Forsaken Skies (38 page)

But it turned out she'd been wrong about Maggs.

His fast corkscrew approach hadn't just been for show. At that speed even a computer couldn't track him. The scouts were incredibly maneuverable, but it seemed all they could do to keep out of his way.

Sometimes not even that. His PBWs scored another hit, and then a fourth. The scouts folded up like they were made of sticks and cheap glue. He struck a fifth scout, his fire carving a line through its eyeball-like gun pod, and the thing just exploded, metal scrap jetting outward in every direction, the plasma inside burning as hot as the surface of a star for a millisecond, expanding in a vast shock wave that was gone before Zhang could even register its existence.

He cut the sixth one in half, its thruster and its gun pod spinning off in opposite directions, both quite dead.

The seventh twisted and darted away from him, only to collide with the eighth, neither of them surviving the smash-up.

Half the picket detail gone and Zhang hadn't even properly engaged yet. She made a mental note.

Maggs had not bought his Blue Star. He'd earned it the old-fashioned way, by being a hell of a pilot.

Zhang's vector field throbbed all around her then and she had to stop thinking about anybody else. A kinetic impactor had just come within centimeters of tearing her to pieces.

The interceptor was right on top of her.

Though less emaciated-looking than the scouts, it was still ugly as sin, a shapeless, lumpy design studded with spiky guns. It seemed to fire in every direction at once, its impactors streaking outward on random trajectories. Valk had described the never-ending assault of projectiles but she hadn't understood what he meant until she saw it for herself. It didn't seem to be aiming at all, just lobbing rounds at everything in its local volume.

She readied a disruptor round, then slewed around it in a wide, careful arc, keeping her nose pointed at the interceptor as she raced past its flank then around until she could see the hot exhaust of its thrusters. Her weapons panel chimed and queued up messages as the BR.9 worked desperately at finding a good firing solution.

She swiped the display away, instead locking her weapons to fire straight ahead. Then she brought her nose around to line up perfectly with the interceptor's glowing main thruster.

An impactor bounced off her canopy, rattling her bones. Warning chimes sounded from her damage control board.

She ignored them. Burned to stabilize until she felt like she was hanging motionless in space, the interceptor rotating slowly in front of her. Flexed the fingers of her hand, then wrapped her index finger around the trigger on her control stick.

Zhang fought by one simple edict: Never waste ammunition.

One shot, one kill.

She waited until she could look straight down the interceptor's main thruster, into the hot core of its engines. She wasn't thinking at all, she was just there, an extension of the fighter's weapons. When she squeezed the trigger she felt nothing.

The fighter lurched almost imperceptibly as the disruptor round jumped free. The tiny shock was enough to bring her back to herself and she slammed her control stick over to one side even as she punched the throttle, sending her veering off to the side, well clear of the interceptor.

Her disruptor detonated deep in its belly. It seemed to blur in her displays as it vibrated with the chain of explosions. Then some store of fuel or ammunition inside it cooked off and it blossomed into a vast cloud of heat and debris. Zhang's boards all chimed at her for a moment as she was buffeted by the shock wave, but her vector field held and the warning signals went silent one by one.

Zhang felt a smile creep across her face. She'd won. She'd beaten the bastard and she was still alive and—

Then a scout swung through her view, its gun pod staring right in through her canopy. Her eyes showed her an infrared view of the thing and it was bright, blindingly bright as it belched plasma across the front of her BR.9, searing heat pouring into her canopy until sweat coursed down her face and she was certain this was it, that she'd made her last mistake, that she was dead—

But as quickly as the heat came, it fell away. Ahead of her the scout had been torn to shreds, reduced to ragged jetsam that twisted away into nothingness.

A sleek shadow raced across her view, so fast she barely noticed. Maggs, in his own fighter, coming to her rescue.

She scanned the local volume of space and found none of the enemy left. The scout that he'd just blown up, the one that nearly killed her, had been the last of the fifteen. He'd destroyed them all while she took out the interceptor.

She opened a communications link. “Nice shooting,” she said. “Thanks.”

“Entirely my pleasure,” he told her.

Maybe he wasn't such a bad sort after all, she thought. She'd met enough pilots in her time—trained enough of them—that she knew there was a certain sort, a kind who were insufferable in the barracks room but once they were out on the field they found their true selves, their nobler natures, and—

Lanoe was calling her. “If the two of you are done showing off,” he said, “you might want to look at the destroyer and see what it's doing. Then maybe one of you can explain it to me, because I haven't got a clue.”

Lanoe's display showed the twisted horn of the destroyer at a high level of detail now, the imagery built out of a composite of different views from various microdrones and his FA.2's own sensors. He could make out the ragged scar near its nose quite clearly, enough so that he could tell it wasn't a rupture in the destroyer's hull. There was no sign of actual damage, no visible scorch marks or stress fractures. It was as if the ragged gap were part of the destroyer's design, a normal feature of its shape.

Which just made it stranger that a cloud of debris was twisting away from the gap like a billowing pillar of smoke.

“Maybe we were right after all,” Zhang said. “Maybe it did get hit by a meteor or something and now it's breaking up.”

“Maybe,” Lanoe said. He couldn't get past the overwhelming feeling of dread he felt, though. The feeling that the enemy was surprising them once again.

