Maximum Offence (34 page)

As the general’s little liner shatters, a lieutenant is sucked off his feet, his hands scrabbling for anything to grip. As we watch, he’s dragged across the deck and disappears. Just one of a hundred.

‘You know how to fly this?’ demands Colonel Vijay.

‘Of course.’

Haze looks surprised.

‘Flew a skimmer round the landing fields,’ I tell him. ‘At Bosworth. How different can it be?’

Opening his mouth to answer, Colonel Vijay realizes it’s a joke and shuts it again. Leaning across, he offers me his hand to shake. That is how I know he expects to die.

ACCELERATION WELDS MY COMBAT ARM TO THE CHAIR AND squeezes air from my lungs. As we roll, my ribs creak and my shoulders try to dislocate. Everything around me is turning black and white. Only there is no
around me
, because all I can see is directly ahead.

A shrinking circle going fuzzy at the edges.

‘Seven g,’ says the gun. ‘Twenty-five seconds.’

Colonel Vijay is unconscious. Other than me, only Haze is awake, and he looks terrified. Turning to forward again almost breaks my neck.

‘Nine g,’ the gun tells me. ‘Thirty-two seconds.’

It hesitates.

‘Say it . . .’

‘Going to kill them,’ the SIG says.

‘No, they’ll pull through.’

‘Not those two,’ the gun says. ‘That lot.’

A screen flickers to show me Rachel, Shil, Emil, Neen and Franc . . . They are twisted into the bulkhead. Far from helping, the curve of the crewpit seems to be forcing them into a single mass. One of the straps holding their net has snapped, another cuts so deep into Rachel’s arm it is bruising already.

‘Thirteen g,’ says the gun. ‘Thirty-seven seconds.’

‘What’s the tolerance . . . ?’

‘For them?’

‘No,’ I say. ‘For this ship.’

The SIG feeds me a figure so high we will be slop in a bucket long before I can shake the engines off this thing. As always, the limits are our own.

‘They’re human,’ says the SIG.

‘So am I.’

It laughs, darkly. ‘You really believe that?’

I’d nod, but g-force glues my skull to the seat. So I grunt, ease back a little and roll a turn. We just miss a Z7x fighter, which explodes as our rocket hits.

‘Five,’ says the SIG.

My gun is firing, the combat AI target-spots, and I fly. Should be Haze, but he’s away with who knows what. So far the combination works. Hekati is behind us. A bloody great ring hanging off the edge of a mined-out—

‘Concentrate,’ says my gun.

Another fighter explodes in front of us.

Out here, you don’t get sound; you don’t even get shock waves. You just get a burst of light and endless high-speed shrapnel. The trick is to outrun the shrapnel, or slide it off your force field like flat stones off water. Easier to describe than do.

My screen shows a fighter coming up behind. No way is it going to miss from this distance. As I roll the B79, the Silver Fist fighter fires, and the SIG burns each of its rockets in turn with a short pulse of cannon.

Rolling again, I loop my own path to take the Z7x from the rear. It goes up in a ball of flame, and enough shrapnel to make me twist viciously.

‘Sven,’ says the gun.

‘What?’

‘You’re killing the Aux.’

‘If I don’t do this,’ I say, ‘they’re going to be dead anyhow.’

‘Well,’ it says. ‘Perhaps they’d rather be killed by the enemy.’

‘How are they going to know?’ I ask, checking a screen. ‘They’re all unconscious anyway.’

The gun says nothing. Probably not a good sign.

Taking a slow curve, I see the edge of the asteroid belt.

It is that jumble of rocks, slashed like a broken line inside my screen. Should have thought of it before. 1500 klicks.
We can do that
.

‘Behind you,’ warns the SIG.

There are two of them, fighters in tight formation. And then, when I check again, I see it is three. One waits higher than the others, further back. That one intends to kill me. The others are just along for the hunt.

To unsettle me.

‘Incoming,’ the SIG says.

Yeah
, I’ve seen them. The outriders sweep in behind me.

They intend to cross, which means they’re flying staggered. Although both open fire at the same time. Give me a knife, and I’ll take down anything. But this, slamming around inside some bloody machine, it’s not natural.

If I’m going to kill someone, I want to see their eyes.

