‘em!”

Jerry smiled and picked up his cards as good-natured chuckles and muttering circled the table. He used to be pretty good at poker, sometimes didn’t bother to even look at the cards, just read the other players. But reading Josie was getting damned distracting—and obvious—and his brain, honestly, wasn’t on the game. Pair of twos...shit...

“I think the dealer agrees with your assessment, Li,” Josie said, arching her eyebrows at Jerry’s expression. “Shoot, I think I’ll be all-in on this one, boys!”

More chuckles. But Jerry could hear in their voices the same brittleness, the same poorly-masked tension he felt in his gut. It was always like this. They all had friends going out without them. Li had grown pretty tight with Matyszak. And some of the Raiders had paired off with opposites amongst the Hellhound pilots—Josie’s razzing, be damned.

And Kelly. Jerry hid a sigh. She had saved him; he’d saved her. They’d come out of those death-mines on Gallaton together, fled into the Jesters together. Like Cory, she’d become a surrogate daughter of sorts. She’d been there when his real daughter had resurfaced, and been a little less than what he remembered. She’d consoled him when that same daughter had...

Nope...not now. He winced again, pretended everything was all right, and looked over his cards at Josie. The vague mischief remained in her cocky stare, but the eyes had cooled a little, detecting the flutter of pain.

Jerry cleared his throat. “We playing cards or not?” He flung a chip onto the upended-door-turned-poker table. “Ante up!”

Grumbles of agreement answered and chips clattered as they joined his. No one wanted to think too much on death streaking southward on gravity drives.

Or on the death that might be waiting there.

***

TIM STOOD IN THE JESTER conference room, staring at the hologram with his arms folded so tightly the muscles began to ache. Icons of Hellhounds slashed across a false, blue sea, angling gracefully for the spattering of islands south of the broken-plaster pattern of Fury’s largest continent. One of those specks blinked and Kelly’s voice crackled, ordering some minor course correction.

“They’re about to go silent,” Red murmured from the other side of the hologram. The chamber felt hushed, tensed. Technicians scurried about behind her in the dark with only the barest of whispers. “They’re almost over the horizon, now, fifteen minutes to target. Any communications will have to bounce off the ionosphere and could be intercepted.”

Tim nodded wordlessly, could only keep his eyes on those icons. His heart beat a steady, rolling rhythm against his ribcage. He never thought about dying—not himself, not really. You couldn’t and still go up in a Hellhound. And you didn’t dwell on it. It was something that happened, but not to you. Yeah, there were always the empty places, the faces and names you sometimes remembered. Mostly, you were glad they weren’t yours.

But he couldn’t stop thinking about one of those gaps being Kelly’s.

Knock it off. No good. None.

The hologram of Fury fluttered for a moment, details snowing over. Then the whole thing blipped out, plunged the chamber into momentary darkness. Tim flinched. Cries of alarm filled the black. Lights fluttered in the corner, behind the holoprojector where the huge plug of the Overmind copy squatted.

“Cory?” Red’s voice split through the babble. “Damn it, Cory, what the hell’s going on?”

In answer, the hologram flared back to life with an electric pop and a pulse of blue-white. Fury returned with its slow-motion rotation, the tiny swarm of Hellhounds slicing across its skies. Tim blew out a breath he’d reflexively sucked in.

“What was that?” Red demanded.

“Apologies, Captain,” Overmind’s voice purred. “Unexpected power surge. I have adjusted and all transmissions are acquired once more.”

Red glared into the corner where the huge computer core dwelled, at Cory, who’d knelt beside it to check something while other technicians scurred about. The girl stood and met her gaze with a headshake, drifted away from the machine after a moment, and left it to the others. Her course carried her towards Tim and the bluey light of the hologram highlighted lines of tension stretching across her young face.

“Something’s wrong,” Tim said, mouth going instantly dry.

“I...I don’t know,” she whispered back. Red was still watching her. She ignored the woman and turned fully to Tim. Her black eyes shivered with bewilderment. “She’s flaked out a couple times like that.”

“You mean Red?” Tim couldn’t help a little brittle humor.

A fragile smile was born and died almost as fast on Cory’s lips. “We miniaturized her you see. I thought the quantum core was sufficient. But there’s so much to Overmind, so much we don’t understand, about how she’s learned, about how much memory she needs. And now...” She shook her head. “Copying her has created some unexpected corruption.”

Ice water filled Tim’s blood. “Have you told Red?”

She nodded. “She only wants to know if it will affect operations. And it hasn’t. It’s just little things. But...Tim, it’s worrying me.” She pinched the bridge of her nose suddenly, as though afflicted with a migraine. “Overmind is one of the Jesters.”

The worry and the very human attachment Tim heard in her voice worsened the chill in his veins. He thought of those weird vats and ancient technology, gathering cobwebs deep in a Junction catacomb. Overmind had spoken to him then, told him to take care of Cory, if anything happened to It—to her. So, the attachment went both ways. But that was crazy.

Wasn’t it?

“The simulacrums in the Hellhounds are copies, admittedly at a far more basic level, none of Overmind’s master programming,” Cory was whispering. Drifting closer to him, she said, “I thought the transfer would work the same way, just on a larger scale.”

“But she’s working now?” Tim pressed, hating the way his voice rose to a sudden squeak. If the AI went down, at this moment, with Kelly out there counting on her ship, her computer...

Cory winced again, put both hands to her temples and squeezed. “Yes...I mean, it’s more complicated, Tim. You don’t understand.”

She was right; he didn’t. But, looking to the hologram again, all he could think on in that moment, all the worry he could hold, was focused on one of those icons streaking across the display.

***

“DECELERATING TO .005 c,” Commander Ellen Woodruf, Executive Officer of the Obliterator announced from her perch behind the tactical station on the battlecruiser’s bridge. “We will be in Fury’s gravity well in eleven minutes.”

Harrison stood near the center of the bridge, just behind and to the left of the Captain’s chair—something he knew made the Obliterator’s CO, Casey Walsh, edgy as hell. But they were all edgy. “Any sign we’ve been picked up?” he asked, folding his arms as the huge tactical display that took up the forward third of the bridge flickered.

“Sensors show no sign of active detection,” Woodruf replied. “Though at this range, it’d be hard to tell it apart from background clutter.” She turned from the station to look at him, a short, tightly-built woman of piercing brown eyes. “We came out of hyper at nearly a light hour out from the system and coasted the rest of the way in.”

Harrison nodded. That way the hyper emissions of his Task Force Overwatch—the heavy carrier group from Bolingbroke, escorted by his battlecruisers and their own attendant craft—would be lost in the cosmic racket of solar wind, gravity, and magnetic fields. They’d been braking steadily on inverted grav drives for the better part of twelve hours. Slow work—but necessary to hide their arrival from any other watchers.

“Any sign of Caldicott or Nagumo?” he asked. The huge hologram before him looked sterile and still, eight planets winding their way around an unremarkable blue primary.

“None,” Woodruf replied.

“Caldicott should already be here,” Walsh spoke up as he touched an armrest control. One of the gas giants circling the primary, the second planet out, winked at the Captain’s command. “Task Force Desolation signaled their departure from the jump-off point thirty hours ago. They should have come out of hyper about fifteen after that, and decelerated into position from galactic north.”

“We’ve got passive sensors up only,” Woodruf added, “but they show no sign of fusion signatures, no wreckage, no sign of an encounter.” She shrugged. “All indications are of a successful, uninterrupted insertion.”

“And nothing of Nagumo?” Harrison repeated, a little bit of eagerness creeping out.

“It’s early, sir,” Walsh replied and gestured towards the holographic mission counter, blinking down to zero from above and to the right of the tactical display. “If we were seeing him, it’d mean something had gone pretty wrong.”

“When we see him,” Harrison said, smiling hungrily, “it means everyone is seeing him.”

“Aye, sir.”

Harrison scanned the tactical. And no sign of anyone else. Yet.

The plan for Fury had the feel of that ancient Terran boardgame Go. Harrison had only encountered it in the Academy, in the Games and Theory Class. Players didn’t start with all their pieces on the board and only introduced them as it progressed. It rewarded the careful player, who planned ahead and massed their pieces for the critical moment.

He’d hated it, even as it fascinated him. And he hated this, the waiting, the game of hide-and-go-seek. The early days of the war had simply been a straight-up fight. But he’d learned the hard way, as had any number of commanders, that charging in where angels feared to tread only led to hell—and ruin. The super-heavy capital ships with their main gun batteries and their ship-to-ship missile salvos still ruled the stars, but the unexpected fighter sortie out of the void could be a fatal stab in the back.

So, battle had become like Go. Plan ahead, mass carefully, watch for what the other player did, and hope you’d brought your pieces in at the right moment.

Harrison let himself glance at the approximate position of Caldicott’s group. The Savo was with her, transferred to her command, along with its sister, the Powell. Buck was aboard, with his squadron. That had to be nervy business, the light carriers overloaded and packed with the munitions for nearly twice their starfighter compliments. More than one disaster had occurred with such ingredients. But Harrison figured grimly that the issue would be partially alleviated soon. Encounters with the Jesters rarely came with light casualties.

He allowed a selfish moment to ask whatever sadistic deity truly ruled the stars to spare his son what was coming.

The tactical pinged and shimmering white halos began to materialize at the system’s edge, where its gravity well deepened enough to begin interfering with hyper drive. In place of those momentary bursts, where realities met and rent apart, emerged Nagumo’s task force.

“There he is,” Harrison murmured. “Right on time.”

“But not quite as expected,” Walsh said with a note of confusion. “They’re...missing someone.”

Harrison squinted at the hologram, then scowled. “One destroyer short.” He glanced at Woodruf. “Was anyone reporting problems before departure?”

“None that I’m aware of, sir,” she replied, staring hard as schemata flicked into existence next to the icons, the war book program identifying each of them. “It’s the DD-172, the Ming. She’s newer, but had a full shakeout, no report of any technical issues.”

“The rest are here,” Walsh growled. He looked over his shoulder at Harrison. “Nagumo can’t afford to wait on her.”

Harrison scowled at the hologram, watching as the icons coasted down the gravity well, came slowly, gracefully together after the scattering that often occurred from hyperspace transition. They showed no sign of delay, kept to the deliberate, pre-assigned course. Good. Nagumo’s nothing if not a stickler for timetables.

“Not an auspicious start,” Woodruf muttered.

With a glare shot at the XO, Harrison said, “Keep an eye out for the Ming, but otherwise, we remain in position with all passive sensors on Nagumo’s progress.” He unfolded his arms, shook them out, as though preparing for a bout. “It’s time we stuck the hornet’s nest, see what swarms out.”

He thought of Sobieski and his lousy luck and tried not to worry that he’d find the same, here in the Fury System.

***

KELLY’S HELLHOUND TREMBLED around her as Fury’s seas blurred by beneath it. Dusk had deepened to the dark azure of early night, stars beginning to wink out from the heavens. A streak of yellow slashed the horizon to port, its last rays dashing off the whitecaps below in scintillas of pale gold—so damned close.

The tactical pinged and showed the terrain ahead. Queen’s Point was an irregular star-shaped island, connected to the mainland by a long, uncertain sandbar, over which ran a far more certain bridge. That was her secondary target. Primary was the seaside bay, which should be facing her squad as they swept in from the northeast, within which should rest any heavy transports that had used their buoyancy for a waterborne landing, rather than seek limited space on the Point’s small landing strip.

“Four minutes, fifty-eight seconds,” the AI announced, and it was hard not to hear tension in the voice. “You will want to decelerate now.”

“Brake for the approach!” Kelly broke radio silence to order her squadrons.

The starfighter groaned as she pulsed the maneuvering fields and backed off the gravs, almost as though protesting the move. Around her, in the dazzling half-light of the dying day, the rest of the Hellhounds slowed and settled in around her like seagulls streaking home. Everything felt fast, clear, clean.

It felt wrong.

“Where the hell is everyone?” Matyszak’s voice broke through the faint pop of the wing channel. “They’ve got to see us by now!”

As if in answer, the tactical display blatted and glowing tails began tracing their way into the skies from the distant island. A second alarm joined the first as those tails lurched in unison towards the approaching Hellhounds. An instant after that, lightning jolted out across the ocean, cyan bolts lashing the sky above, then questing lower, striking the wavetops in thunderous gouts of instantly-boiled seawater.

“Hostile targeting!” Kelly barked, juking her fighter to avoid a settling plume. “All right, Second Squad, it’s your time! Peel off for the sky. Give ‘em something to look at!”

“Always the fun jobs,” Matyszak grated as he pulled up his nose and shot for the heavens. The rest of his squadron followed within a second, their vulpine silhouettes sinister against the last pink flutter of day.

The blaster bolts lanced up after them and several converged on one in a single heartbeat’s time, shields strobing out, a flash, and then flames. The Hellhound’s climb stuttered instantly to a half, became a tumble. More flames turned it into a meteor streak, winding wildly back towards the sea. A wing shed, fluttered almost lazily. A scream tore across the tactical network, distorting until the Hellhound struck the waves, skipped once as it came apart, and then shattered across them in a globe of fire.

“Shit!” Kelly heard Matyszak screech. “Break high and scatter!”

And they did, Hellhounds peeling off from one another in wild paths. But the missiles were already looping amongst them, even as the blaster fire from Queen’s Point continued its murderous pulse for more prey. Starfighters juked and dove and dodged. Drones tailed. Flecks of plasma lashed out from Hellhounds, stabbed their pursuers into antimatter flame and smoke smears that were barely afterthoughts.

And then Kelly and her squad had left them behind.

“First Squadron, stay low,” she told them through grinding teeth. Flecks of blaster fire worried high above, an occasional bolt slapping across the sea, but it looked like Matyszak’s decoy had worked. “Target coming up in ninety seconds!”

Icons twinkled across the darkened horizon ahead, the war book highlighting hostile positions by electronic noise, by tracing missile tracks and energy fire back to their sources, by visual confirmation. Density of signals gave away the nerve center of Queen’s Point, a former office complex, now-festooned with ether-tenna, sensor turrets, and weapons emplacement domes. This perched on a cliff directly above the starship bay.

“Sixty seconds,” Kelly’s AI told her in its vaguely scolding voice. “We will need to enable targeting or engage with visual only.” A pause. “The latter will not have the same precision.”

“Not yet!” Kelly snapped. “Painting them with active sensors will point us out to them like searchlights! We wait!”

“Fifty seconds...”

It was weird they weren’t taking any fire. Their gravity drive wakes had to be showing by now, even coming in this low. But Kelly wasn’t going to squander what fleeting advantage they had. Every muscle clenched till it tingled, Kelly willing the seconds by.

