Forsaken Skies (39 page)

“Boss,” she said, “you have a plan here?”

“Give me cover, if you can,” he said.

She swung around to follow him, blasting apart a scout almost as an afterthought.

There were no pilots in those scouts or interceptors, Lanoe knew. It made it easy to shoot at them. It also made them disposable. The enemy didn't care how many of its ships were lost here. All it cared about was killing humans.

Even in the darkest days of the Century War, when Earth had fought Mars and Ganymede for control of the solar system—when it seemed like the entire human race was at war with itself—even then, there had been a certain fellow-feeling among pilots. You hated it when you saw an enemy get hit by antivehicle fire, because you knew what an ugly death that meant. If somebody ran out of ammunition or fuel maybe you just let them go, a weird kind of professional courtesy offered to someone who'd had you locked in their sights a moment before.

This wasn't that kind of fight.

Lanoe kept his PBWs blazing. He swatted away the enemy scouts like flies, not caring if he cut them to pieces or blasted them into slag. He didn't so much as pause to make sure they were out of the action before moving on to the next enemy. Interceptors wheeled around to face him, their spiky guns belching out an impactor every second. He didn't waste disruptor rounds on them, just hosed them down with particle beams and rushed past them, deeper into the cloud.

It grew thicker the farther he went. Scouts crowded his view. He stopped trying to aim. He was more interested in punching his way through. Getting closer to the destroyer, the big prize.

He didn't have time to analyze imagery and sensor data, but he could see the mass of the big ship up ahead and he could see how it had changed. From a distance it had looked almost smooth, like a thing with a real hull. Now it looked like it was dissolving in acid, its edges rough and chipped, any kind of real shape lost until it was just a formless blob of metal in the dark. Each scout or interceptor that leapt from its back left it smaller and less threatening, but he had to know.

The engineer, Derrow, had said there needed to be a living, thinking commander nearby in case the enemy drones went off-program. Maybe they were on the destroyer, coordinating the whole battle. If he could get through, if he could strike down the enemy commander, maybe Zhang and Maggs didn't have to die here today.

Maybe.

For his own life he gave little thought. That was the only way he'd survived so long, gotten so many medals. If you went into a battle expecting to live through it, you made bad decisions, you gave up opportunities. On the other hand, if you went in expecting to die you probably would. The key was to put yourself aside, to think of yourself only as part of a squad.

Some days he was better at that mental shift than others. This time he was ready. This time he would achieve the impossible middle state of grace. Or so he told himself.

Zhang dove after Lanoe, weaving back and forth to avoid debris, ignoring impactors unless they were right in front of her. She carved up scouts as they raced after Lanoe or as they came tearing through space right after her. She took bad chances.

Still she couldn't keep up with Lanoe. He barely veered aside from a head-on collision with an interceptor. His maneuvering jets stuttered as if he was trying to conserve fuel, probably the dumbest thing you could do in a battle like this.

She knew he wasn't dumb. He was headed for the destroyer and he wouldn't be turned away from his goal, that was all.

Don't get yourself killed for nothing,
she begged him, the words getting no farther than her head. She wouldn't say them aloud, certainly wouldn't message him with such trivial sentiments. She couldn't help but think them, though.
Not now, please.
Not when we're so close to starting over.

She did her best to keep the cloud from all falling on him at once. She blazed her way around him, keeping his tail clear, shouting in defiance as the enemy ships ganged up on them and came pouring down in formation from on high. She waggled her stick, let her PBWs play over the enemy ships as if she could paint the bastards with her guns. They burst apart or went spinning away or just fell silent and drifted off by the dozen, but still more of them came at her, more of them flocked toward Lanoe.

An impactor struck the side of her thruster unit, hard enough to press right through her vector field. Her bones were wrenched around inside her flesh as her inertial sink tried and failed to absorb the shock. Her engine board started screaming at her, warning her that she was about to lose all her secondary thrusters.

She bit her tongue to keep from shouting for help. Maggs was still out at the edge of the cloud, picking off enemy ships. Lanoe was surging ahead of her, getting farther and farther away. Neither of them could afford to turn aside and come to her aid.

So she let herself fall back, let her engines rest and cool as their autorepair systems came online and tried desperately to prevent any further damage.

Still the enemy came at her, relentless, never-ending. Her weapons still worked just fine. She never stopped shooting.

Lanoe was nearly through.

Plasma fire washed over his FA.2 and his cockpit turned into a sauna. Then a furnace. Impactors bounced off his vector field left and right, throwing him back and forth like a toy boat in the middle of a flash flood. He kept his touch on his stick very light, just compensating for the battering, just maneuvering enough to keep from colliding with anything big and hard.

