Forsaken Skies (40 page)

The impactor could have cleaved right through it like a hot knife through a ripe tomato. The fact that it hadn't—the fact that Maggs was still alive—came down to pure, incorruptible luck.

Another hit on that same location—even a near miss—would crack the transparent material, he knew. The canopy would shatter. Shards of jagged ultrahard material might come scything for his face. Or it might just explode outward, leaving him relatively unharmed—but also completely exposed to the void. And enemy fire.

When you stare Death in the proverbial eye socket,
his father's voice told him,
that's the moment
you see how empty it is.

He'd never really understood that lesson until now. Maggs realized, with a start, that he'd never really been afraid of dying before.

It wasn't an experience he could recommend. He heard a weird, low throbbing alarm from somewhere nearby, though it was nothing like the alert tones his boards normally used. It was enough to make him look at his displays, which was enough to break the hypnotic spell of the divot.

When he couldn't find the source of the thumping, he blinked away the last of the cobwebs because he realized what it was. That was the sound of his own heart thundering in his chest.

He fought for control of himself. Found the steel that laced his blood, the steel his father had given him. Wheeled around just as three scouts came tearing through space at him and, with one rapierlike blast of particle fire, cut all three of them to pieces. He needed to pay attention.

If he died out here—if he died anywhere, frankly—certain debts would go unpaid. That was unacceptable.

For a good minute he did nothing but kill. Like an alchemist he transmuted this new fear into pure, cold, high-toned rage and fought like a maniac, scouts falling before him so fast he thought perhaps he could win this battle single-handed if he could keep it up. Yet something cold and thick had clotted inside his heart and it started to drag him down. Adrenaline curdled in his veins and he felt like he wanted to weep.

That was when he saw the trap. When he realized just how clever the alien drone ships could be, if you gave them half a chance.

The scouts he'd been cutting down must have been a screen, a ruse thrown at him so he wouldn't notice the real menace creeping up from behind. He caught sight of the attack on one of his displays, then spun around on his axis so he could get a good look at the hounds that pursued him.

There, through his canopy (don't look at the divot, don't look at it), were three interceptors, bearing down on him at high speed from the heart of the cloud. Already they had begun to unleash their storm of projectiles, impactors coming at him in a nonstop torrent of solid metal.

His weapons board showed him the two disruptors he had left.

One too few.

He could take down two of them, then wheel about, bank hard, loop back, and catch the other one from behind—assuming he somehow, miraculously, avoided all those impactors. Assuming there were no scouts anywhere nearby waiting to swoop in and catch him split-arsing all over the local volume
. A bad plan is better than none at all,
Dear Old Dad told him, and he tapped a virtual keyboard to try to get a firing solution, while working out the maneuvers in his head.

Then one of the interceptors exploded in a cloud of debris. And another.

A firing solution came up. He blasted the third, then wheeled around to look for scouts, to try to get some idea of what happened.

“Remember that time you saved my ass? We're even,” Zhang called, on an open channel.

He found himself laughing, fear pumping endorphins all through his body and for a moment he felt good again, invincible.

Then he saw Zhang's fighter and felt the ice water of trepidation splash against the back of his neck. The whole flank of her BR.9 was a jagged mess of broken components and torn-open panels. He could see one of her secondary thrusters flap back and forth, connected now only by a thin, frayed cable. The red tentacles that writhed across her fairings were obscured by scorch marks and craters left behind by impactor strikes.

“You look like ten varieties of hell,” he told her.

“Yeah, well, your canopy's about to fall off,” she responded. Weakly, he thought. She sounded very tired. Well, her body might be twenty but her brain was much, much older. And if he were being fair, he wasn't exactly fresh himself. The inside of his suit stank of fear sweat and bad breath.

“We've both seen better days. How damaged are you?” he asked.

“In about ten minutes I'm going to look like a Fleet Day goose. How's your ammo supply?”

“I have one disruptor left, and maybe two thousand shots in my PBWs. Fuel?”

“I'd be lucky to get back to Aruna.” Zhang was quiet for a moment. “Maggs, if we don't make it—”

“Should we die here,” he said, cutting her off, “anything we say won't matter. If we live, anything we say will be embarrassing later.”

“Fair enough,” she said. “Oh, hellfire. Look at that.”

Maggs could see it just fine.

He'd spent most of the battle at the periphery of the enemy ranks, scoring hits along the edges while she burned through the heart of the opposition. The two of them had put up a valiant effort, indeed—Maggs's displays showed him an enormous field of debris, hundreds of dead enemy ships reduced to scrap metal in a slowly expanding cloud. Yet in the midst of all that chaos at least a hundred drone ships remained active. They showed up on his display as pinpoints of light, a visual representation of the heat of their thrusters.

The display switched over to a vector analysis—a breakdown of how those ships were moving, how fast and in what direction. They were all burning blue. In other words, they were all headed straight for Maggs and Zhang.

“No point in cursing, really,” Maggs said. “Shall we make a good show of this?”

“Yeah,” Zhang told him. “Go out in a blaze of glory. Can't wait.”

