Hell or Highwater (Hell's Jesters, #5), page 40
“Your Grace!” he heard the man exclaim. “My god, it’s worse than it looked on the hologram! We’ll get you to medical and—”
“Fool!” Julian shrieked. “They’re going to—”
Jerry pivoted from behind the edge of the chute and slammed the heel of his blastpistol grip into Julian’s kidneys. With a squeal, the Methuselah dropped to the floor. Jerry looked over his quivering shape, up the chute to see the yacht officer, gawking in surprise. The man was lunging for the blaster holstered at his hip. Behind him, a Council Guardsman fumbled to bring his blastrifle to bear.
Josie stepped around from the other side and Jerry barely had time to flinch back, out of her way, before she fired. The blast took the officer squarely in the chest, flung him backwards into the Guardsmen before he knew what had happened. She stepped fully into the chute, firing again. Tangled up in the fall of the officer, the black-clad trooper had no chance at evasion, the bolt punching through his facemask in a crash of sparks and flying metal.
Then Josie was lurching down the chute, screaming. Jerry stumbled after her, nearly tripping over Julian, who was beginning to rise. With a surge of rage and a roar, Jerry slammed him with his pistol again, this time to the back of the skull. Distantly, he wondered if he’d just pulped the brains of their leverage. But the Methuselah slumped in the chute, no longer an immediate problem. And Jerry needed simple solutions.
Josie’s blasts punished the eardrums. She was already out of sight, but the hammer of her footsteps indicated the way. Jerry stepped over the slain men and out into the yacht’s main corridor, panning his blaster left and finding only a sealed door, another Guardsman slumped back against it and smoldering.
A blaster bolt slapped by his head, cracked off the aft door, and sent slag spuming into the air. Jerry ducked back. A flurry of fire shivered the air of the corridor in pulses of cyan. It ended an instant later. He heard the pound of feet on deck plate and knew Josie was on the move again.
Feeling as though it was someone else’s body in motion, Jerry launched himself after her. Every step dragged, it seemed, weighted by doubled-gravity he knew was only in his imagination. The corridor was a narrow, elongated octagon, bulkheads at even intervals tightening the space further. He reached another tangle of fallen Guardsmen, Josie’s grim work, and lost time stepping over them.
Cyan ripped up along the corridor and Jerry stumbled back behind a bulkhead. Sparks and molten alloy speckled bare flesh, bit. He shrank into the angle of the passage, but could find no more space. Josie was ahead, shrunken to the opposite side of the hall and firing from behind another bulkhead as Guardsmen fell back before her, tripping another up, then crumpling as her fire strobed with cold, metronome rhythm. The air fouled with smoke and screams.
Then she was moving again.
Jerry followed, reached an intersection where side passages appeared to feed to compartments lining either flank of the vessel—likely crew and passenger quarters. Motion to the left tugged at Jerry’s mind and he stumbled, flinched backwards. The stagger likely saved his life as a blaster bolt slapped through the space he’d occupied. He fired back reflexively as his back slammed into a wall. No more shots followed.
With the racket of Josie’s running fight continuing on ahead, Jerry leaned around the corner. A Guardsman slumped halfway into the junction of corridors, smoke winding up from a hole burnt through his torso. Checking the passage leading right and finding nothing, Jerry took another tentative step to the left, moved cautiously toward the side passage and the hall running parallel to the main corridor.
A storm of cyan blades filled the air before him and he flinched back. The motion turned him around in time to find black-clad figures emerging from the other side of the junction. Blastpistol already up, he didn’t even have to aim, just pulled the trigger. The first Guardsman into the main corridor went down in a squall of cyan flame. The second stumbled over the first, actually had a hand up—reflexively or pleading, Jerry would never know—when the flurry of his blaster fire jolted the man backwards, dead before he finishing sliding down the wall to the floor.
Energy bolts continued to chew the side hall in a wild pattern, clearly frantic and unaimed. An alarm was sounding somewhere and indicator lights pulsing blood red all along the passageways of the invaded yacht. Someone was shouting. Might have been Josie. He thought he heard the clamor of her rushing again.
“Dad!”
Everything crystallized into an icy moment at the word, cried out over the din of blasters. Fear shrank back before a cold fury, howling like a polar wind up out of Jerry’s core. The mind fog of before cleared and details stilled to perfect clarity around him. He knew what he had to do, as though the instructions were printed across the insides of his skull.
He saw a little girl with pigtails, bouncing up and down with excitement as she waited for him to pick her up.
He saw a daughter he’d left behind too many times.
The blaster bolt storm relented for instant. Jerry clenched his jaw and whirled around the corner into the side hall.