“Contacts!” one of Kelly’s wing mates screamed. “Coming in to starboard, three o’clock hi—aaaaaaahhh!!!”

The Hellhound known as Harrison Squadron Six took no less than half a dozen direct particle beam hits in a second. Shields slagged away, left the starfighter trailing fire and losing speed. A second flurry of azure blasts sliced through fuselage like it was barely there and finished turning the craft into an inferno that rained debris across a kilometer of sea.

A trio of Valkyries slashed through the smoke of Harrison Six’s demise and across the squadron’s tail, banking so violently their pilots had to be feeling wobbly, even with the inertial dampeners. Particle beams licked after the surviving Hellhounds, flaring shields, dashing up steam plumes from the waters below.

“Second Flight!” Kelly squawked as she flung her fighter to port to baffle the beams ravaging the skies around her. “Break off and deal with those guys!”

Two Hellhounds veered off their original course and clawed for altitude, to get up and behind their pursuers. The third starfighter of Second Flight simply hit its maneuvering field and braked violently, let its sudden deceleration carry it backwards through the speeding Valkyries, that juked to avoid it. Suddenly its was on their tails, plasma blaster chattering bolts after them. One Valkyrie peeled off. The Hellhound followed.

The remaining Valkyries clung to Kelly’s tail.

Energy blasts crashed across the wavetops from Queen’s Point. One of Kelly’s squad mates took multiple hits, shields fluttering, and pulled out—it wasn’t clear if from damage or simple reflex. A near miss shuddered her own fighter and the systems display globular pulsed yellow out of the corner of her eye, warning of weakening shields in the port quarter.

She knew why the Queen’s Point defenses hadn’t been firing. It hadn’t been because of Matyszak; they didn’t want to hit their own fighters. But that hesitancy had apparently vanished, the air ablaze with energy bolts, a frantic volume of it. Kelly clearly saw a Valkyrie jolted by a friendly hit and could only imagine the panic of the base controllers.

Hostile targeting alarms warbled in her ears. A massive geyser of particle beam-heated seawater leapt up before her nose and Kelly swung to starboard to avoid, came out of the maneuver with steam crackling off her shields and another near-miss skipping across her ventral deflector with a crash felt to the marrow. Steadying her Hellhound as it dipped a wingtip dangerously close to the water, she saw the white trails of missiles leaving tubes.

Insanity! We’re so close their onboard targeting won’t have time to initialize...

A point that was proven a moment later as the missile spread from the point streaked across the waters and jumped into the midst of the oncoming fighters—and closed in on the Valkyries. One of these banked wildly and dropped a chaff pod that likely hit the sea before even activating. The other absorbed one, two direct hits and wobbled off course, shields flickering wildly and the pilot clearly dazed.

A second missile salvo screamed for the Hellhounds, this time clearly sorting friend from foe. Targeting halos winked into being over them and Kelly squeezed the trigger, cut loose with a long burst from the chin mounted plasma blaster. Aided by the AI, the tightly-knit packets of cyan chopped into the projectiles, smearing a trio of them into flaming shreds across the waves and clearing Kelly’s way.

The rest roared by to either side, spark-strewn trails lashing past the corners of either eye. A curtain of fire to aft and a momentary scream across the tactical net told Kelly someone else hadn’t been so lucky. But she didn’t have time to look and see who—

—because Queen’s Point loomed before her.

Details rushed for her in such precise detail her guts recoiled—like she was in free fall and only meters from the ground. The targeting computer frenetically painted icons over gun and missile emplacements, all flaring and fuming, over the telltale half-globes of shield generators, and across the bay, opening wide before her. A pair of Kensington-class transports bobbed there, scrambling with activity as crews vainly rushed to seal hatches and prepare for takeoff.

Freakin’ jackpot!

“Number Three and Four scatter-packs!” Kelly hollered as she flicked the weapons select toggle. Her words would set the AI to pre-selecting targets for the missiles, a brain-melting flurry of calculations only the little super-intelligence could handle. She stroked the trigger. “Go!”

The wings of her Hellhound momentarily glowed white-hot as the hardpoint-mounted packs erupted. A pair of six-missile spreads shrieked loose and twined out of the darkened sea sky, slashing for Queen’s Point. Most struck the Point’s defensive shielding in blisters of thermonuclear white. But hammering home at the low angle, below the slope of what was effectively an anti-orbital defense, some slipped through. Most of these flashed apart in fiery rain as point-defenses scrawled the mouth of the bay, gauss guns flaying the air before them with their magnetically-propelled streams of metal.

But one sideslipped all of it and found the mark.

Kelly felt the blast as she tore back on the stick, began to lift the Hellhound’s nose for the sky. White pulsed all around her, then went fiery yellow as the grav drives wailed and clawed for altitude. Shields shimmered momentarily, absorbing punishment as the whole spaceframe shook. Then it was open air above her and she could spare an instant to glance at the aft view hologram.

The first transport had exploded amidships with such violence the blast had scooped a crater from the water that was still rushing back in as the fiery halves that remained of it flopped back into the churn. One of these landed, crashing onto the after quarter of the second transport. The impact jolted a messy detonation of smoke and shrapnel from the engine section, then an eye-scrawling globe of fire. Shockwaves whipped out across the water ahead of it and the whole bay flamed into a cauldron of death.

The Hellhound wobbled as the blast smote skyward and Kelly had to fight the control for a few seconds, all while a roar like the devil’s laughter thrummed through the hull. She kept the power on to the thrusters, let them carry her high rather than fight it.

Flashes and fire smears seemed anticlimactic in the aftermath of the transports’ demise, but they walked steadily uphill from the fuming bay as the rest of Kelly’s squadron came screaming in, spewing missiles. The Point’s shields had failed with the titanic blast within their perimeter and the Jesters were free to savage the uncovered facilities. Point-defense emplacements slagged, sensor globes shattered, and the great tree of the base’s ether-tenna assembly shivered and shed great metallic boughs while fire snaked up its trunk.

Beyond the mini-city of the Point’s administrative buildings stretched the aerodrome, where scatter-pack missiles squealed in amongst parked shuttles and hover vehicles. A boxy landing craft flipped like a toy kicked by a toddler as explosions walked across the tarmac. Secondary explosions rippled amongst waiting carts, whipped into an inferno as Hellhound particle beams and plasma torrent lashed through. The pancake-shape of a hovertank sagged and burned while crew scampered frantically off of it. Stick figures dove or fell, writhing.

It all happened in less than fifteen seconds. Kelly’s squadron had turned the Alliance’s key logistical hub on Fury into a funeral pyre.

A second later, the hostile targeting alarm wailed at her and the aft display flashed in warning. A delta shaped emerged, unscathed from the fireball below, rocketing for the heavens after her. Blue-white flashed out from its nightmare-black silhouette.

Kelly juked to starboard and killed the thrusters, let the Hellhound sail off to the side and begin to plummet. The Valkyrie’s azure bolts lanced up through sky where she’d been a moment before. Then she was tumbling, stomach doing a queasy tumble as the nose dropped towards the ground. When the fiery image of Queen’s Point filled her display, she hammered the thrusters and shot straight down for it.

The warble of alarms told her she’d only bought herself a momentary reprieve. A glance at the tactical showed her the Valkyrie putting on a blast of speed and shooting out in a long arch above her that would bring it about either on her tail as she flattened out, or head-on, depending on what she chose. So, she did, diving for the inferno with the spaceframe quivering, her guts seething up into her throat, and every display flashing red in warning.

Just as the flames seemed they’d reach her, she banked the Hellhound to port and wrenched back on the stick, sent the starfighter screaming into a course that would bring it level with the surface—with meters to spare. A howl worked its way up from her chest, became a keen as the flaming ruin below tilted sickening and the debris-strewn canal that ran inland from the Queen’s Point Bay rushed up to meet her. All righted at what seemed the very last millisecond and Kelly’s keen disintegrated into a maniacal cackle as the Hellhound streaked up the channel, kicking up water trails behind it with its passage.

The targeting alarm squawked at her once more and the tactical strobed a warning. The bridge that’d been her secondary target sprawled ahead, partially-collapsed and aflame from one end to the other. A blinking icon told her the Valkyrie was coming in on her from the other side of the wall of smoke rising above it. Kelly nosed down, aiming for the piles of the bridge. Everything stood in adrenalized detail, so damned close.

Particle beams cut through the fumes, slapped across the canal, one glancing off Kelly’s ventral shields. The jolt dipped the Hellhound’s belly so low its shield carved a tail of flash-boiled canal water after it. The Valkyrie ripped through the curtain of smoke after the blasts, firing wildly, but its speed already carrying over Kelly, past her. She yanked the stick back as the blazing skeleton of the bridge rose up before her. With a shuddering wail, the Hellhound nosed-up over it, kicking the flames left behind into hellish vortices.

Kelly banked the Hellhound to port as a single surviving gauss gun emplacement lashed futilely at her from starboard. The course carried her along the coast line rather than out to sea and the open. She searched the tactical hologram, then with her own naked eyes for the Valkyrie. A shout from the communicator told her.

“—on us! Watch that!”

The rest of her squadron was spraying away from the destruction they’d wrought, in pairs, in singles. The Valkyrie, climbing after its failed chase of Kelly, angled vertically for one of the loners. Particle beam lightning carved the air behind the Hellhound, stabbing closer with each blast.

Kelly whipped to port, the Hellhound lurching back inland as thrusters roared and the starfighter climbed. The fleeing Hellhound would cross directly in front of her, and the pursuing Valkyrie an instant after that. “Harrison Four,” she called, “put on speed! I’ll be right there!”

“Hurry!” Four hollered frantically. “He’s practically up my ass!”

One-two-three particle beams smote Four’s shields and he was trailing smoke as he zipped across the axis of Kelly’s climb. But the Valkyrie was right there and she held down the firing stud, unleashed the full fury of both particle cannon and plasma blaster. At the last fraction of a moment, the Alliance pilot banked out of their climb, took mostly glancing hits, but trailing flashes of spark and flame as they veered away.

Kelly wheeled after the wounded Valkyrie as it started to dive. Another squeeze of the trigger sent energy blades cutting into a hull stripped of its deflectors by damage. Its oily smoke trail became a tongue of fire and a column of black as Kelly turned the Valkyrie’s dive into a plunge. She twisted the Hellhound out of its descent, left the Alliance wreck to its fate. A wink of flame from the surface marked its demise, seconds later.

Another smoke tail attracted Kelly’s attention as she steadied course and let the Hellhound climb once more. “How’re you doing, Harrison Four?” When there wasn’t immediately and answer, she added, “Kimball, are you all right?”

“Yeah, I’m...I’m not great...”

Kelly brought her Hellhound alongside the other Jester’s starfighter and winced. The full suite of shield projector coils had obviously blown out, scorching the spine of the ship. Sparks leapt fitfully from one that hung, half-loose and still smoldering in its housing, leaving a thread of fume across the sky. More alarming, one of the grav drive nacelles had cooked off with the explosion shuddered now in the wind, a burnt-out husk.

That the fighter remained airborne was no small miracle.

“Are you hurt?” Kelly asked

“Nothing serious.” Kimball coughed. “Cockpit’s full of smoke, though. Fans died out.” Another cough. “It’s nothing, Commander. I’ll drag her home.”

“Yeah, you will.”

Kelly scanned the tactical. The fight was ending, no sign of Valkyries now and Queen’s Point devouring itself in secondary explosions that rippled about the base of a monstrous, black smoke column. First Squadron was concentrating towards her—she winced to see missing icons. Lost two, by the look. Second Squadron was reconstituting at higher altitude, out over the sea. She blinked in relief to see one blip blinking and touched it.

“Second Squadron Leader,” she said into her helmet mic, “Matyszak, time to leave. First Squadron will join you momentarily.”

“Um...you coming along?”

She switched the channel to private, between just them. “Kimball’s limping. Doesn’t look good. Can’t have him flying out to sea if his last grav goes out. I’m going to stay with him as long as I can, on an overland route.”

Matyszak appeared in a globular, sweaty face pinching. “Everything north of here for a thousand klicks is swarming with Alliance, Harrison. There’s no way someone doesn’t take a potshot at you.”

“All the more reason for me to stay with Kimball.” She smirked at the other Jester. “Come on, you wanted your own Wing; now’s your chance!”

He grimaced. “This isn’t exactly how I envisioned it.”

“Just go. We’ll be fine. Are you going to make me make it an order?”

“No.” He flipped her a sloppy salute. “Good luck to you, Commander. We’ll be seeing you soon.”

“Yes, you will.” When his globular vanished, she re-keyed the general channel and announced, “First Squadron, re-form on Second. Matyszak has the lead.”

Protests and shock crackled back at her from her survivors.

“It’s no problem, gang,” she hurried to reply. “Kimball and I are just taking a slower route home, get in some site-seeing. We’ll rejoin you at the Hole.”

Grudgingly, the voices quieted, left the tactical network still. One by one, the Hellhound of First Squadron peeled off from the pair of them and streaked for high altitudes. At first, they’d vanished into metallic dots across the stars and cloud-wisps. Then they’d vanished from the tactical display. Then it was just Kelly and Kimball, skimming north across Fury’s bleak, broken landscape. And the feeling of being left behind couldn’t be escaped.

“Sorry, Commander,” Kimball said.

“Yeah, you are,” Kelly chortled back at it. “Now don’t make me really regret this by falling behind, you hear?”

“Loud and clear.”

She glanced at the aft display, could still see cataclysm lighting the horizon red behind them where Queen’s Point had been at sundown. But even that faded, left them alone, two points of light streaking through the dark.

***

TIM COULDN’T HELP THE sigh of relief that escaped him as the Hellhounds began breaking off from their strafing runs over the Point. He caught Kelly’s voice crackling amongst the chatter as the raid began pulling out, successful and beginning to take stock. He’d caught snatches of her through what had actually been a pretty brief fight, but it was hard to know anything in the confusion and terror blistering across the tactical network, the icons slashing this way and that across a holographic sky.

He knew.

But relief began to cool as he searched the formation coming together over the sea northeast of the wrecked base. He glanced at the small hologram of the table of organization, hovering off to one corner, showing Jesters from the squadrons, showing losses. Kelly’s Hellhound wasn’t among those blinking red for downed, but she wasn’t with the others bending into an escape course. He noted another fighter pulsing yellow, indicating heavy damage.

“Where is she?” he asked quietly. Cory set a hand on his back. Red looked up at him. “Overmind,” he asked, raising his voice, “where’s Commander Harrison?”

