Hell or Highwater (Hell's Jesters, #5), page 33
“Thank you, Carson,” Avery replied and the transmission ended.
“Do we have confirmation from the rest of the commanders?” Greer demanded of the comm officer. “Is everyone in position?”
“We have confirmation now, sir,” she replied after scanning her displays. “All units ready and waiting.”
“Slasher Squadron is still on deck,” Kelin reminded him. “But the launch officer reports they’re about to lift off.”
Greer considered the sad collection of Avery’s ships limping back to Surigao, the formation of missile tenders and repair ships lingering in the planet’s orbit—virtually incapable of defending themselves—and the scattering of local militia fighters left to watch over them. He noted, also, Slasher’s badly depleted tally. They’d taken a pounding in that last flurry, too.
“We don’t have time to wait,” he growled. “Slasher to launch as they can. Once clear, they get the short straw; orbital patrol over Surigao. Someone has to keep an eye on things back there.”
“Aye, sir,” the comm officer replied.
“Everyone else,” Greer said, raising his voice to a near-roar, “the word is ‘strike’. Repeat, strike!”
“ARE YOU SERIOUS?” KELLY asked into her mic.
“The order is confirmed,” replied the radio orderly. “Slasher Squadron to take up reserve position over Surigao.”
Kelly blew out a breath as a mixture of relief and disgust swirled within her. She had nothing to prove. None of them did, anymore. But they all knew Greer would be going in for the kill, now.
“Understood,” she replied at last and killed the link.
The gantries of the Ludlow rang with activity around her. Crews scrambled like Nova Terra honey bees about the deceptively flimsy-looking girders. Like the Sacramento, the new strike carrier’s bay was a series of tiered racks into which starfighters were guided by tractor beam. When rearmament or repair was completed, those same tractors lifted the fighters out of their slots, positioned them, and then flung them back into space. Computer coordination then fired the gravs and sent the starfighters careening on.
A crew chief swung down from the superstructure above Kelly and landed beside her open cockpit. “Two minutes, Commander,” the bulky-suited woman announced. “Scatter-packs are about reloaded.”
Kelly stuck up a thumb and waved her on her way. She couldn’t help but seethe a little. The crews were overworked as hell, but their ass-dragging had probably cost Slasher a chance at being in on the big finish.
The communicator was blinking, one icon. Himari’s. Kelly touched it, felt the soft pop as her earbud re-mated to the computer. “What is it, Three?”
“Is it true, Commander?” the younger pilot asked. “They’re putting us in the rear with the gear?”
Kelly cursed chatty crews and spacers. “You let me worry about that.”
Himari paused. When she spoke again, her voice was hoarse with emotion. “Maybe that’s for the better.”
Kelly frowned. “You all right, Himari?”
Another pause. “It’s Slasher Six. Harry.”
Kelly nodded to herself. Then another meaning dawned on her. Six—Camlin, she remembered with a guilty rush—had been a quiet, but smiley man of dark eyes. But those eyes had twinkled whenever he spoke with Himari.
“You were close?” she asked quietly.
“Close,” Himari replied tentatively. “Closer than was probably appropriate.”
“I...see.” Kelly did. She really did, and had to hide a sigh. The sound of Tim’s voice, calling across the vast distance haunted her, hurt her. And for the umpteenth time, she questioned why she let that distance remain, why she didn’t just ditch and return to the Jesters—consequences be damned! Life was short—violently short. And he was still out there.
Maybe.
“I knew it was a bad idea.” Himari sounded like someone still in shock. “We both knew. But...we had to. You know?”
“I do.”
“And now...” the words choked off. When she spoke again, it was low and tremulous. “It was all over so fast. I couldn’t do anything.”
“We’ve got work to do, still,” Kelly said sternly, knowing she couldn’t let the younger woman wallow in this. She’d be worse than useless. But—damn—Kelly hated herself as she added ice to her tone. “You have to put it aside for now.”
“I know,” Himari near-sobbed. “I’m sorry, Commander. I’ve had time to think about it now, though, and—”
“Slasher Three,” Kelly said softly, but firmly, “I need you in control now.”