Maggs's hands flew over his boards, readying his BR.9 for what was going to be some of the hardest fighting he'd ever experienced. The fighter complained with red lights and warning chimes but he ignored them. No point in conserving resources or playing safe now.

In his mind he rehearsed his next moves. Dive straight into the cloud at all available speed. Punch through the far side, swing around, dive through again. Repeat as possible. Do as much damage as he could while Zhang hung back, hunting targets of opportunity. Maybe, just maybe, give Lanoe a chance to accomplish something here.

Or at the very least give him a story to tell back at the Admiralty, about how Auster Maggs died well.

“Ready to run,” he told Zhang.

“Good luck,” she said.

He leaned forward on his stick, opening his throttle until his engines screamed. Dove straight into the maw of a hundred enemy ships.

And then—the miracle occurred.

Another layer of scouts and interceptors had peeled off the destroyer, and still there was no sign of any crew compartments, any centralized command structure. Lanoe was starting to accept the inevitable conclusion: that the destroyer was just a drone, like every other enemy ship they'd encountered.

And behind him, back in the cloud, Zhang and Maggs were at the end of their tethers. They were going to die, and it would be for nothing.

He couldn't stop—there was no other course open to him. He kept flying tight spirals around the destroyer, killing anything that moved. It took very little concentration now. He could almost predict when the little ships would peel off the shrinking mass, all those disposable drones operating on simple programs. Which gave him plenty of time to watch his squadmates make their last stand.

He saw Maggs dive right into the fray, while Zhang drifted, nearly motionless, along the edge of the cloud, firing quick, deliberate bursts from her PBWs. He knew what that meant—she was in trouble, her engines compromised. Maggs's daring strike might keep the worst of the enemy away from her but eventually they would figure out that she was a sitting duck.

Lanoe couldn't break off from what he was doing. If he ran to her side to keep her safe, the destroyer would be able to launch all of its remaining ships with impunity. The best thing he could do for her was to keep thinning out the enemy ranks from afar. Yet he knew she had just minutes to live.

The idea of her dying out there like this, for nothing, was incredibly hard to bear. Harder than he'd expected. The two of them had fought in a hundred battles before, and he'd never worried about her like this. He'd always been able to shut down his feelings when the shooting started. Something had changed—and he didn't like it.

He was just about to do the stupid thing, break contact and run to her defense, when he saw something very strange happen inside the cloud.

Enemy ships were exploding in there, bursting apart. Well, Maggs was doing yeomanlike service, guns blazing away. But some of the enemy kills were happening well clear of his attack corridor, far enough away from him that they couldn't be his work.

Lanoe called up a display to get better imagery of the battle.

What he saw made his eyes go wide.

Maggs wasn't the only fighter pilot in the chaos of the cloud. Another human ship, another BR.9, had joined the fray. One with a broken airfoil.

On the display the fighter wove through a formation of enemy scouts, blasting them apart as an interceptor came chasing after. The fighter swung around to fire a disruptor and Lanoe got a good look at its fairings. They showed black stars on a blue background—the flag of the Establishment.

It was Valk.

Valk had come to the rescue, disobeying Lanoe's direct orders.

In a more formal order of battle that would be insubordination—grounds for a court-martial. At that particular moment Lanoe didn't give a damn for the chain of command.

A green pearl spun in the corner of his vision. He blinked to open the link.

“Thought I'd drop in, Commander,” Valk said. “Hope you don't mind.”

“I don't know what you're doing here,” Lanoe said, “but I'm glad for it. Where's Derrow?”

“Halfway to Niraya by now,” Valk told him. “I put the tender on a preprogrammed course. It'll get her to a safe parking orbit. When we're done here we can fly her down to the planet. Hold on a second.”

On Lanoe's display the interceptor chasing Valk erupted in silent fire.

“Sorry about that.”

“Don't mind me,” Lanoe told him.

“I never thought I'd be so glad to see an Establishmentarian,” Maggs said with a laugh, as Valk tore through another interceptor, his disruptor round blasting it to pieces. He wheeled his own BR.9 around and obliterated a scout that had crept up on Valk's tail.

“I've got a bunch of those little bastards up ahead here, think they're hot stuff,” Valk called back. “You want to stack 'em up?”

“With unalloyed pleasure,” Maggs told him.

It was like he was back in the academy, running a simulation. It ran that smooth. The scouts swung around into a tight formation, their plasma guns glowing with heat as they prepared to attack. Valk and Maggs rolled around them in a perfect double helix, catching the scouts in a textbook crossfire. The scouts tried to escape their net by zooming away in all different directions, but it was child's play to blast them as they ran.

“Interceptors,” Valk called. “Four of them converging on us. How's your supply of disruptors?”

“All but nonexistent. Mind if I play the wounded dove?”

“Gotcha,” Valk said. His engines flared as he burned away, as if he hadn't even noticed the approaching interceptors. Maggs made a good show of it, letting his maneuvering jets stutter ineffectually, fluttering his main thruster as if it had lost power. Firing off a few rounds from his PBW without even coming close to hitting the onrushing enemies.

The interceptors took the bait, closing on him with alarming rapidity. Their guns chugged away, filling the volume around Maggs with kinetic impactors.