“Tim...” Red began warningly.

A pointer blinked over a corner of the continent and a smaller globular popped out, displayed a pair of Hellhounds cruising north, flying low and staying close to the coastline. “She is here, Commander Watkins,” the AI replied. “She has signaled she is escorted her wounded home via a separate route.”

A cripple, Tim realized, glancing again at the yellow-strobing Hellhound icon. That’s Kimball, one of the older hands. Been with us since Loudon. He pinched his lips together to hide a scowl of fear. Stupid, though, no matter who it is. A lucky hovertank or anti-air group sees them, and a Hellhound’s not quite so invulnerable, in atmosphere and close to the ground.

No matter who it is.

Of course, Kelly was doing it.

“We should scramble Third Squadron,” Tim declared before thinking better of it. “They can at least give them a little company.”

“That makes no sense,” Red answered. “We’d be risking them all, and that’s exactly why Harrison dismissed the rest.” She shook her head and her narrowed eyes told him not to press it. “Better this way.”

“Fine,” Tim snapped. “I’ll go.”

Red had her mouth open with what would no doubt be a snarl, but a blat from Overmind cut her off. New alarms pinged and the huge globe of Fury shrank in the holographic display as the whole view pulled back to take in the entirety of the star system. At its periphery, halos of hyperspace emergence rippled in a tight, short-lived cluster.

“Long range sensors indicate new ships entering the system,” Overmind said with a hint of vague unease, as though imitating a human sensor tech’s impression. Elongated trails indicated possible approach routes, shortened slowly as the data refined and the AI adjusted for the doppler effect. The edge of Fury system’s gravity well was nearly a dozen AU’s out—not super far, but enough to clutter things. The tails congealed into a group of four definitive points, glaring against the stars.

Tim swore he could feel air pressure in the chamber plunge as everyone held their breath.

A pointer brushed over the newcomers and schemata popped out. “I can confirm,” Overmind said, “Alliance starships by the fusion bottle signatures.”

“It’s a small task force,” Red murmured, staring intensely at the hologram.

“Carrier group, to be precise,” the AI corrected her. The pointer touched the icon at the heart of the foursome, coasting down the system towards them. “Signature, here, is consistent with a Bellerophon-class strike carrier.”

“One of their newer ones,” Tim said and met Red’s gaze through the holographic glow. “Room for two squadrons, thirty Valkyries. They’re not playing around.”

“A heavy cruiser in support,” Red said meditatively, eyes going back to the imagery, “and two destroyers.” She shook her head. “Seems a little thin after what we saw here when we first came in.”

“Maybe they were expecting support from the surface?” Tim suggested and offered her a predatory smile. “Lousy timing, if that’s the case.”

“Still...”

“What are you thinking?” he asked, his own nerves—already tingling—beginning to cool with the knowledge of what came next.

“Overmind, do we have any other hint of hyperspace activity?” Red asked the machine. “Anything that looks like a fusion signature, a gravity drive wake, or even just unusual electronic noise?”

“I do not, Captain Red. But these contacts will make Fury orbit in seventy minutes at present course.” The AI seemed to pause, thoughtfully. “A scan of records of past encounters suggested they will launch starfighters in less than forty.”

“They’ll have a full welcoming committee out, long before we get to them,” Tim said.

Red nodded and bared her teeth. “Then we’ll just have to return the favor.”

A squeal of static prefaced the appearance of a grainy globular. Tim realized after a moment it wasn’t a problem of distortion; the image was clouded with smoke. Teller glowered through the miasma, a cigar smoldering in his clenched teeth. “I presume your sensors are seeing this, Captain?”

“We see them, General, and we’re doing something about it.”

“That was decent work your people just did on the Point,” the Marine said, his gravelly voice making it hard not to detect a hint of not-quite satisfaction. “Maybe see to it you’re as thorough with our visitors.”

“Wouldn’t dream of doing otherwise, sir,” Red replied. When the globular blipped out as abruptly as it had appeared, she snorted quietly. “Asshole.”

“We should send up Third Squad,” Tim said, and made certain to meet Red’s eye, “and inform Kelly what’s happening.”

Red nodded, raising her voice as activity suddenly charged the air in the command center. “Third Squadron to launch immediately and take up station in geosynchronous orbit. Red and Watkin Wings to scramble, as well.” She stared at the hologram for a moment. “First and Second Squadrons, Harrison Wing, to rendezvous with the Third. All damaged fighters exempted—they are to return to base.” The slight pause. “Inform Commander Harrison, I’d like her to take charge of her Wing soonest.”

“Transmitting to all now,” Overmind replied.

“I’m going.” Tim turned for the exit.

Cory tugged at his sleeve. “And I’m with you.”

“Hold on!” Red barked.

Both spun to look at her.

Red’s eyes were on Cory. “I need you here, monitoring Overmind. She...it’s been glitchy since startup and we can’t have it going down again in the middle of this.”

“I can assure you, Captain, I am—”

“I appreciate it, Overmind, but I’d rather Cory was on hand to assist you.” A glimmer of sweat track traced Red’s hairline. Tim couldn’t blame her; he was feeling it too. They were arguing with an AI over its capacity to function—an AI that coordinated all Jester activities on Fury. An AI that hadn’t seemed itself since getting here and, in fact, wasn’t Itself.

Like telling God He’s wrong...

“She’s fine,” Cory protested. “All diagnostics came back within tolerances when we checked earlier.”

“And it just blinked out a few minutes ago, or hadn’t you noticed?”

Cory shook her head and Tim had a hint of her late-teen peevishness squirming out. “Come on, that was just a power surge!”

“Then you’ll be here in case there’s another one.” Red’s voice hoarsened with her building anger.

“Jerry’s going to need me in the—” Cory suddenly pinched off the last words with a wince and put her fingers to her temples. She didn’t finish, stood in the middle of the bustling chamber with her eyes pinched shut and Tim watching with growing concern.

“Rodann can find another tail gunner,” Red growled, apparently oblivious to Cory’s visible distress—or unconcerned. “Director Xiang, I need you here.”

“Come on, kid...” Tim started to say, setting a hand on her arm. He couldn’t help the feeling of weirdness suddenly permeating the air around her. It was like she was hearing something that wasn’t there—or he just wasn’t hearing, wasn’t being allowed to hear.

“You’re right,” Cory spoke up suddenly, voice decisive. “I’m...sorry.” She blinked once and met Red’s glower with a cool, unreadable stare. “I will remain here.”

“Kid...?” Tim put the hand on her shoulder.

She turned to him crisply, the motion knocking his hand away, almost dismissively. “I am fine. You need to go.”

It was Tim’s turn to blink. He saw nothing in her eyes, no inflection, no emotion, no Cory.

“She’s right, Tim.” Red was stepping around from the other side of the holographic projector, strides lengthening. “We need to move.”

With a backwards glance, he let Red pull him by the arm into a jog out of the chamber and into the tunnel beyond. The Jester leader was already pushing into a dash and he had to scramble to catch up. “What the hell was that?” he asked.

“It’s nothing,” she snapped back at him between breaths. “Just her usual quirks! And we got no time to worry about it anyway!”

They slowed as they neared the bottleneck at the head of the tunnel. The air beyond the caves could be heard howling with gravity drives and the general din of the Jesters kicked into motion. Personnel crowded aside to let Red through.

Tim had a moment to glance one more time down the passage behind him. He saw Cory silhouetted against the glare of the holograms, looking stiff and almost machinelike as she snapped out instructions.

“Inform the Assault Wing they are to launch, as well,” he heard her command in a voice that sounded eerily like Overmind’s.

***

JERRY HAD FINALLY PUT together a winning hand when the alarm sounded and the players erupted to their feet, scattered from the table. Someone knocked the poker table over in their haste—or their calculation—and winnings spilled onto the tarmac. Cursing, Jerry lunged for the pavement to try and at least salvage his cards as boots stomped over.

A hand on his shoulder yanked him back upright and he was looking into Josie’s face. “C’mon, Rodann, it’s a hot scramble!”

The shriek of gravity drives lifting their fighters on plumes of antigravity was already drowning out the blaring klaxons. Vulpine silhouettes winged overhead. Deeper growls spoke of the assault shuttle crews kicking on the powerplants. And everywhere, the landing field thundered with rushing feet.

Jerry nodded and raised his hand to key his wrist comm, brought up the channel he shared with Cory. “If you’re not already at the Hog, kid, I’ll see you there in a minute!”

“You will need to go on without me,” a voice that was Cory’s but somehow sounded wrong replied.

“Wha...?” Jerry halted halfway into a sprint, as though struck a blow that stood him upright. “What the hell are you talking about, Cory? They’re launching everyone!”

“I will remain behind to monitor operations here,” she replied in that not-her drone. “Red has required it.”

Josie was tugging at Jerry, shouting something. He shook her off and snarled in to the communicator, “Since when do you do what Red tells you?”

“I am sorry, Jerry. You will need to find an alternate.”

The channel cut out.

Jerry stared at the wrist comm, dumbfounded. He didn’t even know who it was he’d been talking to, but it sure as hell hadn’t been Cory.

“Rodann...” Josie pulled at him again. “You’ve got to move!”

Someone shoved past Jerry, jarred him out of his funk. He shook himself once and looked at Josie. “Can’t believe it. She’s never done this to me!”

“Who? The little witch?”

“She doesn’t like being called that,” Jerry started with an unexpected surge of almost paternal defensiveness.

But Josie was chortling—and still pulling on him. “Well, they’re going to be counting on the Hog being up there, full crew or not.”

He started into a lumbering jog in the direction of his ship, Josie cajoling him along at his side. The whole thing felt like a kick to the stomach, and he still reeling after it, fighting for balance. The AI could run the tail gun, for sure, but it wasn’t the same. Cory was...better than the machine. More, he hated admitting to himself, he preferred having her close, where he knew what was happening to her.

A Hellhound lifted off ahead of them, kicking up a donut of debris that momentarily blinded, set both Jerry and Josie to hunching and turning away. Ears rang with the scream and Jerry felt the antigravity cushion nearly shove him over. Then it was gone and the air was clear. And they were moving, once more, the Hog visible, one more row of parked fighters over.

Jerry slowed as he neared the cockpit and saw Josie scrambling aft. “Hey! What the hell are you doing?”

She stopped and spun to face him, voice raised to be heard and blonde mop lashing about her face. “More good than I’d be doing otherwise!”

“You can’t be serious.” Jerry stepped towards her. “You ever operate one of those?”

“I’m qualified on more weapon systems than you even know exist, Rodann!” she snapped back into his face.

Protests cooled at the heat in her voice. He chuckled, couldn’t help it. “What about your Raiders?”

“They’ll understand,” she replied. “Hell, most of ‘em would do the same! It’s no fun squatting in a bunker while friends and more” she put extra emphasis on the last word “are out there, risking their tails.”

A little bit of Jerry still fought it. But looking at her, fists clenched at her hips, wind blowing her hair back from her face to leave her blue eyes blazing free, the urge to grab her, give in to what she was pressing for, slammed him. He wanted her along.

He wanted her.

Fighting to keep a tremor from his voice, he said, “You’ll have no time to figure the systems out.”

She smirked. “I know which end’s the business end.”

He grinned back. “Then jump in and buckle up, baby.”

***

“YOU’RE SURE?” KELLY asked the globular of Cory, staring with odd detachment out of the hologram.

“We have multiple contacts confirmed,” she replied. “You need to return your Wing.”

Kelly pinched her lips together and forced herself to nod. Every bit of her recoiled at the idea, filled her stomach with an acidy burn. She glanced at the aft display, at Kimball’s Hellhound, visibly struggling to match speeds with hers. The faint glow of the smoke trail it left in its wake roped through the night, a trail leading back to wounded prey.

“Your Third Squadron is nearing orbit,” Cory said, not exactly pressing; not sounding human, at all. “Inbound Alliance forces will reach the same in approximately sixty-five minutes.”

“And we don’t want to let them get anywhere near that close.” Kelly clenched her teeth for a moment, then relaxed and blew out a breath. “Understood. On my way.”

The globular of Cory vanished without another word.

Pressure must be getting to her, Kelly thought. She glanced again at Kimball. Getting to us all... She hated herself as she touched the communicator, changed channels. “Hey, Kimball.”

A new globular materialized, showed the other Jester’s pale, pain-drawn face. Smoke twined about him and sweat beaded across narrow, bony features, darkened a strand of his normally white-blonde hair. “Gotta go, Commander?”

Kelly couldn’t help but wince. “Afraid so. We’ve got more guests coming. They need everyone.”

“Don’t worry about me,” he replied with cheer that sounded tight and forced. “I’ll carry this bucket home.”

“Let the AI do the work. Don’t force yourself.”

“AI’s fried, Commander. Half the instruments, too. It’s going to be all Kimball flying this thing back.”

Shit. She pressed her lips together again. “Then it’s a good thing you know the way.”

“All the way,” he chuckled and then grimaced, was clearly hurting.

“If you...” Kelly trailed off, the words dragging out of her like splinters. “I’m sorry about this, Kimball.”

“Don’t be,” he replied. “It’s the job. We all know how it goes sometimes. Just make sure if I...if I have to put her down somewhere, that you send the Raiders. It’s going to get awfully lonely you know?”

“They’ll be tracking your position from the Hole. No one’s leaving you.”

“Thanks, Commander. I’ll see you soon.”

“Damned right, you will,” she replied. “Good luck!”

“To both of us.”

Kelly drew back on the stick and lifted the Hellhound’s nose for the heavens. Grav drive shudders built through the spaceframe, the fighter feeling almost hasty as it climbed. Or maybe that’s just me, in a damned hurry to get away, God help me. She didn’t look back at the lone icon of Kimball crossing over the hostile, benighted landscape of Fury, but could see it behind her eyes, nevertheless.

“Computer,” she asked her own AI, “estimate from your sensors Harrison Six’s odds of reaching the Hole.”

“Scans were largely inconclusive,” the machine replied with a hint of something almost regretful. “With Six’s simulacrum crippled, I couldn’t link and run a remote diagnostic. But visible scan suggests no better than an even chance of reaching Jester headquarters before critical mechanical failure occurs.” The AI surprised her by adding, “I am sorry, Commander Harrison.”

She smiled a little, didn’t know if the machine actually felt that—or anything—but appreciated the simulation of human concern.

She still hated every single meter they climbed across the sky, leaving Kimball behind.

***

“HERE THEY COME.”

A swarm of blips rose from the surface of Fury and quickly gathered in orbit, on the planet’s near side, over the horizon from any serious anti-orbital fire from Alliance positions. As Harrison watched, the icons began to accelerate away from the planet. Two, then three distinct groups seemed to sort out.