She could hear Himari’s reflexive gulp. A last pause. Then, “Understood, Commander. I...I’m ready, of course.”
“Good,” Kelly replied, “because just because we’re getting out of this next part, I doubt the Union Fleet is through with us.”
She couldn’t help but see a roguish half-smile, sandy brown hair, and a pair of mischievously twinkling blue eyes across the distance of her mind.
“This thing isn’t over.”
A GLOBULAR MATERIALIZED in Tim’s cockpit and within it a dark, smiling face adjusted glasses on the bridge of its nose. “Jester Leader, you really don’t need to do this.”
Tim grinned back at the captain of the Union stealth-destroyer. “Actually, Captain, I’m pretty sure I do.”
The starship—Panther-class, as Captain DuBoise told them when they made contact—limped off Tim’s starboard wing, surrounded by the helpful swarm of what remained of his forlorn hope of Hellhounds. Its slender, lethal hull was blackened and mangled in multiple spots and occasional streamers of escaping atmosphere still puffed out. One of the strange, nacelle-like protrusions along its spine had fused to the dorsal surface like a scorched tumor.
“We’re making sixty percent now,” DuBoise protested. “We’ve stabilized life support and shields are partially restored. The fleet knows we’re coming.”
“And you’ve got no weapons left to speak of,” Tim replied. “Some random Alliance sweep comes along, and you’re finished.” He scanned the tactical. “Besides, I’m not sure what other good we can do.”
Their charge to interdict the arrival of the second Alliance fleet and subsequent flight away from it had flung Tim’s sad collection of Jester stragglers far and wide. While titans moved into what was looking like the last round of their hellish brawl, over towards the Galactic East Gap, there was nothing in this quadrant but wreckage and void. They could probably make a sprint for the fight, but Jeanie’s calculations put that run at nearly thirty minutes.
“Well, we’re happy for the company, Jesters,” DuBoise was saying. “We should make Surigao orbit in twenty.”
“We’ll be with you the whole way,” Tim replied and saluted sloppily as the other man disappeared from his hologram.
One of the Hellhound icons was pulsing with an incoming query. Tim sighed and steeled himself before touching it. “Yeah, Matyszak?”
“We have any word from Red or any of the others?” the other man asked from the globular that popped into being before him.
“Nothing,” he replied and touched his control panel. “Isn’t that right, Jeanie?”
“I have received no signals on any Jester channel,” the AI answered. “That could be due to the debris belt, the distance, or jamming.”
“Or because there’s no one sending,” Matyszak said with a huskiness to his voice Tim recognized, to his shock, as fear. “Could be we’re the only ones left.”
“No way,” Tim said with bravado he suddenly, certainly did not feel. “Red and the rest have likely fallen back to Tripwire Station. Hell, they probably think there’s none left of us!”
“Alliance was bombing the snot out of the belt, Watkins,” Matyszak said. “Do we even think Tripwire is still there?”
“They’re there,” Tim insisted. “And we’ll get back to them as soon as we get these guys home.”
“If you say so.”
“I do.”
Matyszak nodded from his globular and the hologram cut out.
Tim drummed his fingers along the armrest of his flight couch. “Jeanie,” he asked, “what are the odds he’s right, that the rest of the Jesters were wiped out?”
“Insufficient data,” the AI replied without hesitation, “and, Tim, I don’t think it’s productive to speculate.”
Tim scanned the tactical for a moment, took in the sad, little collection of starfighters following him. Thirteen left. He could remember a time when the Jesters could barely muster more than that, back in the bad, old days. He had a horrid moment, imagining restarting the organization without any of the rest. They’d all been scattered, all to the far corners of creation. Rodann on his suicide mission into the Foundation Sector. Red maybe leading stragglers through the asteroids, or maybe just another cloud of debris. Kelly out there...maybe...maybe not...
Stop.
“You know what?” he said to Jeanie, “I agree.”
“Now I’m worried,” the AI quipped in response.
Tim grinned.
On the tactical, another Hellhound blip was pulsing now. He touched it with only a little less hesitation. “Hey, kid. How’re you doing?”
