Hell or Highwater (Hell's Jesters, #5), page 14
And the Alliance fighter jocks were coming on hard, grav drive signatures bright as miniature suns on the tactical. The leading wave was streaking past the monitor, loosely-spaced, looked to be elements of the system’s patrol screen. But heavier formations were tearing out after them, hot off their carriers and almost shivering with eagerness.
This was looking to be the biggest fight since the Fury battles.
Kelly couldn’t help a wild, freefall exhilaration in her core. The balance of the Fringe World Fleet sprinkled through the space before Coronado’s face like gunmetal tear drops sprinkled across a red surface. Slashes of cloud blown inland by silver-blue seas far below them added a wheeling, out-of-control motion to everything. The war book was still tallying ships as the Marauder’s sensors scanned, dozens of them, hundreds of them.
Avery’s plucky force, backed up by the battlecruiser division on loan from the main Union Fleet, had stood off heavy odds before. And in her short time with them, Kelly had come to share that spirit, that sense that there wasn’t anything they couldn’t do. Downright Jester-like, in fact. But watching the barely three starfighter squadrons array before better than twice their number tempered it. The Alliance is here to fight, too. She knew.
“Slasher Squadron,” crackled the voice of the radio orderly on the bridge of the Sacramento, “Hammer Squadron, the yards are not your target, repeat, not priority! Engage Alliance fighter cover and draw them back into range of the heavies.”
Kelly smiled as a flurry of groans and protests broke out over the general address channel. She knew the feeling—really, she did. “Zip it, Slashers,” she cut in over them. “You all knew this, already!”
“Look at all that cheddar!” Himari lamented.
And running the gauntlet through Valkyries, inter-linked starship weaponry, the point-defenses of the docks, themselves, and possibly fire from the planet would cost the Slashers their entire roster. Kelly had seen what happened when fighters were flung into maelstroms like that. It had been glorious—and sickeningly brief.
“We break up on contact,” Kelly said over the general address. “Stay in your flights. Lead them into the meatgrinder.”
“Thought we were the meatgrinder...” Himari started.
Kelly touched the pilot’s icon on the tactical, keying up the one-to-one channel. “That’s enough, Slasher Three!” she snapped. “We’re sixty seconds out from extreme weapons range. Get straightened out.”
“Roger, Leader,” came the sheepish reply.
Kelly let it go at that. Plenty else to worry about. The nearest Valkyries were still accelerating, a reckless charge that suggesting they might try to run through the Marauders, just as the Slashers intended to do. Unlike the scrum on the other side of the planet, where the Jesters had gotten drawn in around the monitors, these pilots didn’t seem to think that was where the fight would be.
They were right.
Kelly let herself eye the conflagration of the Jesters’ battle for just an instant, thought of the weird, coded exchange she’d had with Tim. Be a hell of a thing it that’s the way we last spoke. She shook herself. Stop it. Can’t think that way.
She shouldn’t be thinking about him, at all.
Slices of deadly azure lit the vacuum. The Slashers were too cool a crowd to answer the Valkyries’ spoiling fire in kind, even as a bolt glanced across a Marauder’s shields in their Second Flight. But as hostile targeting alarms warbled and the distances seared away, the time to reply rushed at them.
Every other Valkyrie blossomed into missile spreads. Kelly ground her teeth as she thumbed the weapons selector to the quad blaster and slid its targeting halo over the onrushing contacts, the holographic circle reddening immediately. She pulled the trigger and plasma bolts ravaged forth. The predictable rash of antimatter explosions walked across space as missiles died.
The Slashers were all opening up now, torrents of plasma and occasional particle beams, then floods of scatter-packs ripple-firing. Kelly had given them leave to spend their missiles liberally. They weren’t going to need them for heavier game. The Valkyries’ volley flared into an inferno and everything was blasting apart as once.
Kelly tightened as though anticipating a slap to the face. She knew where this was going. “Slashers Three and Six, remember; stay on me.”