Especially when a second burst of debris erupted from farther back along the destroyer's flank, a whole new cloud billowing from its side.

“No,” he said, because suddenly he knew exactly what he was looking at. “No, it can't be…”

He tapped at a virtual keyboard and magnified the view until it grew rough and pixilated, until he could just make out individual pieces of the debris cloud. And saw exactly what he expected to see.

“Fellows,” Maggs called, “not be an alarmist, but is that smoke plume…turning? Rather heading in our direction, I think.”

Lanoe shared the magnified view with the other two pilots. “That isn't debris,” he said. “Those aren't chunks of the destroyer falling off. Those are scouts being launched.”

A third column of them came boiling off the destroyer, a jet of tiny ships pushing toward them. Every single piece of “debris” was a scout breaking away from its perch on the destroyer.

Which wasn't, in fact, a destroyer at all. It was a carrier. The entire skin of the enemy ship was covered in scouts and interceptors and now all of them were deploying, headed straight for the three human fighters.

“Spread out!” Lanoe said. “We've got incoming!”

Dead ahead, along an arc fifty kilometers wide, the entire sky was full of enemy craft. Every single one of them accelerating in Lanoe's direction.

Zhang played her hand over her tactical display again and again, trying to get a grasp on what they faced. There was just too much information to process there.

Her eyes might be artificial but they showed her it was all true. Hundreds of enemy ships, maybe thousands.

Maggs had made short work of fifteen of the scouts, but she doubted he could handle these kinds of numbers. She knew she couldn't. The only smart thing to do now, the only course of action that made any sense, was to turn around and burn for safety. Get as far as possible from this cloud of ships and keep going.

“We can swing around behind Garuda, put the ice giant between us and them,” Maggs said. “Buy ourselves some time. Those scouts can't have a very long range. If we can just get out ahead of them, we can make it out of here.”

“There are interceptors in there, too,” Zhang pointed out. “It looks like maybe as many as one in sixteen. We know the interceptors are capable of interplanetary distances. But I'd rather fight a running battle with those than take on all these scouts.”

“I concur,” Maggs told her. “Perhaps our redoubtable commander will be kind enough to give the order to break contact.”

There was no response. Zhang could hear her heart beating in her throat.

“In your own good time, Commander,” Maggs said.

Lanoe was still there. Zhang's communications panel said as much.

“Negative,” he said, finally.

“Please confirm that last communication,” Maggs asked.

“I said negative. We are not going to cut and run. If we can't handle this, there's no point in heading back to Niraya—that just amounts to giving up. You want to be the one who tells Elder McRae ‘sorry, we tried to save your planet but it was just too hard'?”

“Actually? I'd be happy to,” Maggs said.

“No,” Zhang said. It was her job to back Lanoe up. As his wingman she had to enforce his orders; that was just part of the job. Plenty of times before she'd done so even when she disagreed with him, because when you were in the Navy, it wasn't your job to debate orders.

This time, though, she did it because he was right.

“No,” she said again. “We stand and fight. He's right, Maggs. If we give up now we'll never have the nerve to try again. I don't like the odds here, three against…who knows how many ships. But we didn't come out here on a pleasure cruise.”

“Spread out,” Lanoe said. “Stack 'em up. We all know the drill.”

And they did. Zhang had been in bad scrapes before. The 94th squadron under Lanoe's command had taken on plenty of fights where they were outnumbered. Lanoe had always gotten them through. These odds might be an order of magnitude worse than usual, sure. But she would fight and die by Lanoe's side if that was what he wanted.

On the plus side the destroyer—she didn't know what else to call it—didn't appear to have any heavy guns. And the scouts and interceptors didn't have vector fields.

Which was a little comfort, though not much, as the volume around her started filling up with kinetic impactors and plasma bursts.

In a massive battle like this all the rules went out the window. Should you go in screaming, at full throttle? It made you a moving target, which made you harder to hit. It also meant you were more likely to run headlong into an impactor or a piece of debris, which could end your fight right there. Did you take your time lining up shots, so you didn't waste ammunition? Then again, there were so many targets that even wild shots had a chance of hitting something.

The hardest part was keeping an eye on your squadmates, to make sure you didn't shoot one of them by mistake. Or collide with them at ten thousand kilometers a second.

Zhang twisted around in space, not so much corkscrewing as maneuvering by instinct, dashing into the cloud of scouts, banking hard as their engines lit up, as they tried to track her. She swiped away her targeting board—it couldn't keep up with all the things she needed to shoot. She held down the trigger on her stick and spat particle fire at anything that moved.

All around her scouts fell apart in pieces, or burst into flame as their fuel supplies caught. She saw one jink around to get a shot at her, only to fly right into a kinetic impactor. She didn't bother to laugh—she didn't have time.

High above her Maggs dipped in and out of the cloud, refusing to let the scouts surround him. A good strategy, one she wished she'd thought of. Where was Lanoe? There—she recognized the thermal signature of his FA.2's main thruster. He was plunging straight through the cloud, barely bothering to waggle back and forth. She saw his vector field sparkle with heat as an impactor grazed off his canopy, and couldn't help herself—she gasped a little.