Firing the retros makes Haze double over and lose the contents of his gut direct into his lap. Proves he’s still alive, at least. The SIG swears, but that’s only because it is flipping across the crewpit to hit a screen.

Somewhere in the middle of that, the SIG thinks
cannon
, and reduces both fighters to shards of metals, exploding gas and a flash of blinding light. ‘Ungrateful bastard,’ it snaps, when I remain silent.

But I’m too focused to answer.

Anyway, the third Z7x is beginning its run. The pilot is spooked, which makes him careless. This isn’t what he expects. Coming out like that in a group of three, only to be alone. Now, me . . .

I was alone to start with.

And here he is, chasing an enemy towards the edge of the asteroid belt. An enemy who’s just killed both his companions. It is not a big jump to deciding he’s next.

The fighter comes in fast, and I loop, with darkness eating at the edges of my vision until the world becomes a tiny circle of
straight ahead
. What I need is to get behind the enemy pilot and let the SIG do its thing.

How hard can that be?

As the Silver Fist opens fire, I pull up and it flicks below me. Looping takes all of my concentration, and as we level out again the SIG starts firing. You can see pulse cannon in space. It burns green. Don’t ask me why.

This guy is good. He twists away, and I follow. As he jerks up, I begin to follow him into a loop and suddenly he isn’t there, because he’s out of the loop and back on his original heading. Any moment now, he’ll do a second twist and roll himself behind me.

‘Wait,’ I tell the SIG.

Slipping sideways, I flip the B79 and fire boosters. The kick nails me to the chair and turns my vision to a tiny island of light surrounded by waves of blackness. As we level out, the SIG sights.

Looks like a clear shot to me.

‘Targeted,’ the SIG says.

‘Take it.’

Warnings obviously fire inside the fighter, because the pilot weaves from side to side and then rolls into a dive. There is no gravity out here, but that dive instinct still kicks in.

As we go for a kill, the pilot kicks in extra boosters.

Heat flares from his afterburner. And the fighter explodes into a weirdly flattened ball of flame and razor-sharp fragments. Only the shrapnel’s all heading in our direction. On the far side of where the fighter was, lights spark in their millions.

‘
Pull up
,’ shouts the gun.

At this level of g-force, that is easier to say than do. Executing a tight turn, I roll the B79 into the early stages of a loop and begin to climb.

‘
Tighter
.’

Bastard SIG.

Somewhere down the line, I black out.

Doesn’t matter, the combat AI keeps me on track, and I’m awake before it can turn one loop into two, or do something stupid like go take a closer look at all those little explosions.

‘What the fuck happened?’

An area of blank space hangs between us and
Victory First
, with Hekati looking vast behind that. There isn’t a Z7x to be seen.

‘All gone,’ says the SIG.

‘Fuck, how many?’

‘Twenty-three.’

We killed twenty-three fighters . . . ?

‘Fish in a barrel,’ says the SIG, sounding disgusted.

‘Them?’

The gun snorts. ‘Us,’ it says, and tells me why.

We didn’t kill that fighter. It crashed into the inside edge of a force field
Victory First
threw up the moment this battle began. If the field can destroy their fighter, it can destroy us.

And I have problems that are more pressing. We are almost out of fuel, our oxygen’s nearly gone, and we’re using what is left faster than the converters can replace. Eight people in a B79 bomber designed for three is a shit idea. Even if it was mine.

Also, we’re suffering.

My sight is blurred and my throat sour from the kyp. Haze is sticky with his own vomit, and what didn’t glue itself to the walls or the rest of us now hangs in the air, tiny spit balls of half-digested supper.

As for the others . . .

Colonel Vijay is unconscious. But at least he’s upright and safe in a chair. Looking at him reminds me of a very young General Jaxx, which is weird enough to make me decide to think about something else.

It is the rest who need help.

Shil’s chest rises and falls as she struggles for breath. A shoulder tab on her uniform reads orange. She has taken damage, but it’s not yet fatal. At least, not if we can get help and that’s one hell of a—

‘Sven,’ snaps the gun.

‘
What?
‘

‘You might want to pay attention.’

ONE WHOLE SIDE IS RISING FROM
VICTORY FIRST
. if the Enlightened ship is a city, then an entire neighbourhood is detaching itself to lift slowly away. It reveals a hole in the mother ship that begins to close as walls shift and hangar doors move.