Valkyries shot through the still-expanding fumes of their devastated missile salvo, not even bothering to fire energy weapons, piling on the speed. The Slashers broke up at their passing like ice struck by a fist. But the shards spun after them, sharp and ready to cut.
Kelly wrenched the stick to starboard and groaned as the Marauder strained into a hull-splitting turn. Sweat that’d stung at the corners of her eyes slid back, tracing itchy trails towards the lining of her helmet. Then the inertial compensators were catching up at she could feel something other than a crushing hand upon her whole body, see something other than grayish fog.
And what she saw was Valkyries streaking on towards the task force, pulling away from her as she struggled to alter velocity for pursuit. Crazy, she thought, cutting right through. They can’t have enough to hurt the heavies. Was that desperation? Overconfidence? Doesn’t matter. She fed the thrusters more power, pushing the Marauder after them. Only one had to get lucky to do damage.
The long chase back to the task force closed slowly, agonizingly. The Marauders had the speed to gain on the Valkyries and they hadn’t gotten so far past as to escape weapons range. Kelly’s targeting halo crimsoned over the trailing third of a flight and she queued up the particle cannon, triggered them.
Blue white fire licked across the fighter’s aft shield, bathed them in a nimbus that quickly flared white. Kelly saw a wobble from the Valkyrie. Then a lurch. Then—
“Watch that!”
The Valkyrie jock slammed his braking fields and seemed to almost stop in space. With the chase tearing along at a thousand kilometers an hour the Alliance fighter shot backwards towards its pursuers—hurtling right at us! Kelly juked to port as the stalled ship whipped by, her own speed putting it hundreds of kilometers into the distance astern of her in barely a second.
“Stay on the leaders!” she ordered hoarsely.
Himari and Slasher Six needed no encouragement, having not reacted to the last Valkyrie’s move, they were still gaining ground on the others, and their particle cannon strobes after them. Their combined fire caught up to the next fighter, sizzling across shields that incandesced into a lozenge of white flame. The Alliance pilot veered out of formation in time to save his skin, if not his shields, which blew out with a smear of sparks. Himari nosed after him, with Six staying on her wing.
Kelly gave the thrusters even more power, letting the Marauder shiver in protest to catch the ragged foursome of Valkyries still sprinting for the task force. A lightning flutter from the fleet warned her they’d reached the edge of their long-range weapons. She swallowed reflexively. Her drive signature and transponder should keep Union guns from tagging her. But as a storm of capital ship fire ravaged through space, she couldn’t really be sure.
That storm caught the leading Valkyrie instantly and the Alliance fighter just smeared away, barely embers left to cool against the void. The others split, one to port, two to starboard. Kelly veered after the pair, ignoring the shudder as a white shaft of fire that had to be a battlecruiser main gun blast savaged the space just behind her tail.
New shapes suddenly cluttered space around her, wing-shaped hulls that cut graceful, looping curves as they dove after the Valkyries’ delta-profiles. Firestorms. The fight had already carried back into the task force’s near space combat patrol and the reserve squadron—the Sharks—launching off the escort carrier Caruso, was joining the brawl. But they weren’t so much bringing help as confusion.
The ST-111 Firestorm had carried the brunt of the Union war effort in the early days, and suffered for it. Cobbled together from planetary militia contingents, civil defense units, and restarted factories on Outregion worlds, they’d been the best the Union could cough out—but still very last generation. Originally hyperspace-capable, Union engineers had stripped those out to try to give the old birds another grav drive and more speed. But like the Alliance’s Raven-series in reverse, the compromise had been less than successful.
Which the Valkyries Kelly pursued proved a moment later as a Firestorm attempted to cut across their path from below. Rather than take the older fighter’s heavier firepower on their ventral shields, they simply split. The Firestorm pilot had the sense to pick a target and follow—in this case, the one forking to starboard—rather than bumble across her own field of fire. But as the ‘storm pursued the first, the second Valkyrie pulled a bone-pulping turn and ripped back around onto its tail.
“On your tail, Shark pilot!” Kelly barked across the tactical network, at the same time wrenching her Marauder through a writhing turn after the Valkyrie.
