Hell or Highwater (Hell's Jesters, #5), page 4
She squeezed the trigger and the quad-blaster opened up, a crackle felt through the hull, individual reports too fast to discern. Packets of cyan death streaked across the vacuum in firefly patterns, fluttering into the path of the Raven’s salvo. A missile intersected with a bolt and both flashed from existence in antimatter white. Then the fireworks were walking through the rest of the volley, picking it apart.
Kelly hosed the stream of blaster fire across one missile, twitched over to another just as the first shattered, then jumped to a third, firing till only superheated gases remained to fill the dark. A trickle of sweat burned its way into the corner of an eye. She tasted more on her lips as she crushed the trigger, watched the missiles die, watched more still coming on.
“Release one scatter-pack, apiece!” she barked. A flick of the selector queued up the number four pack on her weapons display, left it pulsing green. “Independent targeting!” She jerked the trigger.
The Marauder juddered as the six-missile spread vomited forth. Rushing into the void, they immediately twined apart, wheeling after their opposites in the Raven volley that had survived the plasma blaster flail. A final frenzy of fire globes blossomed before Kelly as missile met missile at immeasurable speeds.
“Pour on the speed!” she shouted into the mic. “Go right through them!”
The Raven pilots had gone with the predictable opening moves; particle cannon harassment at long range, missile volley, and then follow it all in, counting on the confusion of shooting down the volley to blind and distract their foes. It made sense facing reasonably-matched fighters, getting the enemy to waste ordnance and then drawing them into a dogfight.
But Kelly was about to show these Ravens how poorly-matched they were.
Particle beams and plasma bolt chopped through still-expanding fireballs to find the Marauders. For a terrifying instant, the Ravens were everywhere, spouting energy death, slashing straight through the midst of the Marauders. One passed so close to port Kelly saw the flaming angel’s halo denoting some Alliance squadron on its fuselage.
Gonna send that angel to hell!
Killing the thrusters with the flick of a switch, Kelly spun the Marauder on its y-axis and whipped the nose about to bring guns to bear on the passing Raven—the old “turn-and-burn” of the Jesters. She was already firing, sawing the quad-blaster’s cyan torrent across the fighter’s shields, snowing them in splotches of impact that suddenly flashed white with overload. The Raven veered out of its pass, whipped from sight, but trailed a spume of sparks and debris.
Kelly almost felt another Raven coming before she heard the warning blat of hostile weapons lock. Pulsing the maneuvering fields, she stood the Marauder’s nose up at a ninety-degree angle relative to her course. Slamming the thrusters sent her rocketing “up” and away from the convulsion of the dogfight.
Particle beams sliced the space she’d occupied, followed by the Raven that’d thought to pounce on her. This one pulled a bone-pulping turn to follow, choosing to hold on to speed rather than pivot and fire as she’d done. A pair of its comrades followed, the threesome accelerating with obvious eagerness.
Kelly flicked the selector to scatter-pack, touched the lead icon to designate as the target and fired. The missiles frothed out straight ahead, seemed to bunch, and then sprayed back, seemingly right for her. They sizzled by recklessly close, chasing back down the path she’d taken, into the pursuing Ravens.
The leader of the trio on her tail opened fire with blasters frantically, the chase suddenly reversed. Kelly’s volley withered as its comrades joined it, clawing space into a whirlwind of antimatter brilliance. One had the presence of mind to trigger a volley in response, but rather than target her, sent it rushing uselessly into her salvo.
Again, she killed the thrusters and whipped about, reengaged them with a jolt that punished spaceframe and her spine. The gravity drives slammed her back towards the explosions and the Ravens just rising through their settling fumes. They were close, so damned close, shields still fluttering from near-misses.
Kelly didn’t miss, plastered the lead Raven with the full fury of her quad-blaster. Shields flared up through the spectrum of colors to white, flashed out as the Raven’s generator coil blew with overload. The spew of sparks from its destruction was lost in the fireball the Raven became an instant later as plasma bolts walked its length, left only splinters showering through the endless cold of space.