“They’re leaving a reserve,” Harrison murmured, noting the last group, which remained in far orbit. “You don’t think they’ve picked up Caldicott?” He glanced at Woodruf. “Or us?”

“Not possible,” the Commander replied with surety Harrison was too old and experienced to ever feel about anything. She reached over the tech at the Tactical station and touched one of his controls. In response, a holographic pointer fluttered over the third group and a globular popped out, showed a boxy, weapons-studded craft. “Assault shuttles, sir, Basilisk-class. Looks like they’ve fitted them for anti-starfighter work. And they’re slower than those Jester Hellhounds.” She nodded to Harrison. “They’re there should anything get through.”

Which was assuredly going to happen. Nagumo was launching his Valkyries now, the Daimyo filling the void around it with its starfighter brood. These sorted themselves out as Harrison watched for what seemed endless minutes. Two groups split up, one vastly larger one beginning to peel away from the slower capital ships, pick up speed as they headed for Fury. A second, far smaller one clustered around the task force—Nagumo’s Near space combat patrol, his own reserve.

Harrison snorted a little to himself. Both sides were mirroring one another in tactics. A small worried nibbled at his gut. Both sides weren’t trusting that they’d seen the entirety of the other’s full strength.

“Are we picking up anything from Fury?” Harrison asked. “Anything from General Gamble’s people planet-side?”

“Lots of racket, sir,” the technician at the Communications station replied. “Sounds like there’s been some fighting. They’re broadcasting a general distress signal.” The tech listened to his earbud for a moment, manipulated a channel toggle. “There’s been an airstrike and their primary supply depot has been destroyed and the last of their aerospace support is wiped out. They’re calling for help.”

Harrison tensed. “They’re not picking us up, are they?”

“No, sir,” the tech replied. “It’s open frequency chatter. It’s desperation. They’re broadcasting to any who’ll listen.”

Folding his arms before him, Harrison nodded and tried to project calm he certainly didn’t feel. It was madness, waiting like this, watching the slow-motion ballet of icons, which were in fact people and machines hurtling towards one another at insane velocities. Only the vast distance gave them the illusion of gracefulness.

It had to be worse for Nagumo, Harrison told himself. The man would have no idea either Caldicott or his own group had gotten into position on time. He had to feeling like bloody meat in shark-infested waters. His force could likely could hold off the Jesters, but not defeat them. And if luck went against him, he was looking at serious exposure. All he had was the planet and its defenders in front of him and the hope that his comrades would be there when needed.

“We could risk a line-of-sight laser comm to Caldicott’s estimated position,” Walsh suggested from his chair. “It would at least confirm positions.”

At the Captain’s suggestion, the third planet out, a gas giant with a weird cat’s eye pattern in its twisting whorls of upper atmosphere, blinked. Its position relative to Fury—and, therefore, Caldicott’s spot, hiding in its shadow for her chance—would place an attack from that quarter coming in at almost a right angle to the axis of the Jester’s counter thrust.

A perfect ambush—if everything had gone according to plan.

But Harrison shook his head. “Not worth it. It’d be impossible to intercept, but at this range we’d have to boost power to get the signal anywhere and that would be noticed.” He chewed his lower lip. “No, we just have to wait and assume everyone’s where they need to be.

“We need to trust the plan.”

***

“THEY’RE GOING TO TRY to rush right through us,” Red said across the Jesters’ network. “You can tell by how much speed they’re putting on.”

Tim glanced at the tactical hologram. In its holographic depths, the mob of oncoming Valkyries had, indeed, broken into a sprint. It was at least two squadrons, a couple dozen starfighters. He felt a thrill of icy wind rush across nerves, tingle in his lungs as he worked to control his breathing. He never used to get quite this nervy, in the old days, when they were mostly fighting the hunter-killer drones of the galactic mega-corporations that used to be the Jesters’ primary prey. But the knowledge that these were people, thinking, hating humans, coming to kill him, always added a sickening thrust.

It always felt personal.

“Watkins Wing,” Red said, “Tim, I want you to rush right through them.”

He grinned. “Gonna give me another chance at one of those carriers?”

“I’m going to give you the chance to scare the shit out of them,” she replied. “We can’t let any of those Valkyries near the planet.” The globular blinked with dotted lines, instructions relayed from Red’s computer to his. “Put the hurt on their capital ships and they might blink, draw fighters back to protect them.”

“Oh, I’m going to put a hurt on ‘em, all right.”

“My wing will stay with the Valkyries, try to draw them into a general melee,” Red was going on. “Kelly’s group will be in position to snag any who get through us.”

Tim’s eye flicked to the icons clustering above Fury behind them. He touched the globular where they were, caused a table to pop out and confirm the compliment of pilots and machines. She was there, taking command, already. He suppressed shiver of relief.

“That’s it. Nothing fancy.” Red paused. “Any questions?”

Tim frowned. “You’re asking me?”

A globular materialized to show Red’s face, sweat streaks across mahogany, shiny with blue hologram light. “I’ve got this feeling, Tim. This seems too obvious, set-up, like...I don’t know...rehearsed. They didn’t even try to hide their approach.”

Tim’s frown deepened and he stared at the tactical again. “Jeanie, boost long-range sensors. We getting anything out there?”

The hologram zoomed out as the machine worked. He waited a few seconds, watched the empty sprawl of the void between worlds and stars. All he saw was a mess of Valkyries coming right at them.

“Nothing, Tim,” the AI replied. “If there are any other ships in the vicinity, they’ve done a good job concealing their presence.”

He looked at Red’s globular. “You heard her.”

“Yeah,” she said, “I’m not picking up anything, either.” The leader of the Jesters gave herself a visible shake in the hologram. “No sense worrying, now, I suppose.” Her green eyes flared at him out of the image. “Good luck, Tim.”

He flashed his teeth at her in what would certainly look like a ridiculous smile. “Don’t need luck, lady; I make my own!”

An alarm blatted to indicate hostile targeting painting Tim’s Hellhound. It was joined by more, merging into a harsh racket as Jeanie painted halos around the closest Valkyries, showing they’d acquired their own long-range target locks on them. They were coming at them in plate formation, unusual for Alliance pilots, who typically preferred slim, arrowhead arrangements that enabled piercing or slashing attacks. The plate allowed one formation to bring all weapons to bear on a narrower one and then “shatter” after it struck, into individual squadrons or flights. It was inherently defensive.

Meant the Valkyries intended a dogfight—not to punch through to Fury.

Tim started to key Red’s channel to point it out, but the alarm warbled changed and the tactical filled with missile trails, roping out from every other Valkyrie. He opened his Wing Commander’s channel, instead. “Watkins Wing” he hated the squeak that’d risen in his voice “give ‘em one volley and it’s all speed after that. Punch through them!”

He didn’t wait for responses; flicked the weapons selector to missiles on the stick, keyed up the Number Four scatter-pack, and squeezed the trigger. The Hellhound chugged as the launcher emptied into the void. “You got targets for these, Jeanie?” he asked as the projectiles streaked off into the endless dark.

“Half a dozen picked out,” the AI replied almost cheerily.

And she did, the antimatter missiles spreading out and twining into the oncoming salvo of Valkyrie-launched warheads. An avalanche of Jester rockets tumbled past his fighter and raced to catch up to his fusillade, cluttering the tactical display with their dozens of tails that, in turn, were suddenly aped by the Alliance inbounds’ courses—all the little cyber-killers locking on one another in a frantic sprint for collision.

The tactical exploded all at once. Antimatter fire snowed across the void in a wave of eye-scouring white. Each holographic blossom was a tightly-controlled cataclysm. Merging into one, they were a holocaust fiery enough to lay waste to a small town on Fury’s surface.

And Tim was going right into it.

“Jeanie, all power to forward shields and thrusters,” Tim grated as, suddenly, the fire was all around him. “Give me everything this bucket’s got!”

She already was, the Hellhound thrumming with frantic acceleration around him. With his knifepoint focus, Tim hadn’t noticed the gray creeping into the edges of his vision, the sluggishness of his limbs, the labor of his breathing as g-forces outstripped even the Hellhound’s inertial compensators. But it began to crush him back into the flight couch now as Jeanie complied with his command and loosened the failsafe on the starfighter’s grav drive tolerances.

The maelstrom of antimatter blasts buffeted like a gust front on an open sea and the Hellhound jarred, shook. Then they were through.

But they weren’t out of the storm. An instant later, azure particle beams lanced out of the stars and carved into Tim and his onrushing wing mates. Valkyries silhouettes were visible for a terrible, tearing moment, spouting fire. One slashed by to port so close Tim’s Hellhound jolted with the near-impact. Shields sparkled and an alarm screeched. But Tim’s attention had already gone to a strobe of thermonuclear death to aft, where someone vanished in a millisecond of flaming violence.

And then they were through—really through, this time—with space opening out ahead of them and the convulsion of a mass dogfight left behind.

“Keep going!” Tim hollered to his wing.

On the tactical, the cluster of icons representing the carrier group drew near. At the crazy speeds they’d put on, they’d reach them in less than two minutes. To aft, space boiled with energy blades and slag. Not one Valkyrie had peeled off to give chase as Tim’s group shot through.

But a small host of fresh icons was pulling away from the capital ships to cut them off, just ahead.

“Jeanie, we’re going to overshoot the big guys at this rate! Decelerate to attack speed and reroute power to weapons.”

A pause and a flutter of sound like a voice distorting behind static. A flicker passed over some of the holograms. Tim’s stomach fell into a pit, then, as a familiar, androgynous tone filled the speakers. “Logic core compromised.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?!?!?”

“Restart recommended.”

Tim punched the instrument panel so hard the holograms blinked out for a moment. He struck it again with a shriek of rage. “Now?” Knuckles slammed something that crumpled. “You do this now?”

“Backup persona enabled,” the AI droned. “Manual contro—”

The crack of Tim’s fist off the control swallowed the rest of its recitation. Shaking his punished hand and blinking through sudden, cold sweat in the eyes, he raised the wrist comm to eye level. “Jeanie, are you in there?”

“I am,” the familiar voice replied with a tinny ring from the piece’s small speaker. “But...I am not. Tim, I’m locked out.”

“Yeah, I noticed! Damn CPU again! Can you re-acquire?”

“I think so. It’ll take a few minutes.”

“We don’t have a few minutes!”

“Wing Commander.” A globular knitted itself together before him, showed Li’s crooked-toothed smile. “What’s happening? You all right?”

“Computer trouble again,” Tim snapped, “again, goddammit!”

Li’s narrow eyes widened. “Break off, then! We’re twenty seconds to energy weapons range!”

“Hell no!” Tim snarled and killed the globular, switched back to the wing channels. “All fighters, queue up scatter-packs! Spoiling volley!” He blinked through more sweat—so damned much of it cascading into his eyes as, flustered, he tried to keep track of everything. “Fire!”

Icons fluttered across the tactical, white tails elongating as dozens of Jester missiles streaked towards the Alliance fighter screen. Tim jerked the trigger, felt nothing. “Shit! Jeanie—I mean...shit! Computer, Number Three scatter-pack!”

“Number Three is ready,” the machine that was not Jeanie replied.

Tim pulled the trigger, felt the Hellhound jolt as the missiles sprang from it.

On the tactical the leading birds from the Jesters’ salvo were already beginning to blink from existence, clawed from the void by the Valkyries’ particle and plasma weapons. Oddly, they weren’t firing counter-volleys, as their predecessors had. Yet the Jesters’ missiles continued to vanish in a rash of silent fire globes. Then Tim saw it; the Valkyries weren’t coming on fast, at all, were spreading out into a net while the Alliance destroyer screen behind them flung out a storm of supporting fire.

This is gonna get rough real fast...

“Second Squadron, go after the Valkyries!” Tim barked. “See if you can draw off that fighter cover! First and Third with me! Concentrate fire on the capital ships!”

The latter were rushing towards them, even as the Jesters braked down toward 1000 kph—slow enough to bring weapons to bear. The Alliance capitals had come about, braking, too, and presenting broadsides—even in space, firing arcs mattered. The destroyers, two of the Alliance’s ubiquitous Triumph-classes, had swung out wide and ahead of the carrier, the Bellerophon-series. What looked like a heavy cruiser lingered between, the Hellhound war book painting it as a Mythos-class, new, fast, and heavily armed.

Explosions rocked the Hellhound as the last of the Jester missile salvo blew apart, well shy of its targets, and the Valkyries surged through the expanding debris, particle beams afire.

Tim juked to starboard to evade a fighter that veered off just as it looked like it’d dive upon him and tore after a Hellhound from Li’s squadron. For a moment, near space seethed with wheeling ships, swords of coherent light, twisting missile trails, and deceptively lovely flowers of fiery death. But Tim’s speed carried him through the lethal ballet and there were far too many Hellhounds for the outnumbered Alliance craft to chase them all.

“Don’t let them draw you in between!” Tim hollered over the tactical as the icons of the destroyers on the tactical became true visual images dead ahead. He wrenched the stick again to starboard, sliding to one side rather than punching through the overlapping fire of the larger vessels.

One Hellhound got the warning too late and crossed into a tapestry of annihilation woven directly ahead of the destroyers. Shields flashed up through the visible spectrum into sun-bright brilliance that was replaced by an ugly and brief smear of slag-red flame. Further strobes quested across the deflectors of a second Jester, but this one peeled off, chased by waving streaks of energy like searchlights probing a night sky.

A near miss gouged across Tim’s forward shield with a crash of white that slapped the Hellhound’s nose up and scrambled the tactical. When the hologram steadied again, his speed had carried past the destroyers into a fresh vortex of destruction. The heavy cruiser looked like it was exploding. But the scream of targeting and proximity alarms told him what looked like a debris cloud was, instead, the ship unleashing its full anti-ship missile compliment. Two dozen light threads blossoming out confirmed it.

All of them converging on Tim.

“Computer,” he screeched, “point-defense measures!”

Each of the missiles rushing for him gleamed with a targeting halo. Half of these dropped away as the AI took control of the plasma blaster and began jolting out bursts in a frantic, staccato pattern that started claiming warheads immediately. The remaining halos belonged to Tim and the Hellhound’s particle cannon and he crushed the trigger.

Lightning strobes pulsed out and Alliance missiles tumbled apart in antimatter flames. Tim felt a chug-chug as the AI triggered the release of chaff packets, decoy pods that flew apart as they fell away from the Hellhound into dozens of smaller transmitters. No small number of the projectiles snowing Tim’s display lurched pointlessly after these. The rest shattered before Tim’s guns in a final orgy of detonations.