A stuttering flash chewed the Firestorm’s stern deflector as the Alliance pilot unleashed with all energy weapons. The Shark pilot managed to tumble his heavier fighter’s wing-shape out of their deadly touch, trailing slag and flaps of debris. The Valkyrie chased it with its fire a moment longer—until Kelly’s suddenly tore into its own shields. With another mind-ripping maneuver, the Alliance pilot whipped to port and momentarily out of sight.
“Get clear, Shark!” Kelly called, frantically scanning her sensors for either of the Valkyries tangled up in the fight. “You’re not doing any goo—”
The Firestorm shattered down the center, sent great peels of wing spinning out in either direction and superheated gas belching straight across Kelly’s path. She had a fraction of a second to gasp, to ponder what damage could’ve caused such a catastrophic secondary explosion, then the Marauder was juddering through the inferno. Shrapnel flashed across her shields with crashes that felt like medicine balls thrown at a wall.
Then she was clear, with system displays fluttering red and damage alarms wailing.
Then she was getting hit again, slammed from behind. One of the shield readouts went solid crimson and a single note screamed alarm. Reflexively, she tore back on the stick and threw power to the thrusters, launched into a ninety degree climb away from her original path. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw lances of solid azure chopping frantically after her, but lost in a moment as the violence of her maneuver carried her out of her attacker’s firing arc.
The hell...? A glance at the tactical showed her not the pair of Valkyries she’d chased, but the first one, whose wild braking had carried it from her sight before. The hostile targeting alarm blatted and her pursuer suddenly blossomed into a full, six missile scatter-pack salvo.
“Slasher Three! Six!” she shouted. “A little help?”
When no response came, she sent the Hellhound lurching back towards the Union. Avery’s plan had been to draw the Alliance back on their guns; well, that was exactly what Kelly was going to do! Simultaneously, she dropped a little power back to the stern deflectors and flicked the release switch to drop one of the Marauder’s ECM pods.
A pair of the chasing missiles looped out after the decoy pod, came together at once upon it in a double sun of explosions. The remaining four kept on at Kelly’s tail, the Valkyrie that’d launched them trailing further behind, flicking an occasional blast after her, anticipating an evasion that might open up an advantageous shot.
The Union Fleet spread before them, already straddled in blaster fire as Valkyries broke through the near space combat patrol to streak in amongst the capital ships. But few profited from the experience, the Union’s tightly-interlinked point defenses enmeshing the space between them in a field of plasma bolts and gauss rounds you could practically dance open. And few of the Valkyries were finding the steps, floundering instead, as the galling volume of fire overwhelmed shields and hammered them into fiery scraps rushing into oblivion.
Kelly’s guts twisted as the streams of Union fire looped out towards her. But the transponder signaled true and none of the energy bolts got near, questing instead for the void astern of her. The missile salvo vanished in a blistering of explosions so brief, she almost missed it. More spectacular was the flare of the pursuing Valkyrie’s deflectors as the Union anti-starfighter batteries worked them over. The Alliance pilot veered out of his chase, but he’d already gotten lured into too far and no less than three ships’ fire converged upon him. Hardly cinders remained to spread across the vacuum.
“Thank you!” Kelly called across the general address, wondering if any of the straining Union gunnery crews would even notice. She dived through the task force, looped astern of it, and accelerated to find her Slashers and rejoin the fray.
Shafts of retina-gouging brilliance slammed forth from the Union capital ships, drowning out the frenetic glamor of the lesser batteries fighting off starfighters. A battlecruiser main gun—either heavy particle cannon or C+ mass drivers—was overkill against Alliance single-seat flitters, no matter how dangerous their stings. But Kelly quickly found the cruisers’ true purpose.
Downrange, the nearest monitor bathed in fire as Union guns worked over its shields. Given time by its fighter sorties, Avery’s attack group had sort themselves out into a formal battle line, destroyers and corvettes in an outer screen, cruisers and battlecruisers coming on behind those, and the more vulnerable Sacramento and Caruso hanging back. Now their combined fire mauled the outclassed battle platform.