Debris flamed across Kelly’s shields. The remaining pair of Ravens streaked by to either side. Knowing she couldn’t give up speed this time, with them about to be right on her tail, she wrenched the stick to starboard and groaned as the inertial compensators fought to keep up with the bone-crushing maneuvering. She knew it was a gamble, with g-forces pushing grey into the corners of her vision; the Ravens might not be there when she finished the turn.
Or they might be right on top of her.
Turned out, they were neither, had peeled off the opposite direction together in a tight arc that left them exactly opposite her maneuver. Bad for her, but good for Himari and Slasher Six, who appeared to have cut an arc back across the rear of the scattering Raven formation, rather than mimicking their leader’s maniac course. Their position put them practically on top of Kelly’s adversaries.
“Got ‘im!” Himari cheered prematurely. But it proved predictive. She hit the trailing Raven with the full load of particle and plasma bolts. Shields flared apart like an eggshell of pure energy, shattering into sheets of fire. What remained of the Raven after that blazed briefly across the stars like a bottle rocket and abruptly blinked from creation.
The second one veered away violently and Himari followed tightly, drunk with her success. Their path took them across the T of a second three-Raven flight rocketing up from behind their chase. Azure and cyan licked out from the newcomers, missed Himari, but converged on Six.
The Marauder’s shields dazzled with the punishment and the kid didn’t have the experience to know to just accelerated through the storm, tried turning away, instead. That only left him in the cone of their fire longer and he paid for it, shields finally blowing out with the telltale puff of sparks and shrapnel from the fighter’s dorsal surface.
“Thrusters, Six!” Kelly screamed. “Run for it!”
In the same moment, Kelly was coming around from her turn, putting her right on the chasing Ravens’ tails. The Marauder still shaking from the violence of the maneuver, she dumped more power to the thrusters, came careening right up on the trio’s grav drive wakes. One of them must have been minding his sensors, because he panicked and broke off to port. The remaining pair lined themselves up as perfectly for Kelly as if by plan.
A buzzsaw of plasma fire took the trailing Raven in the tail. Where a Hellhound’s single chin blaster might have mauled but not broken the fighter’s aft shields, the Marauder’s quad threw a pile of bricks at it. The deflectors popped like a bubble before a jabbing finger and the Raven simply crumpled into flames and wildly spinning embers.
“Glass guns...” Kelly muttered, recalling Himari’s words.
The remaining Raven haunting Six’s tail sliced away to starboard, abandoned its pursuit. Kelly turned after it, but found it was putting on an explosion of speed. A glance across the tactical showed her all of the Ravens following suit, scattering away, running for the edge of the system. Expanding her scan, she quickly saw the reason why.
The rest of the Slashers were arriving.
“Running!” Himari crowed, the elation of her first kill causing her voice to crack with overexcitement. “Look at ‘em go!”
“Let them go,” Kelly ordered, powering her Marauder up alongside the other two. A glance to port at Slasher Six showed scorch marks and a spark-sputter of heavier damage. “Six, you all right over there?”
A cough crackled in the audio. A moment later, another baby face filled a globular hologram, this one aged a little bit from the last ninety seconds. “Smoke in the cockpit, but I’m all right,” the young man said. “Shield coil’s blown. It fried the number two grav drive when it went up.”
Kelly nodded. That was turning out to be a common problem. The Marauders were mean pieces of work, but a little high-strung. “Can you make the Sacramento on just the one engine?”
“No problem, Slasher Leader,” he replied. “And Commander? Thanks.”
“Any time.”
“Slasher Leader, this is Flight Two,” a new voice sputtered from the communicator, distorted by distance. On the tactical display, the flight coming from the far side of Saipan, itself, blinked to indicate the signal’s source. “Ravens in front of us, but breaking off.”
“I see you,” Kelly replied, watching as the Raven flight that had tried to work their way around the fight veered away to follow their comrades. At the edge of the system, the furthest of the Alliance fighters was already blinking into hyperspace. “Good work, everyone.”
