Forsaken Skies (61 page)

Next,
she thought, and found an interceptor wheeling around to face her. She put a disruptor between two of its guns and moved on.

Number three
. Impactors brushed against her canopy, less than a meter from her face. Nothing exploded or cracked. She launched her disruptor and looped up above the ring formation.

The fourth tried to pin her by flanking her while the fifth moved up to target her undercarriage. She raked its bow with PBWs mostly as an insult. It was moving too fast to get a clean hit so she put three disruptors into it and flew away.

The fifth loomed beneath her where she couldn't see it. She rolled over onto her side as its guns let loose. An impactor tore through one of her airfoils but she didn't need those. Her head spun as she twisted around and around, trying to get a good line on the bastard, but it was turning fast now—the interceptors were sluggish but once they got up to speed they could
move
. She spun around it in tighter and tighter circles, the blood pooling in one side of her head until she started to feel faint. Right before she would have blacked out she hit her trigger and sent four disruptors out in a fan pattern, two of which actually found their target.

The sixth interceptor nearly got her. It crept up on her right, low where she couldn't see it without instruments, and its impactors thundered against her fuselage, her vector field throwing out enough sparks to blind someone with human eyes. She saw them as nothing but heat. She pulled up into a loop, then twisted out at the top and dove back down to launch the last of her disruptors right through the bastard's heart.

She could hear nothing but her own breathing. Feel nothing but the blood throbbing in her veins. She felt like she was about to die.

With a shaking hand she reached for her sensor board.

Behind her, below her, the ring of interceptors exploded, one by one. Pieces of them went pinwheeling away into space, while their fuel cooked off in an ever-expanding cloud of high-energy gas. Half a dozen orbiters were caught in that blast and just shredded, reduced to unrecognizable debris that bounced and shook and spun away into nothingness.

She took a long, deep, gasping breath.

Twenty-one of the orbiters remained intact, still speeding toward their destination.

That was okay. They were unarmed and fragile. She could scoop them up at her leisure.

Above her a whole new squadron of scouts and interceptors was swooping down toward her position, backup sent just a little too late. She could safely ignore them—her mission now was just to cut up those orbiters. Save Aruna, and Ehta, and all the Nirayans down there, and that was easy. That was cake. That was—

She had of course completely forgotten about the last little scout, the one that had been keeping its distance. The one that had been too far away to worry about.

The one that had crept up on her now when she was too busy to notice.

An impactor bounced off the side of Thom's BR.9, knocking him sideways in his seat. He screamed a little, by reflex. Red lights flashed all around him but he ignored them long enough to swerve out of the way of another shot before checking his damage control board. Nothing vital had been hit—but now an interceptor was turning toward him, lining him up for a new volley of impactors and he had to—

The interceptor exploded into shrapnel while he watched, bits of it flying in every direction, some of them knocking a scout off course before it could blast him. He threw his fighter into a corkscrew maneuver, just as he'd been taught, and dove for the periphery of the battle area, still trying to figure out what had happened.

His tactical board came up and he saw it cut in half by an orange line that passed right through where the interceptor had been. A shot fired from the guns on Aruna. If he had been less than a kilometer to the left, it would have smashed him instead.

His teeth ground together. His head felt like it was being squeezed in a vise. He tried very hard to just breathe as he maneuvered around to where he could see Lanoe through his canopy.

He was a little heartened, at least, to see that the FA.2 wasn't in great shape, either. It was missing most of its airfoils and the paint was gone from one whole flank.

“Keep it together,” Lanoe said. “We're making progress.”

“We are?” Thom asked, and he heard the edge of panic in his own voice.

“Take a look at the queenship,” Lanoe told him. Then he spun away to face a group of scouts that Thom hadn't even noticed. For a minute the two of them could only focus on holding off the little drones.

When Thom did have a chance to look at his sensor display he saw what Lanoe had been trying to show him. The face of the queenship was covered in new craters that were all exactly the same size. Places where the guns had struck the asteroidal hull, the depleted uranium rounds gouging out deep holes in the rock.

As Thom watched the display another round came flying past, not ten kilometers from his position. He felt it like a ripple running across his skin.

“Come on,” Lanoe breathed. “Come the hell on…”

Together they tracked its course, even as new wings of enemy drones converged on their position. This round looked like it was headed straight for the web that covered the queenship's maw—exactly what Lanoe had been asking for. Thom found himself chanting along with Lanoe. “Come on…come on…”

The round tore through a scout that happened to be in exactly the wrong place at the right time. Thom's heart sank—he was sure the impact would deflect the round, make it miss its target by kilometers. But—

The scout had barely slowed the round down. It tore through the little margin of space between the scout and the queenship, then hit the web just a little off center. It punched through with seemingly no resistance at all. In a magnified view Thom could see the hole it left behind, about a meter across, the edges of the gap ragged with twisting, severed wires.