His eyeballs dried out in the heat and his eyelashes started to curl up and singe but he refused to blink. The skin of his hands cracked and bled as the heat mounted, but he kept them on his controls.

The destroyer lay right ahead of him, only seconds away. He expected the scouts and interceptors to come flocking after him, to throw everything they had at him to keep him clear of their mother ship, to defend it at any cost.

But then the other thing happened. The thing he hadn't expected.

Which was exactly how every battle went, but it surprised him every time.

It was like he'd been flying through clouds and suddenly they'd parted, dumping him out into clear air. The scouts and interceptors pulled back, spinning around to face Zhang and Maggs instead. He'd thought they would defend the destroyer to the last—instead, they let him through as if he'd crossed some imaginary finish line, as if he'd already won the race and he wasn't worth chasing anymore.

A single interceptor launched from the side of the destroyer, burning past him like he didn't exist. He fired a disruptor into its hull at point-blank range and it didn't even react, just kept to its preordained trajectory even as its stocks of fuel and ammunition cooked off and blasted it into pieces.

He let it die unwatched, his interest in it voided by what lay ahead of him.

The destroyer, half the size it used to be. Practically undefended.

If they were going to let him have his prize, if they didn't feel it was worth protecting, so be it. He was still going to blast the hell out of it.

Zhang's engine board chimed to tell her she still had power in her main thruster. Chimed again to say her maneuvering jets still functioned. Then it blared a warning Klaxon and she knew she was in trouble.

All of her secondary thrusters were down, and heat was building up in her fusion reactor. Not so fast that she was about to turn into a giant, glorious fireball. But if that heat level rose unchecked, it would eventually melt right through the insulating layer of shielding that separated her cockpit from the reactor. She wouldn't need enemy fire then to burn her to a crisp.

It wasn't an immediate problem, but every time she used her main thrusters, the heat would rise exponentially. Her main method of avoiding the worst of the enemy fire—maneuvering at speed—would be the thing that killed her.

If she didn't keep moving, the enemy would swarm all over her and they would finish her off with plasma fire. Either way she would die in agony.

Her only chance was to conserve her thrust, to fly smart instead of fast. She brought her engine board around in front of her and studied her options, all while keeping her eyes on the enemy scouts that wheeled and darted around her. She still had her maneuvering and positioning jets, the tiny thrusters in the sides and nose of the BR.9 that allowed her to turn and brake. She could use those as much as she liked—except they ran on their own fuel reservoirs and those were limited. You weren't supposed to use maneuvering jets as your main source of thrust.

For a few minutes, though, they might be enough. As a scout dove down toward her from on high, she punched for a hard burn that sent her spinning away. The scout rushed past her and she blasted it apart with PBW fire as it passed. Up ahead an interceptor had filled the local volume with hurtling impactors. She twisted around on her positioning jets and watched as one of the deadly rounds zoomed past her canopy. She cut a hole in the side of the interceptor, then fired one of her few remaining disruptors into the cavity she'd made. It was gratifying to watch the interceptor burst apart from within like a rotten fruit, but she had little time to congratulate herself—three more scouts were headed her way on different trajectories, all of them headed to intersect right with her position.

Come on, Lanoe,
she thought.
Give us a miracle here.

Her communications board chimed at her, telling her she had an incoming message. It wasn't from Lanoe, though—it was from Maggs.

“Not to be a wet blanket,” he said, “but I think I'm rather desperately in need of help out here. Anyone?”

She had no idea what to tell him. She had her hands full already.

N
othing. No response at all.

It looked like Maggs was on his own.

At the start of the fight, when he'd come screaming in on a high-power corkscrew and laid waste to his first fifteen scouts, he'd felt iron-bound and invincible, an angel of destruction bent toward hell on a trajectory of pain. He'd forgotten, in the years since he'd been on active duty, how splendid it felt, just how fun, to sweep through one's enemies with a truly graceful attack run.

Then the sheer magnitude of the battle had overwhelmed him, and he'd very quickly stopped enjoying himself. As he wove and darted through the outer limit of the cloud of enemies, racking up kills, he'd avoided the worst of the enemy's attacks but by sheer law of probability some of them had gotten through. One impactor after another had clanged off his hull. Sprays of plasma fire had washed across his canopy, blinding him with their incredible, dazzling light.

No, this wasn't fun at all. Especially with all the red lights flashing at him.