“This is getting to be a regular thing,” Flight Two’s leader said—Slasher Five, one of the old hands, former Alliance, who’d flown a Valkyrie before this.
“And, yet, kind of forced,” Kelly said. “They were looking for a fight, this time, like they wanted to rattle us.”
“Don’t think this system’s going to be the place?” Five asked.
“I don’t know about that,” Kelly replied, hearing a hint of unease creeping into her voice. “Just seems to be a lot of noise the Alliance is making.
“Well, if it is,” Himari cut in, “they’re going to get a Slasher welcome!”
“Hell, yes, they are,” Five replied with a chuckle.
Kelly smiled, but didn’t quite manage to join the laughter. A glance to port again showed her Slasher Six falling back along her wingtip, the damage to his starfighter all the more obvious. Kid was lucky. Her eye went to the unblemished fuselage, the squadron decal there, a machete—like from a Holomedia horror flick—that Six looked to have embellished with a painted-on blood smear.
They were a good group—really, they were. But she couldn’t help missing the Jesters, again.
Because she had the feeling there was real blood coming.
JERRY RODANN STARED through the force field into the cell beyond. Polarized, the view was one way, but he couldn’t help the crawling sensation under his flesh that the prisoner within glared back, like a feral hound, whipped, starved, and beaten to a near-mindless menace.
Prisoner. He sighed. Damn, but that’s my little girl in there.
Tina leaned back in the cell’s single seat, sagged and vaguely bored-looking. She was working her jaw into a smirk, glancing about at her surroundings, no doubt aware she was being observed.
That insolence was the only thing about her that still felt familiar. The rest of her was a fragment of what she’d been. Old bruises darkened her otherwise drained-out complexion, which would normally been of the richest chocolate tones. Flesh hung off bones, robbed of the coiled spring athleticism she’d once possessed. And the eyes—twins to her late mother’s—fluttered with a desperate, hateful light, even as they pretended to nonchalance.
Not just a prisoner, he thought, a plant. A spy. Has to be. No other way she could have ended up here.
He’d left her on Cerelon, when their grand heist to steal a fleet of transports for the Loudon relief went to hell. Left her. Jerry winced. Left her for dead. He’d almost wished for that, too. Looking at her now, he couldn’t imagine where she’d been, what had been done to her, what the men who’d dropped her in the Jesters’ laps again intended for her to do.
They’d recovered her after the Battle of Fury, marooned in the wreckage of an Alliance transport. But it’d been such a clumsy fiction, her the only survivor on an otherwise empty and evacuated derelict, that the Raider boarding party that recovered her quickly sedated her, fearing what she might do. And, of course, Jerry had suggested it. He’d been there, by the cruelest of cosmic jokes, with the rescue party. He’d begged them to knock her out.
He knew how dangerous, how treacherous she could be.
Josie put a hand on his arm and half turned him to her. The leader of the Jesters’ ground assault group—the Raiders—had grown as close to Jerry as he’d let anyone get since Tina’s mother had finally imploded into addiction and self-destruction. And her blue eyes gleamed with worry for him.
“You don’t have to go in there,” she said to him. “Maybe it’s not a good idea.”
“I’m sure it’s not,” a second voice said.
Jerry glanced over his shoulder at Red, leader and founder of the Hell’s Jesters, leaning against the doorway to the antechamber just outside the holding cell. Her green stare smoldered out from a mahogany face at him, the kinky, red-dyed mop of her hair adding an infernal aspect to it.
“She’s my kid, Red.”
“We also know she’s a double-agent,” the woman replied and straightened, stepped into the room. “Playing both sides.”
“I think she only ever plays her own side,” Jerry replied.
“Even more dangerous,” Red said and came to stand before him, not nearly as tall, but somehow towering with the force of her personality. “But I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know.”
“No.” Jerry looked at Josie, who winced, likely seeing the pain on his own features.
“Someone left her for us to find,” Red said, “to mess with us. If you go in there, that’s what she’s going to do, starting with you, Rodann.”