Soon the
Victory First
will look as it used to look. Just a bit smaller. ‘What the fuck is that?’ I demand, pointing to the detached bit.

‘Epsilon-class cruiser,’ says the gun.

We can play question and answer or I can use the kyp. The thought doesn’t make me happy. ‘Using it already, sir,’ mutters Haze.

Blood beads his lip. It wells into little blue spheres and flips free like floating pearls to join the vomit, spittle and all the things we forgot to lock down.

Blue?
I think. And then I have my answer.

Oxygen loss starves haemoglobin. In a flash flood, I understand more than I want about human biology. And Haze is human; well, as human as I am. Just as quickly, I dismiss the fact.

Who needs memory when this stuff can be pulled from the air?

The cruiser is epsilon-class, a kilometre long and 330 metres wide. It’s vast, armed with fifty cannons and has flight decks for three combat wings . . . That’s a hundred and fifty Z7x fighters.

A list comes up before my eyes. Battles won by a single epsilon-class.

Victory First
is made of nineteen epsilons slotted together. That is the beauty of Enlightened technology. It’s cumulative. The Z7xs fit into the sides of the cruiser, the cruiser slots alongside other cruisers to make the mother ship. If needed, the mother ship can be slotted with others to make . . .

Something the size of a small moon.

A ray-traced sphere flickers into my vision and then goes, along with coordinates that put it half a spiral arm away from us.

Speed?

Faster than we are. Well, the cruiser is. Although it takes time to get ramped up enough to use its ion jets.

And distance?

It could cross the galaxy, if the U/Free ever let it get that far.

All this makes me wonder how we outfight the Enlightened, because we do. Every planet they take, we retake, or take one in its place. The figures are vast, tens of thousands of suns and hundreds of thousands of planets. It seems impossible, beyond counting; until that thought brings the number of stars in our galaxy.

A million million.

Our glorious leader, OctoV . . . And the Uplift’s hundred-braid, Gareisis, the Uplifted and Enlightened. They mean so little to Letogratz that the United Free will accept any solution that stops us fighting. Doesn’t have to be fair. Why would it be? Not much else in life is.

Makes me wish I were still at Fort Libidad, scanning the dunes for ferox and desert tribes. And that makes me wonder what an ex-sergeant, who couldn’t count above twenty until a few months back, is doing counting stars.

‘So,’ says SIG. ‘You’re back.’

It shows me the cruiser on screen. ‘You plan on fighting that?’

‘Got a better idea?’

‘Well,’ it says. ‘We’re out of rockets, our shields are screwed and the power bank for the pulse cannon is critical.’ It pisses me off when the SIG gets snotty.

‘You forgot oxygen.’

The SIG begins to tell me it doesn’t need—

So I point out that unless it’s happy to drift in space with rotting bodies for company, it will factor oxygen in too. It’s still sulking when I use most of our remaining fuel to take us over the top of the cruiser, round the outside of the mother ship and over the edge of Hekati itself.

Red lights start flashing. A buzzer joins in. And, just in case we need more distraction, the crewpit screens override with a critical fuel warning.

‘
Sven . . .
‘

‘Look,’ I tell the gun. ‘I know what I’m doing.’

‘There’s always a first time.’

The mirror hub is ahead. A small silver castle where the struts meet in the centre of Hekati’s ring. Brightness flares our screens as we get between a mirror and the sunlight it’s reflecting at the glass that gives this habitat its sky. What fuel is left, I burn entering the hub itself and slotting ourselves into a dock.

Obviously enough, it’s fuel we can’t afford.

———

On the far side of the airlock, Ajac takes one look at my vomit-splashed uniform and steps back. Could be the stink, could be the bloodstained blades on my combat arm, or it could be the foulness of the air belching out behind me.

Iona stands beside him. She’s carrying Colonel Madeleine’s handiwork.

Yanking my combat arm free, I see her glance away. She waits until my old arm is in place before glancing back. ‘Knew you’d return.’

More than I did. Needles pierce flesh. After a second, I flex my fingers. Good enough for what I need to do now.

It takes me a minute to cut the net, remove the straps and begin carrying my crew into the corridor outside the airlock. Shil is first, and she weighs less than I expect. Her right shoulder is dislocated. As I settle her on the deck, she whimpers.

‘Shil,’ I ask. ‘Can you hear me?’