“Fourth dimensional baffles!” Cory squawked in his earbud. “That’s what those are!”
Tim frowned. “Uh...what?”
“They said they were a stealth-destroyer,” she replied with energy he hadn’t expected. “I’ve been scanning the auxiliary nacelle that’s still intact and I’ve come to the conclusion it’s a 4D projector! It has to be! Just like we’ve used!” She huffed. “The Union stole my idea!”
“I, ah, don’t think you had any kind of patent on the idea, kid.”
“It was mine!” she snapped.
Tim grinned again. Her fit of techno-witchery pique was just the salve his weariness and despair required. And he realized in a guilty rush that, if he was stuck re-founding the Jesters, he wouldn’t be alone, at all.
“Glad you’re here, kid.”
“And that’s fine, and all, Tim, and I’m glad you feel that way,” she went on, “but that’s hardly the point!”
“What are we going to do? Sue them?”
“Well, I’m going to give someone a piece of my mind, that’s for certain!”
“Can’t wait to see it.”
ANTON PULLED BACK A flap of fabric from the armrest of his chair to reveal a communicator panel that he keyed with a wormy finger. “Mister Renfield, I think my guests and I are done, here. If you could join us and bring bags for the items we discussed, for their journey back?”
Silence answered him.
The Methuselah scowled, turning his rat-like face into a pale knot of wrinkled. “Mister Renfield, I’m speaking to you.”
Still no answer.
Jerry glanced across the table at Tina, who’d suddenly tensed, hand darting to the blastpistol at her hip. He felt Josie mirroring the motion at his side, going for her own, and had the nerve-tingling sensation of the moment before a lightning strike.
“Mister Renfield!” A tendril of drool glittered down onto the comm panel. “Answer me at once!”
A hiss of static purled from the plate. “—eem to be experiencing a communications interruption,” a voice hissed through. “Sorry, Master. We’re working on it.”
Anton wiped the spittle from his lip slowly with his free hand. The other shivered over the communicator. The rest of the Methuselah was as still as a woodland animal that’d heard an unfamiliar sound. Empty eyes widened slowly. “What kind of communications issue?”
“We’re working on it,” the voice repeated.
The void-eyed turned towards Tina as Anton replied, “Thank you”, and cut the link.
Tina stood from the couch and drew her blaster. “Time to go?”
He sucked drool in through his teeth, a kind of hiss-scowl. “Miss Rodann, I fear it’s already too late for that.”
Lightning flashed from outside the study windows, followed a fraction of a second later by a thunderclap that flung glass into the room, then fire.
Something slammed Jerry between the shoulder blades, sent him sprawling onto the floor. He felt the couch kicked over beside him, the jostle as Josie dropped down behind the upended furniture. Wind and snow howled in, louder even than the window-shattering detonation. But the keen of blaster bolts slicing into the room were louder, still.
Jerry scrambled on all fours for the high-backed chair, also thrown aside by the blast. A squirm of black fabric, white forearms, and squealing drew him to Anton. But a blurry of plasma streaked over him, drove him down to the hardwood, squeezing as close to it as humanly possible as the sizzle of energy death tickled by his shoulder blades.
Looking up from folded arms, he could see Tina behind the opposite couch, firing from behind smoldering tags of blaster-scoured cushion—ducking down as fresh bolts ripped them to fiery tags and dashed splinters into the air.
From behind the other, kicked-over couch, Josie rose up and blasted away at the jagged shards of window. Something swung into view, a black armor-clad figure dangling from a rope, firing into the room with tight, clinical bursts. One of Josie’s shots connected in a crash of sparks and a short-lived scream as the attacker fell from sight.
“Go-go-go!!!” Tina screamed, firing out the window, though Jerry could see nothing there but smoke and whirling snow.
Jerry lurched half-way onto his haunches and scuttled behind the wreck of the chair, found Anton flailing to get up. A clawed hand raked across Jerry’s cheek as he screeched, “You! You led them to me! You’ve ruined it all—”
Jerry’s fist smashed the Methuselah’s toothy sneer into a smear of blood and snot and left him limp on the floor. “Shut. UP!!!” He grabbed the stunned, whimpering form and began to drag him clear of the flaming clamor of the firefight.