A Council Guardsman was waiting. His first shot screamed past Jerry’s head so close it left a line of tingled, singed flesh at the temple. The second would kill. But Jerry’s blast cut it off, struck the blastrifle muzzle and jolted it upwards in a spray of metal slivers. The Guardsman squawked in pain that was lost in the torrent of blasts that followed, flaming the air, the bulkheads, everything as Jerry unloaded in mindless fury. He wasn’t sure the man had fallen, his vision shot through with fire and rage.
“Dad!!!”
The blastpistol ceased firing. Jerry didn’t know if the weapon, glowing red at the muzzle, had malfunctioned or he’d managed to reassert a sliver of self-control. The Guardsman slumped in smoking shards before him. Death littered the halls behind him. He could hear it in the air, smell it, see it pulsing red to the time of the yacht’s emergency lights.
“Dad...”
He looked to his right. His rush had carried him down the side hall, left him standing before an open compartment door. Blinking away sweat, he saw Tina, bruised and shaking, but alive and flung into the corner of what looked like a luxury living quarters. Julian’s maybe, he thought with a spike of rage. But the hot stab of it cooled as he took an uncertain step into the chamber.
“You’re all right?” he heard himself ask dumbly.
Her wrists bound, she clumsily levered herself back to her feet, using the wall. Her eyes shimmered. “Yeah, I’m...” She gulped and twin tear tracks raced down her cheeks. “You came.”
He blinked again, ran a hand across his brow. “Yeah, I did.” He sounded surprised, even to himself. “Yeah...of course I did...”
“You came for me,” she repeated.
He smiled at her. She was still the girl in pigtails. “From now on. Always.”
“Rodann!”
Jerry flinched at the voice blatting over what sounded like the yacht’s general address speakers. Confusion fought relief for a moment. The voice was Josie’s.
“Rodann!” she repeated, tone rising with panic. “Are you back there?”
“Here!” he shouted at the top of his lungs.
Tina stepped over to a communicator plate, affixed beside the entrance to the room, and touched it. “Wheeler, this is Tina. We’re both here.” She met Jerry’s gaze with a smile like a supernova. “We’re all right.”
“That’s great,” Josie drawled back. “Except we’re not. Jerry, get your ass up here! I took the bridge and think I’ve sealed off the compartments where the rest of these assholes are. Doesn’t look like they managed to lock out the engines. But I don’t know what the hell I’m looking at with these controls.”
Jerry exhaled for what felt like the first time. “I’m on my way.”
Tina reached out and touched Jerry’s arm. It felt like the first caress of a new sunrise and he pulled her into an embrace, held on to her with every shred of his being. He felt it as she chuckled.
“We never have the time, do we?”
“We will,” he promised her. “I swear, we’re going to have all the time in the universe.”
“AGAIN, SLASHERS!”
Kelly tried not to hear the desperation in her own voice as she nosed her Marauder back towards the Foundation Fleet for another pass. The Slashers formed up around her and they, in turn, were forming up ahead of what was looking like the Union’s last-ditch effort.
A thin line of ships was rushing for the Alliance attack, the sleek shapes of the new-model Panthers in the lead, nine of them, though at least half of those damaged from their fight with the Rimward Fleet. Behind these came the rest of Avery’s mixed bag, centered around the Solomon. Even further beyond these, the Sacramento and the rest of the stragglers were limping for safety.
But none of it looked like it would work. The Alliance formation was deforming as Kelly watched, what had been a crescent pulling back on one side, as the left horn slowed to meet their counterattack. The right horn stretched out ahead, like a great, terrible arm, reaching past the fight to catch the stragglers and envelop them all.
And where the hell was Greer and the rest of the Union Fleet?
But she couldn’t think on that now, had to focus on the next minutes, seconds. She touched the icon of the lead Panther, noted its heavy damage and that it was already lagging behind its kin. “DESRON Leader, this is Slasher One. We’re with you.”
A globular fraught with pixelation appeared before her and the dark, smiling face within it replied, “Thanks, Slashers! We don’t have a lot of running room and they’ve already seen us, so I don’t know how well our baffles will work.”
Kelly wasn’t totally sure what he meant by that. She knew the Panthers had some sort of advanced ECM packages. But as she watched, six of their icons fluttered and faded from her scopes. The hell...? She suddenly had a hint as to how they’d made such a mess of the Rimward squadrons.
“If you can keep as many inbounds off us as you can,” DuBoise was saying, “that’d be all the help in the world.”
“Roger,” Kelly replied. “We’ll tie our weapons to your point-defense web.” She glanced at the icon of DuBoise’s ship, the Smelter, she noted—also noted that its icon was still visible to her sensors, though notably faint. “We’ll stay with you the whole way.”
“Thanks, Slasher.” DuBoise vanished from her cockpit.
“We’ll stay with you, too,” another voice crackled across the tactical network.
Kelly grinned miserably, wished he wasn’t there—as much as she was glad that he was. A flicker of icons joined the Slashers as they settled around the still-visible Panthers. Tim and his Hellhounds made the little group seem a little less hopeless.