Every one of his boards showed significant damage. His engines were battered and bruised and their output had dropped to half of optimum. His supplies of ammunition were running dangerously low—he had but two disruptors left to his name, and even his PBWs were running short. Life support was critical and even communications had seen better days. He wasn't sure if his call for help had been received or if it had even gone out.

One more bad hit, one more damaged system, would do for him, and he knew it.

In his head his father's voice kept up a nonstop stream of advice.

Keep your nose up, Maggsy—keep turning, think in three dimensions. Keep your mind on your six, but not so much you forget to look forward. Don't just spray them down with your beamers; pick your shots. You can afford to lose your airfoils, so turn into those blows you can't avoid, let your wings take the brunt.

All very good advice, he was sure. None of which was new to him. Maggs had learned to fly and fight long before he'd set foot inside a cockpit. At his father's knee he'd absorbed all this advice a hundred times over, as Dear Old Dad regaled Maggs
enfant
with tales of epic dogfights and desperate encounters at the rim of some far-off system, all from the comfort of an armchair at the Admiralty. Maggs had, not unlike a sponge, absorbed every word, memorized every stratagem, every tactic.

In fact, once he'd reached his majority and entered the Naval ranks himself, the hardest part of his education had been unlearning half of what his father had taught him—figuring out which bits of advice were still valuable and which had been made antiquated by advances in technology, or which he'd misinterpreted from lack of practical experience.

Still, father's legacy had kept him alive. Heeding that paternal advice brought him his Blue Star and made him a bit of a hero, hadn't it?

Do remember to pivot, and keep your trajectory clear,
the voice in his head told him.
Don't forget the rotary, the best trick you've got. A snap turn's better than a vector field, when you're down in the slot.

Though perhaps the best piece of advice of all had been this:
A hero is a fellow that learned on day one how to duck, and on day two when to do it. Courage and resourcefulness ill behoove a dead man.

Two interceptors were closing on him, their guns already belching out impactors. They didn't seem to care when their fellow scouts ran right into their lanes of fire—they were happy to blow away their own scouts, if it meant getting a shot off at a human pilot. Maggs eyed his ammunition board, saw his last two disruptors showing green lights all across their status displays. They were ready to fire. Once they were gone, though, he'd have none left.

He checked the interceptors again, plotting their trajectories. They were set to converge on a spot a few kilometers in front of him, though of course the bigger enemy ships were smart enough not to actually collide with each other. They would correct at the last moment and just miss one another and then they would bank around, double back on him where they would have a good view of his tail.

The thing about this enemy, though, unlike every human foe Maggs had ever faced down, was its predictability. The alien drones were fast and they could appear to be clever but only because they were running some algorithm, some deep-seated program. If you could guess that program's next move, you could play the enemy ships against each other. It just took a bit of gray matter, a little application—

There.

Maggs twisted around and brought his nose up until he was burning away from the interceptors. The big, spiky ships poured on their own fuel until they were arcing up to meet him—they wouldn't let him get away so easily.

Too bad an entire cloud of scouts was already swooping down toward him. Too bad for the interceptors, anyway.

The scouts tried to bank out of the way but they weren't quite fast enough. The interceptors tried to jink but they had to fight their own momentum, and they would never be as nimble as Maggs and his BR.9. Some of the scouts managed to get away. Others plowed right into the interceptors like insects smacking into the windshield of a ground car. Their spindly bodies folded and twisted as they struck home, their fuel tanks igniting silently in the void.

One of the interceptors broke in half under the weight of multiple collisions, its thrusters sending it rolling off into darkness.

The other interceptor was damaged but kept after Maggs, listing a bit but still blazing away with its heavy guns. Impactors flashed past Maggs's canopy like fat shadows, coming fast and thick. One creased his left-side fairing and it burst in a shower of sparks, adding a new red light to his damage control board.

Maggs stood on his throttle a moment longer, then yanked it back to zero as he shoved his stick over to the side. His BR.9 rolled hard to the left and the interceptor flashed past him until he could see the glow of its thrusters.

The interceptors were too big and too heavily armored to be killed by PBW fire—under normal conditions. There was no armor inside their thruster nozzles, though. Maggs brought up a virtual Aldis sight and let his computer find the perfect firing solution, let his finger hover over his trigger, waiting…waiting…now.

His particle beam lanced straight through the interceptor's engines, carving the bastard like a roasted goose. There wasn't much to see—all the damage was internal—but the interceptor's guns stopped firing. A moment later its thrusters cut out as well.

Maggs would have preferred to see the thing explode in the dark, but he would take the kill he could get.

He looked around for the next target, the next dogfight. With his free hand he reached for his comms board again. Zhang wasn't responding—maybe she was dead. He refused to believe he'd outlived the famous Aleister Lanoe, though.