“Yes!” Lanoe shouted, loud enough to hurt Thom's ears. “Yes, this is what we needed. Another couple of shots in that same location and we'll have an opening I can fly through.”

“You're going to…fly inside that thing?” Thom asked.

“It's the best shot we're going to get. Fly in there, shoot anything that looks important, run like hell. As soon as Zhang gets back, we'll start our attack. And then this will be over, Thom.”

One way or another,
Thom thought.

“We just need Zhang back. Hold on, I'll call her, get an ETA. Zhang? You there? I have you on an open channel. Go ahead, Zhang.”

Scouts came at Thom from above, their eyeball cannons already hot. He broke away from Lanoe to weave a tight slalom between them, raking them with PBW fire. They tried to break formation to surround him but he was getting the hang of this, he thought. He was finally learning to fight.

“Go ahead, Zhang,” Lanoe said again.

A scout spun around until Thom could see the barrel of its cannon looking straight in through his canopy. He blasted the thing before it could open fire, then immediately cut left in case there was another one behind it.

“Zhang, come in,” Lanoe said.

More scouts—and an interceptor—were moving on Lanoe's position but the old pilot wasn't moving. Thom kicked open his throttle to screen the FA.2, ready to hold the enemy off no matter what it cost.

“Zhang—”

“Lanoe?” she said. “Lanoe, I think—I think I may have a problem.”

It happened so fast she was barely aware of what was going on. The scout was moving at high speed and she was just coming out of a tricky maneuver. Its plasma cannon was already hot. She was flying backward, focused on the ring of debris that was all that was left of the interceptor formation.

Maybe the scout had time to fire its weapon, maybe not—it didn't matter. Her BR.9 smashed into its plasma cannon just as it was reaching peak temperature. It exploded in a fireball that enveloped her completely, hot plasma washing over her instruments, vaporizing her airfoils, burning out her maneuvering jets.

Her main thruster cone had been hastily repaired back on Niraya. The fix had held up just fine through all of her wild maneuvers and desperate chases, but when it was heated up to several thousand degrees in a span of microseconds, it failed. The cone collapsed inward, crushing the heat sink that kept her engine cool.

Her fusion engine was already running hot. The heat from the exploding scout pushed it into a critical state. There were safety features built into the engine, interlocks to keep it from just exploding—instead it vented its contents, its own store of plasma, in a great plume of fire. For a full second the engine was transformed into a very efficient, incredibly powerful rocket engine.

All of its thrust hit Zhang square in the back.

Her inertial sink still had enough power to compensate. It locked her in place, freezing her so tight she couldn't breathe, so tight her heart stopped beating. Her tongue was glued to the side of her cheek, her left hand pinned to her shoulder. If the inertial sink hadn't worked exactly like it was meant to, she would have been reduced to a red mist by the sudden acceleration. Instead she was merely held perfectly in place, unable to react as her fighter went shooting past the cloud of orbiters, past the battle area altogether, past Aruna at a speed it had never attained before.

She could only watch in horror as Garuda, the ice giant, grew steadily larger in her forward view.

It was over in a moment. The reactor melted down, globs of superheated metal and fuel streaming away behind her like a blazing pennon. The thrust went away and her inertial sink relaxed and her heart could beat again, sending spikes of pain throughout her body. She gasped, desperately sucking at breath, unable even to scream.

An alert chime sounded behind her head, warning her that her engine had failed. She cursed at it, demanding that it shut up. It went away but other chimes sounded next, telling her that her cabin temperature had reached dangerous levels. Chimes informing her how many systems had just gone offline. Chimes warning her that her current trajectory was ill-advised.

That one was hard to ignore. When she brought up a navigational display, when she looked at where she was headed—she understood. The explosion had thrown her at high speed into Garuda's gravity well. She was headed directly for the ice giant's atmosphere. Now that her engine was gone, that was a one-way ticket.

A damage control board came up and told her everything she'd lost. It took a while to figure out what she still had. Maneuvering, main, and secondary thrusters were gone; that was to be expected. She still had her positioning jets—those had their own fuel supply not dependent on the main engine. She had a working inertial sink, but no vector field. Comms were still operational, at a minimal level.

She would take what she could get.

“Ehta,” she called, “it's Zhang. I'm afraid…I'm afraid I won't be able to take out the rest of those orbiters. I'm sorry. I gave it my best shot.” She closed off the channel before Ehta could respond. There was nothing more she could say there.

She licked her lips before she made her next call. The skin around her mouth was badly chapped. Well, she'd just gotten a terminal sunburn, hadn't she? She put all thoughts of her physical condition out of her mind. There was nothing she could do about that. As long as she could move her hands, there were still things she needed to do.