It managed a valiant effort, pouring out missile volleys, plasma torpedoes, everything from heavy guns down to gauss rounds. But the Union heavies simply drowned it, shields blowing out and hull shattering before blasts that could slag a small town. For a moment, the monitor was a maelstrom of hurtling metal, splashes of slag, gouts of escaping atmosphere, and blooms of fire fed by them. Then she was gone in a fireball like a second star.
And the Union fleet hardly slowed to acknowledge it, streams of fire questing further down the gravity well, dashing up fresh firestorms as they found new targets. The Alliance Fleet was coming out to play.
“Slashers!” Kelly called with an increasingly frantic note—starfighters would matter nothing, at all, caught in between the coming contest of space leviathans. “Anyone who’s left, form up on me! Now!”
What had started as a raid was getting serious.
“Kill that thing!” Tim snarled and plunged his Hellhound between strobes of azure death.
He had no idea what had become of his other wing mate, but Cory was still there with him, chasing down on the blazing monitor at his flank. They’d cut in “behind” the bulky thing, hoping to find a blind spot to aft. But its stubby trio of gravity drives—like shrunken appendages too weak to support its weight—splayed out from the central cylinder and its stern bristled with point-defenses.
At least it’s not more missiles, Tim thought with teeth gritting as he juked to avoid a stream of plasma bolts. The dodge only carried him into another flurry that walked across his starboard shield in a stuttering crash. He lurched the other direction, steadied, blinking through a sizzled haze of sweat.
Targeting halos reddened over the ugly hull of the battle platform and Tim thumbed the selector.
“Scatter-packs?” Cory chirped from the communicator.
“No sense saving ‘em now!”
Tim let loose with both packs, the Hellhound shivering as sixteen anti-matter warheads boiled free on their mini-grav drives. Cory’s spread joined his, an avalanche of projectiles rushing down on the monitor, whose fire shifted suddenly to converge on the deadlier threat.
Clenching his jaw till the molars ached, Tim switched to guns and poured on the particle beams and plasma. The monitor’s shields whitened like a field of hell-snow below them, rippling with punishment, seething as they burned up. Scatter-pack missiles flashed even brighter as they died, but strobed brightest as a few got through to slam the shields.
Tim took that last as sign to pull out of his dive and sawed the stick to port, grunting as the Hellhound shuddered, then gasping as he realized just how long he’d waited. The monitor rushed up at him, so close he could see the first of its shield generator coils blowing out, watch secondary explosions ripple out from those. Metal streaked by to starboard as thrust carried him by, but he still felt the shock of a huge internal blast and saw a flap of the battle platform peeling off in a spray of shrapnel.
“Cory?” he grated as he let the Hellhound accelerate clear. “You still with me?”
“Wow!” she howled in reply. “Look at that go!”
A third of the monitor’s cylindrical surface was bulging out from internal stresses, and then bursting, sending out hurricanes of short-lived flame and debris. Even more eye-catching, though; the remaining two-thirds continuing to throw out anti-starfighter blasts, the turrets and crews continuing the fight, even as the Hellhounds’ disemboweling strike had left their ship’s guts hanging out in the void.
The rest of the Jesters knew a mortal wound when they saw it, though. Hellhounds converged like Tim had seen Dires do back home on Loudon, circling bloodied prey, warily at first, then lurching in for the kill. Jester scatter-pack missiles wheeled in where hull-plate had sheared away, plunged into exposed decks to detonate and send antimatter flames scrawled inward. It was almost painful to watch, the last, frenzied flail of the dying monitor.
And then it was over, the bullet-shaped monstrosity blowtorching in every direction as its fusion bottle finally failed and raw energy escaped its bonds to scour out the thing that had harnessed it. Super-heated gases billowed into momentary cataclysm, then faded in seconds for an utterly unsatisfying denouement.
“Jesters!” crackled across the general address. “Fall back for the system’s edge!”
Frantic motion on the tactical display caught Tim’s eye. Red’s wing was sprinting back from their lunge at the docks, and notably fewer in number. The butcher’s bill for Greer’s little diversion was running high, indeed.