The Hellhound lanced through a cloud of gas and debris cooling in the void to a deep red and came out the other end into a momentary flail of close-range blaster fire. Tim didn’t even have time for a curse as the heavy cruiser whipped by momentarily below him, its conning tower so close and detailed Tim could see the glitter of individual windows. Then they were past it, the ship’s anti-starfighter batteries blazing after it frantically.

And the carrier was right there.

Can’t believe this!

Like its larger Nebula-class cousins, the Bellerophon was an elongated hexagon, bulging to aft with its gravity drive nacelles, hyperdrive package, and command tower. The hexagon split as it ran to the bow, opened up into a long trench housing the launch bays for its starfighter coterie. Also like its bigger kin, it boasted little in the way of offensive heavy weapons, but practically bristled with point-defenses.

These lashed Tim’s shields as he careened for the strike carrier on a course that would trace the launch trench and take him straight over the tower mast. Plasma glanced off his forward deflectors. A direct hit translated through the coherent energy barrier as an uppercut blow that slapped him back into the flight couch and sent the Hellhound wobbling.

Tim clenched the stick till his knuckles creaked, fought the fighter as a series of alarms merged into one squall, announcing target lock. Halos converged on the center of the carrier’s mass. Its bulk screamed towards him, the hologram painting it with such preternatural precision he could see gun turrets pivoted to track him.

“Scatter-packs!” he snarled and pulled the trigger.

A one-two pattern of hits crashed into the ventral shields. Tim’s world vanished for a moment in a din of alarms, shuddering spaceframe, and scrambled holograms. Instinctively, he sawed back on the stick and prayed the Hellhound still had enough speed to carry it free. He thought he smelled smoke. He knew he tasted the blood of his own bitten tongue.

The aft display steadied into a globular to his right. Within it, the carrier’s shields fluttered and energy blasts tore the void around it. But no explosion blossomed, no fireworks tore across its hull as Tim’s course carried him away, left it shrinking into the distance.

The hell...? Tim looked to the weapons system display. The remaining scatter packs remained primed, but unlaunched. “Goddammit, Computer! Why didn’t we fire?”

“Number Four scatter pack is already fired,” the AI replied.

“And we’ve got three more ready to go!”

“You did not specify—”

“We had the bastard right there in front of us!” he shrieked and smote the instrument panel again, this time wincing as the surface did more damage to his fist than vice versa. “Fuck!”

“‘Fuck’ probably isn’t a command in its default actions menu,” Jeanie said from Tim’s wrist comm.

“Oh, I’ll bet it’s fucking not!”

Azure washed across his starboard shield and slapped the Hellhound into a sideways slide. The systems display pulsed red with damage and the tactical warbled a fresh warning, showed an icon blinking on Tim’s tail. He hit the thrusters and banked the opposite direction, sawing so hard on the stick he thought it might snap. The Hellhound groaned as it lurched.

The Valkyrie that’d somehow chased Tim all the way along his strafing run streaked by just overhead. Tim’s desperate course change had cut the Hellhound right back across its path and it had to nose up to avoid him. But the pilot was no novice, wasn’t there when Tim whipped the starfighter back around, hoping to find them there.

The tactical blinked frantically, showed the Valkyrie at a ninety-degree angle above him and beginning to spin on its y-axis. The move brought its weapons around to bear. An instant later, they were scouring space for him.

But it was Tim’s turn not to be there. Wrenching the stick and pulsing the maneuvering fields, he wrestled the Hellhound about in a split-s and kicked the thrusters, shot back the way he’d come. The Valkyrie’s fire slashed apart empty space. Still hurtling away from Tim, the starfighter pivoting, stabbing energy bolts out after him. One sizzled across his port quarter before the pilot gave up and put on a terrific burst of speed that carried it from Tim’s sensors.

Given a moment to check his surroundings, Tim saw what had drawn his pursuer away.

The fight around the carrier and its escorts was ending in fire and disappointment.

Hellhounds sprayed away from the big ships like sea spume off rocks. The combined fire of the four starships turned the vacuum around them into a web of death so dense a Hellhound could slide across it. One Jester did exactly that as Tim watched, skating down along the blue-white shaft of one of the heavy cruiser’s main gun blasts like a wild hog forcing itself up the shaft of the spear that’d killed it. It came apart in an anticlimactic spray of debris that proceeded to rain down on the cruiser’s shields with far more drama—the kinetic energy of the wreckage hammering them in a momentary spasm of flashes.

It was the only damage the Jesters seemed to have done.

“Break off!” Tim commanded hoarsely. “First and Third, break off and regroup on me!”

Most of the two squadrons were already on their way, scattered and still shaking off fire from the capital ships. A pair of Hellhounds continued a long arch away from the rest, trailing the Valkyrie that’d harried Tim until its speed convinced them of the futility. Tim counted three fighters lost and a fourth was signaling heavy damage. On the far side of the Alliance ships, Li’s group was still writhing with dogfights as the survivors of the near space patrol screen continued their vain resistance.

“That could’ve gone better,” Tim growled to himself. He switched on the wing channel. “I’ve got ordnance left. Who’s still carrying?”

More than half the Jesters replied in the affirmative.

Tim eyed the tactical for a moment, watched as the two squadrons of his attack group closed up around him. His gaze went further down the system, back towards Fury, where Red’s fight with the rest of the Valkyries raged in truly savage fury. But the strike group hadn’t gotten any closer to the planet, the battle, in fact, spilling far and wide. Individual fights had unraveled both groups, who now dueled across the better part of a light second.

Kelly’s group could move to join them, now, add a decisive edge.

But the capital ships were still Tim’s problem.

“All right, Jesters,” Tim said into the communicator, “they’ve had their fun. But playtime’s over.” He drew a line across the tactical, his finger leaving a faint trail indicating a course the computer would transmit to the others—he hoped. “Back this way. We’ve peeled off their Valkyrie babysitters. Let’s see how they like it when we mean business!”

Feral growls answered him across the network and he couldn’t help but smile as he veered his Hellhound back towards the Alliance formation.

But a new alarm blatted. The tactical zoomed out to show the wider system and a pointer rushed away from the marble of Fury to the larger ball of its nearest gas giant neighbor. A dust-pattern of icons glittered from its far side.

“What the actual hell, Computer?”

“Contacts,” the AI reported with its maddening lack of inflection. “Multiple gravity dive signatures just past Fury Number Three.”

“Identify!”

A nearly imperceptible pause prefaced the appearance of a familiar delta-shaped schematic in a globular. “Valkyrie AF-1B.”

And Tim’s guts collapsed into cold porridge as he counted them all.

***

RISING INTO POSITION in geosynchronous orbit over the Hole amongst the Hellhounds of her Wing and the mixed group of shuttles of the Assault Wing, Kelly brought up the tactical and scanned the situation. The Jesters’ fortunes swung violently even as she watched.

At first, they seemed to have things well under control. The Academy-trained part of her brain clinically dissected the swirling icons of the fight. Tim’s group had punched through to the carrier and seethed about the capital ships in a rash of fire globes. Red’s group had hung back and caught the carrier’s own strike groups in a running dogfight. They’d stymied the Alliance approach.

But the lie of that analysis was exposed the moment Tim’s voice crackled from her earbud. “Head’s up, all Jesters!” Fear and shock gave his voice a tremor and chilled Kelly as she rarely heard them come out so obviously. “We have a second, large Valkyrie force moving in from the backside of the gas giant!”

“Can confirm,” Kelly’s AI spoke up. A pointer rushed across the tactical as it zoomed out to take in the full system and circled the fresh contacts. It then drew a long, white dotted line back towards Fury, indicated likely approach by the contacts’ current trajectories.

Oh, shit. That’s three—four—squadrons, at least. “Computer,” she started to say, paused to clear the quiver from her voice. “There’s got to be another carrier group! Expand scanning range, maximum boost.”

Seconds passed, left Kelly watching the inexorable creep of the newcomers down the gravity well towards them. In another few minutes, they’d be close enough that they’d arrive in orbit before Tim and Red’s wings could get back—and they’d be doing so with an unfinished fight behind them. Trap, Kelly thought, bait us out away from the planet, then cut across behind us. It’s nothing complex, but it’s effective.

“Scans inconclusive,” the AI told Kelly at last. The pointer hovered over a spot on the gas giant’s far side, barely visible by line of sight. “If they are there, they’re rigged for a silent running. That said, I am picking up enough electronic noise to suggest signals.”

“Ship-to-ship communications,” Kelly guessed. And it didn’t really matter; they were too far away to hit back at and Kelly was about to have a brawl in the front yard, anyway. She keyed up the command channel. “Red, are you seeing this?”

“—kind of busy!” came a shrieked response. Static snowed over anything else she might have said. On the tactical, a blinking icon indicated Red. That icon was weaving in and out of a furious dance of crimson-coded opponents,

Kelly had to fight the urge to follow her progress—or to check on Tim’s. There wasn’t time to coordinate more with the others. She had to react.

“Okay, my guys,” she called, keying up her own Wing’s channel, “looks like we’ve got a new party to go to.” She touched the tactical at the point of the approaching Valkyries—the AI would transmit to the others. “We’ve got to stop these punks from pasting Fury. First and Second Squadrons, I know you’re already wrung out, but who’s still carrying scatter-packs?”

About half her pilots responded with some leftovers, of varying quantities. She had one left, herself, but scowled at the rest. The Valkyries would be coming on with full missiles loads, would simply drown them in an opening salvo. Third Squadron was fully-loaded, though. And the Assault Wing...

“All right,” she resumed, “here’s what we’re going to do. Third has the lead. When we reach extreme weapons range, I want full release, fire all scatter-packs, targeted to nullify enemy missiles. These Valkyrie jocks think they’ll just run over us, but we’re going to stop ‘em cold.”

“Going to the rat-race, eh, Commander?” Matyszak said through the chorus of hungry growls across the tactical network from the others.

“No choice,” she replied. She switched channels. “Assault Wing, this is Harrison One. I’m taking local command, here. Follow on the coordinates I will indicate. You will provide point-defense support. Understood?” Icons blinked back in the affirmative. She touched one of them, opening a private channel. “You get what we need, Jerry?”

A globular popped out to show his sweating, brown face, nevertheless crinkled with some vague amusement. “Yeah, I’m taking care of you again!” There was no anger behind it—though perhaps a touch of resignation. But it was true. He’d done so a lot, her surrogate father of sorts. And just seeing his smile, knowing he’d be back there, made what she was about to order them all to do a little less hard.

“Yeah, you are,” she admitted. “Those Basilisks are kitted-out for anti-starfighter work. You can keep the Valkyries from snuffing us out with missiles and then tear their faces off when they think they can punch through to Fury.” She stared into the hologram, as though doing so would stiffen his will. “You can keep the Hellhounds alive through the first exchange, so we can even the odds.”

He flashed a smile back. “Like I said, taking care of you!”

Apparently, the former-hauler pilot needed no stiffening. “Thanks, Jerry.”

“Always.”

She flipped channels back to the wing general address. “All right, gang! You’ve got the course. Hellhounds, don’t let yourselves get strung out too far ahead of the Basilisks.”

“That’s like dragging along a ball-and-chain!” Matyszak protested. Multiple voices squawked in agreement. The Hellhounds had twice the raw speed of the lumbering assault shuttles.

“Wait till we’re through the first exchange!” Kelly spoke over him—swearing that, if she got through the next half hour alive, she’d have a real word with her Second Squadron leader. Guy was good, and the Jesters still weren’t some spit-and-polish regular unit. But, damn, we can’t have these never-ending snipes going on! “Then we jump on the bastards!”

Grumbled agreement answered her across the network.

Kelly nosed her Hellhound away from Fury, momentarily dizzied by the weird tilt of its horizon and then its sweep out of sight. The starfighter began to thrum as she poured on the power to the thrusters. A glance at the tactical showed her wing following suit. Her eyes went to the horde of Alliance starfighters charging for them and she struggled to contain the jabbering voices of fear clamored to burst loose from the backside of her brain.

They’d be outnumbered nearly two-to-one, her depleted thirty-five Hellhounds against what was looking like north of sixty Valkyries, coming on hot and fully-loaded. She’d have the Basilisks, sure. But after the first scramble of the fight, they’d be on their own like big, fat pigeons in a swarm of rocket-driven hawks—albeit, heavily-armed pigeons.

Can’t worry over it. It’s the best we can do.

For a moment, she let herself shrivel inside, weep silently over the fact that she’d probably never see Tim again in this world...or Jerry, or Cory, or any of them.

Then she clenched her teeth and the control stick and prepared to go to work.

***

“IS SHE SERIOUS?” JOSIE called up the chute from the tail gunner’s pod.

“Yeah.” Jerry blew out a steadying breath before continuing. “Having second thoughts about coming along?”

She snorted. “Not on your life, hotshot!”

He chuckled back, hoped it didn’t sound as forced as it was. Looking at the wave of Valkyries, washing towards them and beginning to sort themselves out into distinct, arrowhead formations, it was hard not to piss himself right then and there. He fed the Hog power to the thrusters and turned the heavy starfighter into a course following the Hellhounds out.

In the tactical, the Basilisks lumbered after him. It was hard not to imagine a grudging, boot-dragging pace to their response. One of their icons blinked and he recognized it as coming from the senior among the shuttle pilots.

“Keep it short, Wu,” he said into the communicator.

A globular popped into being before him, contained a round, puckered female face. “Is she fucking serious?”

Jerry tried to ignore Josie’s snicker from aft. “She sounded serious, didn’t she?”

“The Hellhounds usually cover our asses, not the other way around,” Wu snapped. “We’re going to be sitting ducks after they break off to dogfight!”

“You got a better idea?” Jery growled back. He suddenly missed old Solito, the shuttles’ former lead pilot, a hard-drinking, hard-fighting sort who met hell with a smile and a breezy attitude. He’d met death, along with most of the Assault Group’s older, steadier hands outside Loudon. They’d been replaced with wrung-out survivors, like Wu, and newbies whose only experience had been this crazy run into Fury.

“We never switched out for a heavier payload,” Wu was still complaining—which had always been a favorite hobby of hers. “We got nothing long-ranged, just knife-fighting stuff, blasters and gauss guns!”

“We stick together, then,” he spat back. This was bad, even for Wu. Couldn’t have her spooking anyone else with this. “Interlock your targeting computers. Overlap your firing arcs. If the Valkyries think they’re going to dive into that without getting a hole burned in ‘em, they’re in for a rude shock!”