“Commander,” he called, “do we have an actual plan, here? Or do we just keep fighting till we die? I'm just working on my social calendar, you see.”

Bravado was another thing he'd learned from Dear Old Dad. It was so much more decorous than screaming in terror.

Green pearls queued up in the edge of Lanoe's vision, calls coming in from Zhang and Maggs that he didn't have time to answer.

He needed every ounce of concentration he could get, at that particular moment.

Scouts and interceptors kept launching from the sides of the destroyer, which had shrunk to nearly a third of its original mass. Lanoe watched it like a hawk, waiting to see any sign of the line ship underneath all those ancillary craft, especially keeping an eye out for anything resembling a crew section.

He wasn't just biding his time while he watched, however. The emerging scouts and interceptors paid him no attention except to swoop out of his way as they hurried toward the cloud of their fellows beyond, out where Zhang and Maggs were. The enemy didn't spare a shot for Lanoe, as if he were some neutral third party they didn't have to worry about.

He made them pay for that mistake. As soon as they were clear of the destroyer—sometimes even as they emerged—he tore them apart, racking up kill after kill after kill. He imagined Maggs would find it all terribly unsporting.

Lanoe didn't give a damn.

Some glitch in the enemy's programming, some misplaced variable in its algorithm, had given him a chance to take out a vast number of ships before they could attack his squadmates. He would thin the herd as much as he could, until the enemy realized its mistake and came for him.

If that happened, of course, he wouldn't stand a chance. He was in far too close. In a moment a hundred scouts would be on him and they would turn his FA.2 into a cloud of vaporized metal before he even started to evade.

He flew a tight course around and around the destroyer, looping down under its belly then up over its top decks then back around for another pass. This must be what an apex predator felt like, he thought—the lions of the plains of Africa, killer whales in the polar oceans must have felt like this before humans came along and beat them at their own game. To pick one's targets secure in the knowledge of one's own inviolability. It was almost boring.

The green pearls kept spinning. He let one call through, then the other. Listened more to the tones of his squadmates' voices than the actual content of their words. Zhang was in trouble, he could tell—she put a brave face on it but there was an edge of fear there, a certain clipped bite in her voice that he knew all too well.

He still didn't know how to really read Maggs, but he was certain the swindler was in bad shape, too. He'd given them a mission far above and beyond what two fighter pilots should be expected to accomplish and he knew it. Desperately he wanted to turn away from the destroyer, burn back toward the cloud and come to their aid—but he knew he was far more useful to them where he was. Every scout and interceptor he took down here was one less they would have to fight. The work he was doing was the only chance they had.

Ahead of him two interceptors jumped into space at the same time, huge and dark and lumpy. He'd used up his disruptors long before then but he'd figured out the trick of taking the big ships down with just PBWs, found all the sensitive spots in their thick hide of armor. The thrusters were good, but hard to get at. Far better to rake fire across their sensor pods. The hard part was finding them, as they were nestled deep between two ranks of guns on the interceptors' flanks. Once you blinded them, though, the interceptors would just fly off in a straight line, headed for nowhere, unable to find targets to shoot at. Like the machines they were, they had no idea what to do when their programming broke down, and thus they did nothing.

Scouts, of course, were a lot easier. One good shot and they broke in pieces. Lanoe made a point of taking careful aim, but only so he wouldn't waste ammunition.

Meanwhile, below him, the destroyer grew leaner and leaner as its cargo of drone ships launched toward oblivion. And still no sign of what Lanoe desperately wanted to find.

NO CAVITIES DETECTED
, his computer kept telling him.
MILLIMETER-WAVE ANALYSIS: NO RESULT. MAGNETIC RESONANCE ANALYSIS: NO RESULT
.

If one of the aliens were inside that thing, Derrow's hypothetical programmer, they were buried deep.

Boards flashed at him. Red pearls spun in the corners of his vision. Alarms blared.

Maggs couldn't pay attention to any of them. All he could see was the divot in his canopy.

He'd flown right into a kinetic impactor, straight into a headlong collision with a chunk of metal the size of his fist. He must have caught it at a slight angle, because it hadn't just torn through the canopy, his body, the seat behind him—instead it had bounced off, ricocheting out into the void. The impact had been powerful enough, however, to leave a finger-long dent in the carbonglas of the canopy.

Carbonglas was nigh-on indestructible. It could be crushed under hundreds of tons of weight, subjected to temperatures higher than the surface of a star, and not even get scratched. Even particle beams could do little more than mar its shiny surface.