Josie ducked and scampered from the quadrant of room exposed to the windows while Tina blazed wildly at the opening. Another armored figure swung from above, suspended from a rappelling harness. Booted feet shot through. Tina’s fire struck one, shattering the attacker’s leg into fiery shreds halfway up the shin. Squalling, the armored man flopped head over heels, halfway into the room, tangled in his line. Two more bolts from Tina’s Street Special ended his struggle.
But a second attacker dropped into sight, scuttling to one side and using the window sill as cover as he filled the room with cyan splinters. Tina broke and ran, chased by the blaster bolts. One slapped into the stack of peta-drives, shattering the one at the bottom and kicking the other two onto the floor.
“Nooo!” Anton wailed, beginning to thrash anew in Jerry’s arms as he dragged him towards the exit. “It’ll all be for nothing!”
Tina skidding to a halt, hearing him, and turned to fire again, savaging the windows till the barrel of her blaster glowed. Josie joined her and the pair edged back towards the nearest of the fallen drive, firing as they went. Tina barked something and Josie nodded, ducked around behind her, and lunged for the storage device.
Just as she scooped up the tome-sized drive, an arm flipped into sight and a ping drew Jerry’s attention to an egg-shaped object bouncing off the wall opposite the windows. “Grenade! Go!!!”
Tina backpedaled into him, using her mass and momentum to force him and Anton stumbling out the door into the hall. Josie hurtled after them as the blaster fire into the room dropped off suddenly. The peta-drive under one arm, she spun upon reaching the hall and kicked the door shut.
WHAM!!!
Actinic white light limned the doorframe for the blink of an eye before smoke and shrapnel gouted out through the cracks and flung the door outward on a shockwave of sound and force. Josie slammed back into the wall behind her, the hurtling door hitting her once, then dropping over her.
His ears ringing and with no sense of how he’d ended up on the hallway floor, under Anton, Jerry staggered back to his feet, throwing off the now wildly-yammering Methuselah. Fiery light flickered from within the shattered door and fumes gusted out, caught flashlight beams waving wildly about. Tina was coughing, trying to lever herself back upright from further down the corridor. Jerry’s world wobbled as he reached for his own blaster, was surprised at the ease with which he drew it, aimed, and started firing.
A voice yelped within, amplified by a helmet speaker. Another bawled orders. Blaster bolts chased out into the hall, filling it with jolts of spark and smoke. Jerry flinched back, still firing as Josie kicked out from under the fallen door and scuttled by his feet. Tina was staggering to his side, shouting something he couldn’t hear. One of his shots went wide and glanced off the remnant of the doorframe, spraying debris back into their face.
Tina jolted his weapon aside. “Go, Dad!” She yanked the weapon from his hand and with both blasters aimed sprayed into the wrecked study beyond. “I’ll be right behind you!”
Wheezing for breath, Jerry stumbled down the hall towards the lift, grasping Anton by the back of his frayed, outdated suit as he went. Josie led the way, the peta-drive clenched protectively close to her breast, turning as she reached the chute door and aiming her blaster back the way they’d come with her free hand.
WHUMPF!!!
The floor rippled beneath their feet, then shivered as a long roar went through the very stones of the palace. Jerry stumbled into Josie, the pair of them crunching Anton between them. The overhead lights fluttered out, left only the ruby glow of widely-spaced emergency lamps and cyan strobe of blaster bolts.
Jerry worked the control plate beside the lift door, found the actuator crystals unresponsive. With a slug that crumpled holocrystal wafer beneath it, he swore, “Shit! Dead! What now?”
“There...” Anton wheezed through blood-slobber. He nodded feebly from Jerry’s side to an alcove to their left—and a door. “Access stairs.”
“Whatever you’re going to do” Tina shouted between blaster bolt flurries down the hall “do it fast!”
Josie spun and kicked the door in. It crashed against a wall beyond and hung open, hinges warped by the violence of her blow. She lurched through and paused, more emergency lights highlighting her like a shadow against an inferno as she peered down what was obviously a stairwell. Apparently satisfied, she waved them to follow.