“We always get the shit jobs!”

“Shit jobs are Assault Group’s specialty, or didn’t anyone tell you?” He glared at the hologram. “Are we having a problem, here, Wu?”

She glared back. A single drop of sweat slid down the side of her helmet-framed face. “Not from me,” she grated. “Just don’t go running off on us.”

He cackled without humor. “When have you ever seen the Hog run anywhere?”

Wu’s globular flicked out of existence, left Jerry staring into the tactical again, and at a storm of Valkyries spreading out before them. He ignored the latter, concentrated on the Hellhounds, spreading out before the Basilisks into a trio of diamond formations. The shuttles assumed a line behind these, nine abreast, with the Hog a tenth icon at the middle. He gave the thrusters a little more power, edged out slightly in advance—an example, if not much of one.

“Hey, Josie.”

“Hey what?”

“I know you’re checked-out on whole arsenals I don’t know about, but...” Jerry trailed off, not certain he wanted to tweak her pride.

“Go on, Jerry. I’m listening.”

“If something’s gotten into our rear arc, self-control isn’t a virtue,” he said. “Forget short bursts; hose the hell out of whatever’s there and keep firing till they’re gone. If you melt down a blaster, then so be it.”

“You got it, pal.”

Thousands of kilometers tore by a minute as an awkward silence filled the Hog. Jerry was surprised. Cory got like that, with a fight coming on, settling into herself with the fear. Jerry certainly did. But he’d expected Wheeler’s hard-nosed humor and chatter, not the steely, mute reserve now clenching about her, broken by an occasional hum of the tail-gunner pod’s gimbals as she made some adjustment.

An alarm blatted to indicated extreme weapons range and hostile targeting. Jerry twitched, was glad Wheeler couldn’t see him. He rubbed sweat from his eyes with the back of an arm. As soon as he drew it away, two thirds of the Valkyrie icons sprouted into long white stems of missiles trails. These, in turn, began splintering into separate branches as Alliance AI’s selected targets and the missiles clusters split up after them.

Jerry whistled. “Really rolling out the welcome mat for us.”

“Just tell me where they are,” Josie growled back through audibly gritting teeth. Jerry had to wonder if she’d begun regretting her decision.

The Hellhounds spewed their missiles and Jerry watched them march out ahead of the Jester formation. He knew the speeds were insane, enough to pulp an organic being, even with inertial dampeners. But with the distances involved it always looked like a slow walk into annihilation.

A second salvo sprang from the Valkyries and the wisdom of Kelly’s plan became clear. A moment later, blips from the first volley began winking out of existence as the Hellhounds opened fire, AI-guided plasma blasts picking them apart. Flashes here and there swelled suddenly into a froth of hell-globes bulging all across the hologram. This, in turn, flared into a wall of fire as the first of the opposing missiles reached each other and collided.

“Computer,” Jerry said, forcing his voice to remain even, “target missiles, all energy weapons. Fire!”

The Hog shivered as the wingtip-mounted particle cannon went to work in tandem with its triple nose- and wing-mounted plasma blasters. The void, itself, almost seemed to shudder as the Basilisks opened fire all at once, joining their webs of flame to Jerry’s. The lethal strands lashed out ahead of the Hellhounds, interweaving with their own probing fire.

Missiles that got through the first counter-volley met this newest wave of destruction and simply ceased to be. The white tails of their paths on the tactical ended almost altogether, as though slamming into a wall, the antimatter glare of their simultaneous demises lit up space like an artificial dawn.

Sweat traced an acidy stream into the corner of Jerry’s right eye. He blinked it away as the Hellhounds rushed toward the roiling stormfront of superheated gases, his Hog and the Basilisks right on their tails. He knew what they’d find on the other side, felt muscles he didn’t know he had clenching.

“Computer,” he said hoarsely, and flicked the weapons switch to missiles, “Numbers One through Four scatter-packs; set to independent tracking. Target Valkyries only.”

“Acknowledged,” the Hog AI replied in its monotone—like Kelly, he didn’t like personalizing the program, preferred to keep it just a machine to him. He’s seen too much of Cory’s weirdness to be comfortable otherwise.

The Hellhounds dove into the settling flames of the dying missile salvo, were lost for a moment. The Hog hit it a moment later, rattled like a snare drum. The tactical snowed over as blazing, wild energy clouded the sensors and the shield glowed to ward it off, keep it from cooking the Hog and its occupants.

Then they were through.

And diving, blazing delta shapes were everywhere.

No less than a half a dozen Valkyries’ fire converged on the Basilisk to port of the Hog. Shields whitened, flashed, and blew out. But the assault shuttle somehow coasted through it, trailing sparks and debris, but intact.

Jerry jerked the trigger and felt another rattle go through the Hog as twenty-four antimatter missiles belching from four of its hardpoints. The heavy starfighter was momentarily at the center of an insane tangle of phosphorescent trails as its payload looped out after prey. One of these speared straight ahead, found its target, and splattered across an attacker’s shields in a yellow-white half-sphere of annihilation.

The cheer of triumph Jerry had half-unleashed cut out as the Valkyrie emerged from the blast, shields fluttering, but very much alive and spewing hellfire. His voice twisting into a screech, Jerry wrenched the stick to starboard and felt it to his bones as the Alliance starfighter ripped by to port.

“There!” Josie hollered, and the shuddered buzzsaw sensation of the quad-blasters cutting loose to aft filled the Hog. Cyan brilliance washed across space to aft. “Got ‘im! I—ah, shit!”

Jerry knew what’d happened, even before the first particle beam kidney-punched the Hog in the rear shield bank and the resulting shock translated as a kick that flung him forth into his restraints. Instinctively, he sawed back on the stick and flooded the thrusters with power. The Alliance pilot had shot by into a turn-and-burn, spinning like a plate on its y-axis to bring its forward weapons arc to bear.

This same maneuver allowed them to follow Jerry’s climb at a ninety-degree angle, particle beams licking ever-closer to his tail. But Jerry had seen this before, and knew what the Hog could do, and pulsed the maneuvering fields to flip it over, facing the Valkyrie “upside-down”.

With all his own frontal weapons to bear.

Jerry flipped the weapons selector and pulled the trigger in one motion. Space between the Hog and the Valkyrie fluoresced with dueling lances of azure and cyan. A bolt splatted off the front-port shield. A second slammed dead-on, so hard Jerry heard something shake loose, heard Josie squeal in fright.

But white fire dazzled across the Valkyrie, betrayed shield failure. With a blur, the Alliance pilot broke off, jolting into a power climb that shot it past Jerry and out of range of his sensors. He searched for it vainly for a moment, then gave it up.

There was plenty else to worry about.

Space all around flared with the most terrifyingly insane rat-race Jerry had ever seen. The Hellhound and Valkyrie formations had shattered upon one another and whirled out in a shrapnel spray of rapidly-separating dogfights. Machines wheeled and dodged, stabbing the vacuum in frantic pulses of coherent, killer light. Missiles blossomed and twined, some blown apart barely clear of their launchers, others twining out against the starscape in long, lonely pursuits. Death pinwheeled all around. Destruction lunged in from every angle.

Through it all coasted the line of Basilisks, chopping the dark around them with a seizure-inducing pattern of point-defense fire. The battle swirled about them, pilots clearly warry of piercing their briar patch of destruction. They became like a bone, lodged in the throat of the whole fight, and Hellhound jocks began drawing their duels back towards them, where their supporting fire could claw the Valkyries apart.

A pair of Valkyries made a play to cut through them, cut them apart, and met the inevitable crossfire. The first veered off with direct hits battering its ventral deflectors in a heat-lighting flutter. The second met its doom as shields flared out and a hundred plasma bolts chewed its hull into a riddled, fiery ruin.

But luck wasn’t with every Jester, and ran out for the Basilisk stripped of its shields in the first exchange. Azure beams punched through its naked full, split its boxy hull like an eggshell. An ugly orange flood of fire and shrapnel filled the void, while screams crackled across the tactical network for a hideous half-a-second.

Perhaps sensing the vulnerability of the Basilisk formation, now, a trio of Valkyries cut far below them and wrenched up into a climb for their bellies. The obviousness of the disemboweling maneuver was demonstrating a moment later as all three triggered missile salvos at what were ridiculous short-ranged and raced up behind them. Basilisk fire slashed out, peeling apart the volley, but little of it touching the fighters.

Ah, crap. Jerry nosed the Hog over into a dive that would take him through the Basilisks in the opposite direction, straight into the Valkyries. “Hang on, Josie!” he called, then keyed up the computer. “Prime chaff and jamming pods. Prepare to release.”

“Which pods?” the AI asked.

“All of them.” Jerry flicked the weapons selector back to missiles. “Numbers Five and Six scatter-packs, ready.” His voice ratcheted up to a near squeak as the Hog shook with acceleration and the Basilisks rushed up to meet them. “Set independent tracking!”

“All set,” the machined replied.

Blisters of antimatter white burst all around the Basilisks, followed by the stab-stab of particle beams. Ventral shields flared as energy bolts struck targets. The assault shuttles throbbed at the eyes of individual firestorms of point-defense weaponry.

The Hog screamed straight down through them.

“Release chaff!” Jerry shrieked and simultaneously pulled the trigger while targeting and proximity alarms wailed around him.

For an endless moment, the whole Hog shivered as though it was coming apart. And to the outside observer, it might very well look like it was. Jamming pods coughed loose from their lower aft compartments in sprays of false debris and the scatter-packs ripple-fired their loads in a fuming knot of missiles trails. Out of that, the heavy starfighter tumbled, sent by the forces shaking it into a crazy spin.

Everything dissolved in fire and ravening streaks of energy. The Hog jolted once, again, as it dove through a fireball that might have been one of the Valkryies exploding. Shields flamed, blinded, and then blanked the forward screens. Another crack shook the Hog and red warning lights blinked, warned of a shield generator coil failure.

Then space opened out before them, the faint sparkle of stars the best, most unexpected thing Jerry had ever seen.

In the tactical, half the remaining Valkyrie-fired missiles wheeled after the chaff packs, most exploding vainly upon targets that were merely false transponder signals. The other half, however, curved through sharp turns to pursue the very real glare of the Hog’s engines.

The tail-gun snarled. “Here they come!” Josie howled. A missile puffed away in white fire. “Got one!”

“Long bursts!” Jerry barked. “Remember long bursts, dammit! Don’t stop firing till they all flame out!”

He flung the Hog into a bank to port as the warheads closed it. Two more blasted from existence as Josie sawed her fire into their paths. But a third side-slipped the firehose stream of her plasma bolts and rushed closer.

And shattered, less than a hundred meters off the Hog’s tail, pulverized by a torrent of particle beams.

Proximity alarms screamed and a Valkyrie hung right in front of them. “Shee-it!” Jerry veered to starboard hard, let the fighter rip by, just off his port wingtip. He blinked, wasn’t sure—but it looked like the Valkyrie had inadvertently shot the missile off their tail in its frenzy to hit them.

“Now you’re mine!” Josie cheered and walked her fire across the starfighter as it zipped by and banked. Its aft shields lit up like a bonfire.

“Hold your fire!” a new voice squawked over the tactical. “Jester pilot, hold your fire! We’re friendly! Check our transponders! We’re friendly!!!”

“What...?”

A battle already gone chaotic seized with absolute anarchy as fresh Valkyries streaked into its midst. And Jerry saw it, now, not just the differently-attuned transponder signatures—blinking white, as opposed to hostile crimson—but blue-gray trim on battle-scarred wings. Josie’s fire cut out with a yelp as the “friendly” pivoted away and instantly into a slashing attack on one of the Alliance fighters. The hell garden of explosions spread.

“Computer,” Jerry grunted, “confirm new signals!”

“Already confirmed from war book records,” the AI replied.

“Then lock all weapons targeting from those signatures, dammit!” He keyed up the Assault Group frequency. “They’re friendlies, everyone! Watch it!”

“Where the hell did they come from?” Josie growled from aft.

The fighting spasmed far and wide in seconds, the newcomers’ arrival scattering the Alliance attackers like embers stirred from a bonfire by a wind gust. Maniacal three-way duels whirled out from the shuttle group in lethal pinwheels, spoked with cyan flame. Fresh missiles salvos arched out into octopoid patterns, the tendrils blooming at their ends where antimatter ate shields and blastisteel plate. Death dealt out by Alliance pilots suddenly became death received as the balance of war wobbled crushingly against them.

“I don’t know,” Jery finally managed, “but I sure as hell ain’t complaining!”

***

IT WAS A TRUISM SO often repeated and so often demonstrated as to be reflexive:  no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy. But in the void between the worlds of the Fury System, it was beginning to look very much like Harrison’s might.

Drawn out to the bait of Nagumo’s task force, the Jesters had met his fighter groups, punched through, and strafed into his capital ships, becoming thoroughly embroiled. Harrison could tell it was tough going for the Palomino Force. From frantic communications warbling across the distances to hiss from the communications station, it was obvious losses amongst the fighter groups were mounting. And the heavy ships, while still undamaged, were enduring substantial torment.

And to his growing surprise—and tightness building in his bowels—Harrison realized the Jesters might actually be able to take Nagumo’s group apart, in their savagery.

But the appearance of Caldicott’s strike group from beyond the gas giant had upended events as abruptly as if a switch had been thrown. The Jesters’ reserve groups, lingering behind in Fury orbit, peeled away from the world at its appearance, scrambling to reform and meet it. With what looked like Caldicott’s entire offensive force bearing down on them, they were badly outnumbered and—numbering those lumbering assault shuttles amongst them—hopelessly outclassed.

“And now they see it,” Omura murmured from the shadowy back corner of the bridge. Stepping past the tactical station to come to stand at Harrison’s left, the Intelligence officer pointed at the hologram. “The trap is fully sprung.”

The Hellhound squadrons that had scattered Nagumo’s near space combat patrol and swirled about his heavy ships were wheeling away, chased by spiteful flecks of fire and still-eddying dogfights that petered out as the Jesters put on tremendous bursts of speed. Their course became apparent as taking them back to help the now-desperate reserves closer to Fury. No help would be joining them from the first group, still battling Nagumo’s main fighter strike.

“The time of choices is past now,” Omura said with a sparkle to his eyes. “And they’ve made all the wrong ones.”

Harrison hid a scowl at the man’s triumphalist tone. The job wasn’t done yet—not even close. But the enthusiasm was nearly palpable in the air, the bridge crew’s voices going high, almost light as they exchanged reports. Even Walsh’s normally dour expression looked momentarily less severe as he saw to the flagship’s functions.