Like make one more call.

“Lanoe,” she whispered. Then she cleared her throat and said the name properly. “Lanoe. I think—I think I may have a problem.”

Outside her canopy, Garuda kept getting bigger, until it filled almost all of her view.

S
ay again.” Ehta worked the controls of the tender's sensor pod, trying to boost the gain. The signal had been faint. Not faint enough that she hadn't understood Zhang's message. Just faint enough she could pretend otherwise.

“What happened?” Roan asked. The girl was over by the display that still showed the queenship's innards in high definition. Maybe she'd missed it.

“Say again, please, Zhang,” Ehta called.

Nothing.

“Did she do it?” Roan asked. “Did she get the orbiters? Are we safe?”

Ehta didn't answer the girl. Instead she switched the imagery on the main display to show a much wider view. Garuda, the ice giant, in full color. The queenship still a tiny dot three hundred thousand kilometers away, farther than Aruna was from its planet.

A blue dot blinked in the display, too small to show up unless it drew attention to itself. Ehta zoomed in on it. The holographic image of Garuda grew huge until it was too big to fit inside the wardroom. The display shifted so that the planet was at the bottom of the view, as if Ehta and Roan were giants standing inside its thick atmosphere. Aruna orbited near the ceiling. The blue dot was still too small to see in detail, but now Ehta could see the wreckage it had left behind. Dozens of drones had been blown apart, creating a far-flung cloud of debris over half the distance between the queenship and the moon. Red blobs wobbled and then blinked out as molten debris cooled in the vacuum of space.

“She made a hell of a mess,” Ehta said, softly.

There was one other salient feature of the display—the cone of orbiters, unescorted now but still headed for Aruna at high speed. More than twenty of them, and they would arrive in just over a minute.

She did the calculations in her head. The orbiters would need to slow down before they could establish stable orbits around the moon. That meant aerobraking, flying low through Aruna's airspace so that atmospheric drag would decelerate them below the local escape velocity. They would probably get pretty hot in the process, and need to cool down before they sprang open and dropped their cargo.

Then—call it another minute before the landers touched down. Before they killed every living thing on Aruna.

Not much time.

Not much she could do about it.

She ran the fingers of her gloves through her short hair. Then she turned around and looked at the display again.

“Hell's back door,” she said, though the words came out as little more than hissing breath.

The winking blue dot—Zhang—wasn't changing its trajectory. It was moving in a shallow curve, the kind of long parabolic course that natural objects took in space, objects that didn't have the ability to control their flight. Objects at the mercy of gravity.

This particular course took Zhang far from the orbiters, far from anyplace she might reasonably want to go. It ended someplace very, very bad.

She tried raising Zhang again. “What's your engine status?” she asked. “Zhang, come in, what's your available delta vee? Zhang, are you receiving?”

There was no response. Instead a pale green pearl appeared in the corner of Ehta's eye, the universal symbol for a held or blocked call.

So Zhang was still alive—she just wasn't interested in talking. That was very bad form for a military woman. You were always supposed to respond to incoming calls in a timely fashion—it was just part of the order of battle. Even if all you could do was say you were busy, say you didn't have time to report, you at least let your comrades know that you were still there.

If a consummate warrior like Zhang was blocking calls, that could only mean one thing—there was nothing left to say.

Ehta watched that wicked curve, the final trajectory of Zhang's BR.9, stretch out through space and time on the display. She knew that if there was any way Zhang could change her course, she would.

She was headed straight for Garuda, with no power, no propulsion.

“Is she coming back?” Roan demanded. Maybe she just didn't understand. She wasn't a pilot—maybe she didn't get it. “Is she going to get the last of them?”

“Shut up,” Ehta said.

“What? Tell me what's going on!”

“A good woman is about to die, Roan. So shut your damned mouth.”

Ehta sent Lanoe the data he'd requested, telemetry regarding Zhang's position and velocity. The calculus of her motion, all the numbers and variables and constants necessary to plot out where she was going and how fast. None of it helped—it just added up to a blue dot sinking across a field of white.

He waved it away.

“There's one last thing I can do,” Zhang told him. “I've got about half a second's worth of burn left in my positioning jets.”

“Save it,” he told her. “Remember when I parked Thom down in the atmosphere of Geryon? He stayed aloft for days, Zhang. Days—long enough for me to come get him. You can hang in there at least a little while. Just get under the top cloud layer, where the aliens can't see you, then—”

“Lanoe, you've already run those numbers and you know it won't work. Thom still had an engine when he entered Geryon. I don't. He was moving a lot slower than I am, too. I'm not going to make a leisurely descent through the clouds here. I'm going to hit Garuda like a meteor. My vector field's gone, most of my armor's burned off already. I'll be a fireball, not a spaceship. It'll be…quick.”