Josie squeezed Jerry’s arm. “Maybe you should just wait. We have interrogators. Let them ask a few questions first, warm her up.”
“Warm her up?” Jerry’s voice rose with the sudden fury of a parent’s alarm.
Josie winced again. “Not how I meant it. But we have people who specialize in getting folks to talk.”
Jerry chortled humorlessly. “Not her. You don’t know, babe. Even when she was a kid, she was tricky. And now she’s had a whole life learning the game.” He sighed and looked back into the cell. “With me, at least, I’ll maybe have some kind of advantage.”
Red sidled up next to the cell door and looked in. “I don’t know about that. But she’s cuffed to the wall. Don’t get too close. Don’t give her any opening.”
“She’s not going to hurt me, Red.”
The Jester leader glared at him. “You sure of that?”
Not physically, she’s not, he thought. “Just let me in.”
Josie tugged once at his arm before Red disabled the force field. “Be careful in there, all right?” She touched his cheek with her other hand, looked like she wanted to kiss him, but restrained herself, released him, instead. Had to be impossibly weird for her. They’d only just become a thing, and now this.
He winked at her and turned to nod at Red, who touched the cell control panel beside the door. The shields unraveled with an electric crackle. Jerry stepped into the room.
Tina looked up at him, eyes flaring with shock, like the moment when Jerry caught her doing something wrong as a child. She blinked it away, though, and her face quickly curved back into the crooked smile—into the familiar, old mask. The eyes rolled and she leaned back against her chair with an exaggerated groan.
“Son of a bitch.”
“Not a very nice thing to call your grandmother,” Jerry quipped, coming to stand before her with arms crossed.
“I wouldn’t know. I didn’t know the lady.” She snorted and shook her head. “I hardly know you.”
“You’re going to lead off with that? The family drama? The aggrieved daughter?”
“Pretty sure I’ve got plenty to be aggrieved about. I mean, last time I saw you, Dad, you were abandoning me to certain death!”
Jerry fought to keep the grimace from his face. Of course, she’d gone right to that. And damned if it wasn’t true. They’d been pinned down by Alliance Marines at Cerelon, right outside the hangar bay to their escape ship. There’d been no other way. She’d known it.
“You told us to go,” he replied with chilliness he almost didn’t recognize as his own.
“Doesn’t mean you had to listen to me.”
“You seem to have come off all right.”
She laughed harshly. “Oh, yes. I’m alive, if that’s what you mean. Lucky me!” She jerked forward with sudden anger, caused the chair to squeak and the handcuff linked to the wall behind her to clack. “You can’t imagine what they did to me, Dad.”
Jerry pressed his lips together, buried the hurt. This was the game with her, always, the guilt. She knew he had mountains of it, over her, over her mother. With someone else she’d try another emotion. But guilt was his pain point.
“Who?” he asked, knowing he had to change the game. “Who had you? The Marines? The Council Guard? The AIB?”
She smiled at him, perhaps a flicker of admiration at his deflection. “Where are we?” she asked rather than answer. “You bring me back to the infamous Jester headquarters?”
“Sure.” He made himself keep his gaze locked with hers. “Tina, we know you were left on that derelict on purpose, to be found by someone. It’s obvious. It’s so obvious I can’t figure out why they bothered.” He leaned towards her. “Be a lot easier on everyone if you told us why.”
She cackled. “If this is all you’ve got, Dad, maybe you ought to send in someone who at least knows that you start with pain, not questions.”
“I think you’re hurting yourself plenty, already.”
“Oh, yes,” she drawled, “you’re so wise. You’re such a good father.”
He groaned, couldn’t help it. The little shit. “I don’t suppose you’re ever going to get tired of that?”
She cackled again. “It’s just so easy.”
“Well, easy was always the way with you.”
Her eyes flamed like a starship’s shields after taking a direct hit. “What the hell would you know of it? You were too busy being on the other side of the galaxy with your failed businesses, while I got to watch Mom spiral out of control with her cyberware habit and her revolving door of johns.”