Not that any of them had much to do. They were just sitting there, hidden by distance, by their own silence.

“Perhaps our time has come, Admiral?” Omura asked. The details of the plan had been partially his, of course, though the decisions were ultimately Harrison’s.

Noting a glance from Walsh, the hungry smiles of Woodruf and the bridge crew, Harrison considered the hologram again, eyed their own force. He had the Nebula-class carrier, Cygnus, and two light carriers—five starfighter squadrons, in all. Partnered with those, he had the battlecruiser squadron, led by his own Obliterator, an assortment of cruisers of varying tonnages, and the picket screen of destroyers and corvettes. It was a powerful force, one that could slag every meter of surface area on Fury—or stand off against a full Union fleet.

Just sitting here...

He started to answer in the affirmative when a mumble of surprise came from the officer at the tactical station. Woodruf stepped over to his side and leaned in, features crinkling in confusion as she scanned his readouts. “Admiral Caldicott is on the move.”

A ping from the huge globular confirmed it. Within the hologram the icons of Task Force Desolation blinked as gravity drives lit and began propelling its vessels out from the shadow of the gas giant, into the open. A shimmer of smaller contacts looked to be rushing down-system, into the fighting closer to Fury.

“She’s moving to join the attack?” Frowning, Harrison turned to Woodruf and the tactical officer. “She’s committed the rest of her starfighters?” A glance back at the tactical showed him the Hellhounds that’d broken off from Nagumo, racing back to the scrap around the planet. A slight change of course would lead them straight to Caldicott—who’d apparently just stripped herself of fighter cover.

“The plan is entering its final phase,” Omura said. “Perhaps we can break ether-tenna silence to clarify her intentions?”

Harrison shook his head vaguely, as though trying to clear a haze from his eyes. In the globular, icons raced and flashed with increasing intensity. A trickle of icy awareness began to fill him. Caldicott didn’t look like she was advancing. She looked like she was running.

“Admiral!” the tech at the communications station yelped. “Distress call from Desolation, from the Imperator!”

Harrison grunted as though gut-struck. That was Caldicott’s flag, her heavy carrier. “What are they saying?”

“It’s very confused, sir.” The comm tech listened to her earbud for a moment, then pivoted back to her station, read from a holoscreen. “They’re under attack!”

“Maybe some of those Hellhounds broke through?” Omura hazarded.

“It doesn’t sound like it, sir,” the tech replied. “It seems to be a fresh strike. They’re calling for help on the general frequency, and to Admiral Nagumo, directly.”

Flashes on the tactical display betrayed explosions and blaster fire amongst the starships of Desolation. At the vast distance, and with passive sensors only—even ones as sophisticated as Obliterator’s—it was hard to piece together any meaning, save chaos.

“Admiral,” Captain Walsh said, half-pivoting to face him, “perhaps we should risk active long-range sensor scan?”

Harrison shook his head again, with anger now. He turned to the comm tech, again. Woodruf had scrambled to her side, was reading instruments over her shoulder. “Damn it, what are they saying out there?”

“Definitely a different attack force,” Woodruf answered on the tech’s behalf. She hissed. “Comm discipline has completely broken down. Everyone’s talking at once!” She leaned over the tech so far, the younger woman was actually pushed back from her own station as the Commander manipulated a control. “Imperator’s been hit! Minor damage...sounds like a starfighter sortie.” She flinched and stood back from the station, turned to Harrison with features gone pale. “Admiral, some of them are saying the attackers are Valkyries.”

The temperature on the bridge seemed to fall ten degrees.

Harrison blinked, looked away from Woodruf, back to the tactical. Holograms writhed and fluttered. Caldicott was running, was putting on speed to try and shake off the attack, but also get closer to her own fighters. Even now, some of the latter were pulling away from the brawl closer to Fury to help.

But Valkyries...? Rebel—traitor—Valkyries could only have come from one place. “Greer...” Harrison clenched his fists and stared into the emptiness of space in hologram, searching. “The bastard’s here.”

“How can that be?” Omura asked. “We know the Concordia was at least crippled at Bolingbroke!”

“They managed to repair her?” Harrison scowled. “I don’t know, Terry, but her brood appears to be here!” Narrowing eyes scrawled across the vastness of the Fury System, straining for any sense of his hated rival. “We have to find out where they came from!”

“Savo’s been hit!” Woodruf announced from the comm station. “They’re on fire, sir!”

The machine-like efficiency of the bridge seemed to seize up all at once, voices babbling, figures in motion. The tactical mirrored the convulsion, icons slashing this way and that. All around Fury, three separate fights raged and nothing made sense.

But it did. Harrison unclenched his fists and took a deep breath, crossed his arms before his chest. This was why he’d held his main force in reserve, in silence. The trap hadn’t just been for the Jesters.

“Admiral,” Walsh asked, loudly enough that the crew stilled somewhat, “orders, sir?”

“Signal the Cygnus. She is to detach from our main group with the Sprinter” one of the light carriers “and their attendant escorts and move to Caldicott’s aid. And tell them to launch all fighters immediately!”

“Aye, sir,” the communications tech said from her station.

“And the rest of the task force, sir?” Walsh asked.

“Hold current position,” Harrison replied with his chilliest voice, intending to silence any of the protests his subordinates might harbor. “Continue to monitor, passive sensors only.”

No one replied, other than in the affirmative, but Harrison could clearly sense their discontent. They were a good crew, and fighters. But they didn’t have responsibility for the larger picture.

Omura half-turned to him and pitched his voice low. “More bait?”

“Caldicott’s the bait now,” Harrison whispered in reply. “Cygnus’ attack group should be enough to chase off her attackers. But, more importantly, they’ll be able to follow them back to their own source.”

He looked Omura in the eye. “We’ve got to find Greer.”

***

TIM HELD THE WRIST comm up to his face again, “Jeanie, how are we doing?”

“The Hellhound CPU has accepted my key,” the AI replied. “I should have command line access in a moment. From there, I can resume control.” A pause. “It’s the strangest sensation, Tim. This must be how Little Bear felt, finding Goldilocks in his bed.”

“The hell are you talking about?”

“Goldilocks? The fairy tale?” The AI improvised an incredulous snort. “Really, it’s amazing you’re literate, at all!”

“Just get back in the machine, already!” he snarled. “I need you!”

“A few more seconds...”

“You sort yourself out, yet, Watkins?” Li’s voice called from the Hellhound communicator.

Tim glanced at the tactical display. His wing was reuniting around him as he raced back for Fury. Second Squadron was still sprinting to catch up to the other two, Li’s Hellhound blinking from its place in the lead. A pair of Valkyries—survivors from the carrier group’s near space combat patrol—lingered on their tails for a moment, before breaking off.

“I’ll be tip-top in a moment,” he replied. “But what the hell is going on over Fury?”

Kelly’s fight was a bedlam of formations coming together, splintering, and flying apart. The battle seemed to have run in reverse across space, like a lit fuse burning its way back to a bomb. That bomb was exploding now as the fighting reached the source, the newly-appeared carrier group sliding free of the outer orbits of the gas giant and working its way down-system to Fury. Tim couldn’t be sure, but it looked like something was attacking the Alliance from behind.

“We have new contacts!” Jeanie’s voice suddenly said from around him, not just from the wrist piece. For a moment, instruments and holograms blinked and scrambled. Then the globulars reoriented themselves around Tim’s head and the familiar arrangement he and Jeanie favored in tandem solidified.

One of those globulars blinked with a war book schematic matching that of a Valkyrie, yet somehow different, and with a blinking white light at its core. “They’re Union! Transponders match up!”

“I’ll be a son of a...” Tim shook his head. “Where did they come from?”

“Friendlies...” a familiar voice broke through the static of the tactical network. Tim nearly jumped as he recognized it as Kelly’s. “Watch your fire! Some of the hostiles are breaking off! They’re running!”

“Prior trajectories suggest the Union fighters came from below the ecliptic plane, to galactic north,” Jeanie said. A globular divided off to show a local map and white dotted lines tracing back to a point just “behind” and “below” the second Alliance carrier group’s position. Separated by barely a million kilometers, it was remarkable Union and Alliance forces hadn’t already collided.

But Tim’s mind was still on that voice, snarling through static. His guts twisted. For a thundering stretch of heartbeats, Kelly was the only thing he really saw.

“Tim,” Jeanie’s voice broke through his fugue in that snappish, impatient note that reminded him way too much of the AI’s namesake. “The second Alliance carrier group is running away from these attack waves.” The globular blinked to show likely courses. “And they’re running towards us!”

Tim gave himself a shake. The second group was twice the size of the first, a heavy carrier and two lights, by the grav drive signatures, but unlike the first, screened only by light cruisers and destroyer escorts. These painted the void around the carriers in hellfire that, nevertheless, couldn’t fend off the Union vultures sweeping recklessly through their midst. Globes of yellow-white annihilation sprouted across fluttering shields. At least one bloom of deeper orange-red spoke of a deadlier hit and one of the destroyers shivered out of formation, bleeding air and trails of flame.

“Tim!” A globular materialized with Li at its heart. The squad leader was grinning like a starved wolf sighting a blood trail. “If we put on enough speed, we could reach that carrier group before its own fighters can get back to it!”

“My calculations confirm that assumption,” Jeanie piped up.

Another explosion lit the heart of the fleeing Alliance task force, mushrooming out from one of the light carriers. As with the stricken destroyer escort, it instantly began to lose ground on the rest of its peers. The darting specks of Union Valkyries looped back on it and the vacuum rived with their spears of white-hot death. A second and then third—monstrous—blast shook the wounded ship, sent debris spiraling out from it in clouds of deceptive beauty that faded as slag cooled in the endless, frozen dark. Jeanie’s sensors detected no sunburst flash of a reactor breach, but the ship began a slow tumble amidst a spreading hemorrhage of fire and the leaking air that fueled it.

“Can you see it?” Li was nearly shaking in the globular.

“I can.”

And Tim could. The Nebula-class was piling on the speed, outpacing wounded consorts as Union Valkyries slowed the chase to pick them apart. She’d be isolated, stripped of fighter cover and her escort screen strewn out.

But the tactical pinged with warnings and fresh contacts appeared from the periphery of the system, yet another force, smaller, but moving down the gravity well at them with fresh starfighters launching. The first carrier group, centered around the Bellerophon, was falling back towards these. That the second group was making a break for them seemed clear, as well. United, they’d be far too much for the already well-used Jesters to handle, at least out away from Fury and its ground-based defenses.

And the tactical network squalled with that familiar voice again, “—still under heavy pressure!” Kelly sounded near-frantic, which meant things had already gone far past desperate. “Basilisks are in trouble!”

“We’re too far!” another voice crackled back through interference. A globular struggled to materialize in Tim’s cockpit, Red visible through a snowstorm of static before the hologram failed, left only audio. “Can anyone help?”

“Tim,” Li urged. “Tim, we can take them! Another carrier!”

And at the same time, in taking them, he might be abandoning Jesters to destruction. Kelly. The name lodged in him like a spear between the ribs. But it was more than her, wasn’t it? It had to be.

Muting the channel with Li, Tim asked, “Jeanie, you got yourself fully-sorted out now?”

“I have control of the Hellhound systems, once more.”

“That’s a little evasive.”

“No evasion, Tim. There’s corruption to the quantum core memory again—looks like whole blocks of code missing, too. So, when I say I’ve got control of the ship, that’s what I’m sure of.”

“Great,” he grumbled and paused before his next question. “Can you give me a risk-reward analysis for carrier strike versus reinforcement of Fury?”

“Stochastic analysis will be limited under current conditions.”

“Best guess, lady.”

A long pause. Then, “I don’t have enough data for a reasonable answer. Damage to the carrier forces will weaken the Alliance’s ability to field further starfighter attacks in this system. But they may have more we haven’t seen. Conversely, further Jester losses will weaken our ability to resist them.”

Tim blew out a breath. “So, you’re saying fifty-fifty?”

“I’m saying this may be one of the rare times when human judgement is superior to an artificial one.”

“Bet that hurt to admit.”

“I regret it already.”

Tim snorted.

“You have, perhaps, another hundred-and-eighty seconds to decide.” Jeanie highlighted two separate courses on the tactical, and the wing’s relative position to the point where they diverged from one another.

Tim stared at the frantic churn of icons in the globular. He knew which way he wanted to go. But it couldn’t be personal. It had to be right.

Li was visibly squirming in his hologram. Tim keyed the channel back to audible. “We’re going back to Fury.”

“What?” the other Jester snapped. “You can’t be serious!”

“Defense of the planet is our main job, here,” Tim replied. “Can’t lose sight of that!”

“We protect Fury by killing more Alliance!” Li trembled, eyes glazed with rage, sweat glistening off his pale features. “Damn it, Watkins, look at all those fat targets!”

“It’s my call.”

Li started to say something, but cut himself off. “Oh, I’ll bet it is!” he seethed quietly. “And I bet I know why!”

Tim had his mouth open to retort, but Li’s globular had already winked out of the air. He clenched his teeth, tried to ignore the churn of his gut, the acidy taste on the back of his palate. Clearing his throat, he keyed the general wing channel. “Watkins Wing, listen up! Set course back for Fury, best possible speed. Our people need help!”

He killed the channel, even as the icons of his Hellhounds blinked with incoming messages—acknowledgements or protests, he wasn’t going to check to be sure. He’d made the call. And, obediently—perhaps grudgingly—the wing lurched after him, back towards the fighting around the planet.

It was his call, he told himself.

***

THAT STONE-COLD KILLER was back, the same one.

Kelly knew it was him when the lone Valkyrie slashed back towards the Assault Shuttle group, even as its comrades scattered before the arrival of fresh Hellhounds. She saw the same murderous precision as it punched through the heart of their formation, bursting a Basilisk like a balloon stuffed full of napalm, flaming a Hellhound that tried to dive to the rescue.

She felt the same inexplicable dread as she goosed the thrusters and shot after him—even as she somehow knew the pilot must be a him.

He noted her pursuit and put on a burst of speed, arching down towards Fury. The battle had spilled back into its far orbits and the curve of its horizon flattened as Kelly’s chase increased in speed. Targeting icons lurched to keep up with the racing Valkyrie, never quite settling on its juking, swerving course, always lagging. Kelly fed more power to the engines, clenched her teeth to try to close the gap.

They were in the outer film of Fury’s exosphere, weaving through a faint nimbus of auroras, jarring beauty backgrounding their desperate, deadly game. Gravity was taking a greater toll on both, dragging them, bleeding off speed. The killer had erred, had given her a change to corner him.