“I've known you for a very long time, Zhang. I know you're not a quitter.”

It took her a while to respond. Lanoe had to shift his position several times, to keep ahead of the drones that buzzed all around him. Thom was working hard to screen him from the worst of the attacks but they were still in the middle of a pitched battle—he couldn't just sit in space talking to Zhang as if they had all the time in the world.

He didn't give a tinker's damn. He was going to figure this out.

“I'm not quitting on you, Lanoe,” she said. “I have one last thing I can do. The enemy sent a squadron of drones after the orbiters, reinforcements for the ones I slagged. They're still on my tail, though it looks like they're ready to break off pursuit. But here's the thing. If I fire my positioning jets just right, I can make it look like I'm changing course. It won't actually stop me from hitting the giant. It might fool them, though. If they think I'm still viable, maybe they'll chase me down. All the way down into the atmosphere.”

“We can handle those ships—”

“Won't it be better if you don't have to?” she asked. “Let me go down fighting, Lanoe. They don't have airfoils. They can't handle atmosphere. If they follow me into the clouds they won't be able to get back out again. That's fifteen less drones that you have to worry about. I think it might actually work.”

He paused, not so much to think about what she'd said as to dodge an incoming salvo of kinetic impactors. Three scouts jumped up on his left and he cut them apart before he replied.

“Forget it,” he said. “I'm going to break off here and come get you. If I put every ounce of power I've got into a burn I can match your velocity, come alongside and you can jump out, grab hold of my fuselage, we can—”

“Lanoe,” she said, in a tone of voice he knew all too well. “Don't you dare.”

“I can't just…I can't—”

“You have to. There's too many people counting on you. If you break off now, you're admitting defeat. There's no way you'll be able to drive back the enemy once you lose momentum like that. Don't you remember what you said to me? You wanted to win a war. You want to win.”

“I remember. But that was just talk. This is reality. Zhang—”

“You win this damned thing, Lanoe. I'm going to fire my positioning jets now. I'm going to help you
win
.”

“Hellfire,” Ehta said. “She's
brilliant
. I knew she was good, but…”

“Did she just move, a little?” Roan asked.

“Yes, yes she did,” Ehta said, nodding vigorously. “And so did they,” she added, jabbing a finger at the display where a squadron of drones had just shifted position as well. The movements were tiny, incremental. When you trained as a pilot, though, you learned to think in terms of time as well as space. You learned how objects moved in a vacuum, and how they would continue to move—like watching a chess game and seeing where the pieces would be three moves ahead. Ehta could see exactly what Zhang was trying to accomplish. And she was pretty sure it was going to work.

“She knows how the drones think,” she explained to Roan. “She's been studying them this whole time. Getting a sense for when they'll jump, and when they'll hang back. She knows they want to protect those orbiters. She made the tiniest move toward them, and the drones reacted exactly as she expected. Even then, it shouldn't matter. Any human pilot would realize she was just making a feint, an empty gesture. But these machines—they don't care how many ships they lose. They don't think about what's going to happen, they just pursue their objective.”

“So it's fifteen fewer drones, that's great,” Roan pointed out. “But the orbiters are still coming, and Thom is still up there fighting the rest of the fleet.”

“A fleet that just got fifteen units smaller. It might be enough—so far they've been able to screen the queenship because they had such overwhelming numbers. Fifteen ships won't make a huge difference, but it means they'll have to leave gaps in their defense. Gaps Lanoe can take advantage of.”

“I don't understand, but okay—that's good,” Roan said. She came over and leaned on Ehta's console, invading her personal space. “It doesn't change our situation, though.”

“It might change everything,” Ehta told her. “It could mean—”

“I mean
our
situation. Yours and mine. The orbiters are still coming here,” Roan said. “And nobody's left to stop them.”

Ehta turned and looked back at the display. Those twenty-odd orbiters were still there. Still getting closer.

“Yeah,” she said. Her mouth was suddenly very dry.

“Somebody has to go fight them off.”

Ehta couldn't find the words she needed.

“You're the only one who can,” Roan said. “You need to take the tender up and fight them, Ensign Ehta.”

“You know I can't.”

Roan's face was pitiless. “Then you have to go tell Engineer Derrow and Elder McRae why they're going to die.”

“Okay,” Zhang said. “It's done. My sensors are fried, though. How does it look?”

“It looks like it's working,” Lanoe said. “Of course, if they stop to think for even a second, they'll break off the chase.”

“Such an optimist. It was worth a shot,” Zhang told him.

“Sure,” Lanoe said.

“I've got about thirty seconds until…well.” She couldn't keep her voice from wavering, a little.

Lanoe squeezed his control stick until he felt like his fingers might break.