The blat of a targeting alarm told her this had been his plan all along. Reflexively, she slammed the maneuvering fields to brake, at the same time wrenching back on the stick. Guts lurched forward within her, restraint straps biting into her shoulders as she hurtled forward with them. But the Hellhound nosed up and seemed to fling backwards in space.

Riving particle beams chopped through the hazy space she’d occupied as a second Valkyrie, drawn into their chase, strafed after her. But the violence of her reversal left it diving past her, suddenly so close she could see the seams between belly plates, the wear on gravity drive nacelles. Kelly lost track of the first fighter, but releasing the inversion of her maneuvering fields and kicking the thrusters again, she was right on this one’s ass.

The second Alliance pilot wobbled to shake her, banked starboard, lunged back to port. But the targeting icons settled on its silhouette, crimsoned with lock. Kelly flicked the weapons select to dual position and unleashed with the Hellhound’s full energy arsenal, plasma blaster and particle cannon blowtorching across the Valkyrie’s aft shields.

These died with a white flash, followed almost instantly by an orange-red bloom. Slag leapt out at Kelly, speckled off her own shields. Then flaps of shredding hull were wheeling back towards her and she cursed at her own error. Too damned close! Banking to starboard, Fury tilted before her, as did the fireball of the tumbling Valkyrie. A hunk of wing sent her into a reverse bank to port, the wreckage glancing off her ventral shield with an uppercut concussion that momentarily dazzled her display. Then she was clawing for open space again with her mortally wounded opponent falling away in a column of smoke and debris and—

—a Valkyrie screamed out of the stars above her, hurling lances of azure fire.

Shit!!!

A beam connected with her dorsal shields with a wham-CRASH that flung the Hellhound nose-down for the planet. The same impact whipsawed her back into the flight couch, helmet glancing off something and stars dashed across her vision. Her stomach twisted and pulse roared as the inertial compensator fluttered momentarily and left her at the mercy of the horrific forces of physics. Control came back a second later, but not body control, and she wretched convulsively.

She was falling, the Hellhound twining down into Fury’s upper atmosphere. Alarms clamored for her attention. Links blinked their red warnings. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw sparks and debris winding in a cloud around her—realized with a jolt they were pieces of her starfighter. Blades of blue-white chopped through this, down past her, but strobing closer.

Closer.

Ignoring the tackiness of emptied stomach matter on the control stick, Kelly wrenched it to starboard, at the same moment kicking power to the thrusters. The Hellound, a moment before in a flat spin, shot out at a right angle, narrowly dodging shafts of killer light. The Valkyrie streaked down after them, but was already sliding into a crazy half-turn, half-tumble.

“Primary shield generator destroyed!” the AI told her with tightness that mirrored her own state of mind. “Attempting to compensate with secondary coil.”

Climbing away from Fury on a column of polarized gravity, Kelly had an instant to marvel at the utter cold-bloodedness of her pursuer. He’d let his wing mate sacrifice himself, all to set him up for that last strafing pass.

And the bastard was still back there.

A near-miss slapped across the port wing, flinging the Hellhound into a pinwheel. Rather than fight it, Kelly let the fighter spin while pouring on the power to the engines and her aft deflectors. Her erratic course left the questing bolts of her foe clawing nothingness, while he continued his backwards plunge towards Fury, atmospheric friction beginning to warm his shields. A jolt from his grav drives halted this. A moment later, missile trails blossomed from under a wing.

Hostile targeting alarms warbled in Kelly’s ears as her fighter fought to shed the last of Fury’s gravity. The missiles scrawled after her, their independent tracking AI’s undeterred by her wild escape course. And with their power sources dedicated solely to engines and raw speed, rather than starfighter systems and life support, they closed the gap on her with heart-clenching suddenness.

“Chaff and jamming!” Kelly barked at the computer.

“That last hit froze the ECM pod racks,” the AI replied. “Chaff systems inoperative!”

Shit. A sweat drop traced an acidy trail from the hairline at the base of her skull, down her spine. The bastard had her! She couldn’t outdistance the missiles or shake them. And if she spun the Hellhound about to bring the plasma blaster to bear, she gave up speed and the Valkyrie would follow on the heels of its missile salvo, catch up and savage her while her shields were struggling.

Well, I’m not taking it up the backside!

Dropping all power from the grav drives, Kelly pulsed the maneuvering fields to bring the Hellhound about, simultaneously rerouting energy to the shields and weapons. Alarms squalled, merged into an ear-rending cacophony. Icons blinked across onrushing missiles, lit yellow, then red. Kelly squeezed the trigger, howling as will-o-the-wisp patterns lashed out from the chin blaster, smacked the closest two into fire-spheres.

The survivors whipped by the blasts, one spiraling off at a wide angle—guidance systems damaged. Three remained to streak home with their Valkyrie sire streaking up behind them, murderously patient as it awaited their fates. One more splatted apart before Kelly’s plasma flail with a crash of antimatter glare that shook the Hellhound.

Every part of her clenched, from the trigger finger to her toes. Not enough time or space left...

“Hold on!”

A storm of cyan and azure crisscrossed before Kelly’s nose, washed the last missile pair away in a roiled cloud of superheated gases. The blasts punched through that, seeking the Valkyrie beyond. His shields strobed like a pulsar, flashed with a generator coil failure that flung sparks and shrapnel across Kelly’s bow before the fighter ripped by to port.

She already knew she’d see red-trimmed wings and kill markings that now numbered ten.

“Bastard!” she shrieked as he veered off somewhere to aft with such violence the sensors momentarily lost him.

“Hey, go easy!” a voice crackled from her earbud. “Better late than never!”

For a fraction of a second Kelly couldn’t understand why she was hearing Tim’s voice. But when his Hellhound screamed by hers with two others off his wings the tale of her salvation became clear.

He’d brought his wing back to salvage the fight above the planet. And that fight was very clearly ending, the remaining Alliance Valkyries wheeling away from Fury, some rushing back for their beleaguered carrier group, some fleeing determined pursuit by piling on speed. The surviving six Basilisks—none of them undamaged—flung out a last frenzy of fire and went silent, targets suddenly scarce.

And Kelly laughed into her microphone, hated the way relief made it almost a sob. “It very nearly was never, Tim!”

He didn’t immediately reply, his flight searching space for her dogged opponent. They didn’t find him again until he was halfway to the horizon of Fury, once more, joined by a scattering of peers, all looking to make atmospheric entry. Tim’s group lunged after them, but a frenzy of sun-hot beams lashed up from the surface at them. Shields aflutter, all three veered off, left the Valkyries to their dive to the planet.

“Damn it!” Tim cursed. “Looks like the Alliance still has a few anti-orbital sites intact!”

“Leave them,” Kelly called after him. “No sense risking anyone else.” She scanned the tactical, allowed a few moments to take it in. The various different fights were all breaking up now and the Jester groups limping back for Fury. The Union “rebel” Valkyries were pulling out, too, by the look, rushing back to points unseen, but definitely not local.

Kelly drew the back of her hand across her mouth, winced at the stink she’d made when her guts emptied. 

“It’s over.”

***

“IT’S CONFIRMED,” WOODRUF said with stiff formality that didn’t quite hide the shock in her voice. “Savo is dead in space.” She paused, presumably to listen in at the communications station. “Reciprocity is reported destroyed and the Oaken reports heavy damage.” She straightened up from the station and turned to Harrison. “Imperium also reporting engine damage and reduction in top speeds.”

Harrison nodded wordlessly, but his gaze remained upon the tactical display. Like prize fighters bloodied in a three-way brawl, most of the combatants were withdrawing to their corners; the Jesters regrouping around Fury, Caldicott’s mauled group limping into the linked-defenses embrace of Nagumo’s slowly retreating group, and everywhere starfighters fluttering back to their carriers—where they could.

“Savo strike group leader requesting permission to take their survivors down to Fury,” the communications tech, momentarily free of Woodruf’s shadow, announced. “Admiral Caldicott is granting it.”

Harrison again nodded to hide the momentary sigh of relief. It’d been a confusing brawl over the planet and impossible to gauge one pilot’s fate—even if it’s my own boy. He let his eye linger momentarily on the ragged Valkyrie flights flitting down for the planet’s surface on the side controlled by Alliance anti-orbital guns. Seven, maybe eight starfighters would no doubt be a godsend down there, though still badly outnumbered by the damnable Jesters.

Good luck, son, he thought, clenching his teeth, and good hunting.

Luck had been in short supply. Harrison could feel old Sobieski laughing somewhere, learning that his superior had encountered as much of a wreck in the Fury System as he. But the game wasn’t over.

“They’ve found them!” the Lieutenant at the tactical station announced.

Harrison glowered into the huge hologram. Eyes burrowed after the swarm of icons that had streaked by the fighting around Fury and the running battle out from the gas giant, had kept going until they discovered what had to be there—a Union task force. New contacts speckled the display as the Valkyries spotted them and relayed their sensor data back across the distance. These in turn flashed as gravity drives lit and the flock of starships began to maneuver, no sense in stealth now.

“Cygnus strike group moving to the attack,” the tactical officer said.

“Identify targets,” Harrison demanded. Pointers brushed over the distant, hostile blips, but no war book schemata materialized. “Can they tell what they’re facing?”

“They’ve encountered heavy jamming,” the Lieutenant replied. An alarm blatted and the hologram flickered with rushing contacts and flecks of firelight. “They’ve reached the Union near space combat patrol. Taking missile and heavy blaster fire from the capital ships, too.”

“More Valkyries?”

“Confirmed, sir. A mix of Firestorm-class fighters, as well.”

Harrison squeezed his arms around his chest till the ribs hurt, determined not to let the stress show. It was agony, watching the counter-punch he’d thrown finally landing, but so far away that the signals and imagery were reaching them long minutes after they’d already happened, details degraded by the transition. Icons interwove and flashed. Machines exploded. Humans died.

“We’re getting more details now, sir,” the tactical officer said. At the same moment, the war book schemata began materializing around the blazing pattern of contacts.

Harrison frowned as a vaguely familiar shape occupied a globular. “That’s a...Bulwark-class strike carrier, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir. It appears to be heavily-modified.” The Lieutenant paused. “Admiral, grav drive signature is consistent with readings from the fight at Bolingbroke; it’s the Sacramento!”

Omura stepped slightly closer, his voice just barely audible. “That’s probably Avery. We know they organized a task group around him.”

“Hit!” the tactical officer cheered. “Multiple hits confirmed on the Sacramento!”

Harrison stared into the strobing hologram as members of the bridge crew joined the cheer. None of the flashes confirmed real damage, just shields aflame as antimatter missiles struck home upon them. Plenty of damage was happened to the Cygnus strike force, though, Valkyries flaming out like gnats caught in a blowtorch as they wove through the Union point defenses.

“Press the attack,” Harrison growled. “Tell them. We have to know.”

The words were wholly unnecessary, he knew, even as he listened to the comm tech relay the message. At the great distances, and with the fight all around them, the Valkyrie pilots would do whatever they had to do, whatever they could do. But Harrison had to know what they’d found, what they could still draw out into the open. It was worth exposing his own group, finally, with an open, boosted transmission.

It was worth the casualties mounting in the hologram.

More hits registered on Union vessels. More of Harrison’s pilots vanished in distant death blossoms. A few more contacts registered as fresh ships entered the fight. Harrison’s guts tightened to near spasm-inducing intensity. But identification only confirmed the mix of cruisers and destroyers known to be in Union Admiral Avery’s task group.

“The bastard,” Harrison rumbled.

“Sir?” Omura asked from his side.

“He’s staying out there,” Harrison replied. “Greer’s not letting himself be drawn into it.” He shook his head. “Cold-blooded devil.”

“Admiral,” Terry whispered, leaning in very close, “we’re not seeing anything here that indicates another Alliance group, at all.”

“Valkyries, Terry!” Harrison looked at him incredulously. “There are too many fighters out there for it to just be the Sacramento, alone.”

“Agreed, sir, but it could be something else we haven’t seen.”

“Then you’re making my point for me,” Harrison snapped back, loudly enough that others were likely noticing their debate. “A Union force of indeterminate size, still lurking out there, somewhere.” He glanced once at the communications station, then back at the hologram, grinding his teeth. “And we’ve gone and revealed ourselves, now, with our transmissions.”

“Admiral, I don’t know if I—”

A flash from the tactical drew all attention to the display. Someone gasped. A temporary star bloomed hellishly into existence, and just as suddenly began to fade. Coasting nearby, one of Caldicott’s cruisers flared as its shields absorbed the shock of the blast.

“That was the Savo,” Woodruf said into the shocked silence. “They couldn’t save—” she cut herself off, lips pinching as her features blanched. “Fusion bottle breach.”

“Admiral,” the Lieutenant at tactical called, “the Cygnus strike group is breaking off.”

And they were, the surviving icons peeling away from the Union carrier group, nursing their wounds and far less in number than they’d been, mere minutes ago. That left Harrison with part of his force bloodied and the rest unmasked. In less than an hour he’d lost dozens of fighters, two—maybe three—capital ships, and the initiative.

And the Jesters—damn them. With those bastards squatting on Fury, it was like the hitting power of a full carrier group, sitting on a carrier that couldn’t be destroyed.

That tears it. Harrison pivoted to face the communications station. “Commander Woodruf, signal the order to withdraw to all ships.” Over a murmur from the bridge crew Harrison was certain he heard, he added in a raised voice, “we’ve developed their positions. We know the Union is here in force now.” He glowered at Omura. “We’ll pull back to reform and reinforce.”

“Aye, sir,” Woodruf replied.

“Captain Walsh, bring us about,” Harrison ordered. “Hyper jump at the edge of the gravity well—a half a light minute. We rendezvous at the pre-set coordinates.”

“Aye, Admiral.” It was hard not to hear the tremor of rage in the man’s voice.

Harrison couldn’t blame him—any of them, really. But they couldn’t know. He couldn’t risk so much of the Alliance’s hitting power on a gamble, here. Not with Greer sleazing about. Bolingbroke had been costly enough. Hell, this has been costly enough. He had to be sure. He had to have enough, so much firepower concentrated that all the ragtag Union fleet could do was burn up in it.

Omura said nothing, remained at his side with expression coolly unreadable. In its way, that was more infuriating than any breach of decorum of the bridge crew’s.

Greer, Harrison seethed. Carson, you sonofabitch. You got the better of this one, sure. But I’ll be back. No clever tricks, then. I know right where you are. His gaze darted to the orb of Fury, hovering passively amidst the last flickers of battle and death. And don’t think I’ve forgotten you, Jesters. Oh no...

Your time is coming, too.