Just a little.
“Glad to have you, Jesters.”
Fire was already lashing out from the oncoming Alliance ships, a wilting, appalling volume of energy bolts and missiles. It was clear they weren’t going to be completely fooled by the Panthers’ countermeasures, having already tracked them far enough to estimate their attack pattern and simply filling the space before them with destruction. A smear of fire betrayed a series of hits in what had looked like empty vacuum, suddenly became the flaming wreck of one of the stealth-destroyers. That wreck still managed to unleash a volley of anti-ship missiles and further anarchy looped into the Alliance formation.
And suddenly, with slap-to-face immediacy, Kelly was in the midst of that.
An onslaught of missiles vomited from the Alliance cruisers and escorts and every hostile targeting and proximity alarm the Marauder possessed was squalling at once. Kelly flipped to energy weapons, tasked the particle cannon to the fighter’s AI and brought up the quad-blaster halo. Pulling the trigger, she held it down, hosing plasma fire into the volley.
The rest of the Slashers joined the frantic fusillade, adding their fire to the frenzy of the damaged Panthers’ point defenses. Alliance warheads burst all around them, a blizzard of antimatter flecks swirling in hellish beauty. But beauty became horror as one of the stricken and still-visible stealth-destroyers jolted from multiple hits, then flew apart with a flash of fusion-breach supernova.
Slasher Ten was gone, a missile shattered by his quad-blaster still peppering him in shrapnel that sleeted trough already-weakened shields to rend his starfighter to shreds. As Kelly watched, one of the Jesters strayed into a main gun blast from an Alliance battlecruiser and literally vaporized. And the Alliance ships seemed to be slowing, seemed all about now, pouring on with energy weapons at close range.
Panther missiles blossomed out of nowhere into the heart of the Alliance, rampaged into shields at too close a range for their point-defenses to catch them all. Explosions daisy-chained across the deflector fields till they blew out from overload. More feasted upon naked hull plate. First two, then three Alliance vessel buckled with blasts and sprays of metal and venting atmosphere.
It was an orgy of destruction. And Kelly was nothing in that.
“Hit!” a frantic, familiar voice cried across the general address. “Mayday! We are hit!”
Kelly could barely take her attention from the deluge before her. But out of the corner of her eye should could see horror on the tactical. The other horn of the Alliance crescent had reached the Union stragglers and was unleashing upon them. One of the lightly-armed drone tenders exploded as she watched. Alliance fire walked after the fleeing ships, enveloped a badly-damaged light cruiser and gnawed it to pieces.
Then they found the Sacramento.
And then the grand, old girl was done.
Fire caught up to her battle-scarred hull, converged, overwhelmed her depleted deflectors, savaged armor and plate that had weathered so much. Alloy reddened, whitened, ran to slag. Atmosphere plumed free where seams burst, fed flames that spread inward. A ripple of internal explosions bulged out her guts. Then a final sundown glare of fusion bottle rupture swallowed the greatest ship in the Union Fleet.
“No...” Kelly croaked.
A blast to starboard jolted her out of her shock. Explosions flashed across the Smelter as an Alliance main gun blast sliced along her flank. It staggered in space, limned in a cloud of expanding debris and leaking oxygen. Carried now solely on momentum, the stealth-destroyer, already deprived of its stealth, was now deprived of its speed and began to fall behind.
“No good...” DuBoise’s voice crackled over the general address. “Engine failure...we’ve still got guns...hold ‘em off as long as we can. You’re doing no good, Slasher One! Get clear!”
But watching the jaws of the Alliance juggernaut close in around them, Kelly was no longer certain there was any place to get clear to.
“JESUS CHRIST, WATKINS! Why the hell are we doing this?!?!”
Tim knew it was fury, not fear in Matyszak’s voice, but he sure didn’t have an answer for him, either way.
The charge was going to pieces. The Alliance was all around. Everywhere he looked, Hellhounds, Marauders, Union starships were exploding. And the blaster fire and missiles kept coming.
“Cory,” he called, “you still with me?”
“Right on your wing!”
They’d somehow stayed with one of the damaged Panthers on its sideswiping path across the flank of the Alliance formation. Miraculously unhit during its rush, it was now pursued by a seethed tornado of anti-ship missiles. Tim let some speed bleed off and dropped back to the ship’s flank, pivoting the Hellhound’s weapons about to bear.
“Let’s shake off these fleas!” Tim told Cory and squeezed the trigger.
She joined her fire to his in a moment, the pair of Hellhounds standing off the oncoming missile horde with the frenzy of their cyan and azure arrows. The fleeing Panther added its own weapons and the pursing warheads suddenly halted in space, wreathed in antimatter fire, shattered, flying apart as though they’d struck a wall. But fragments spiraled away from that collision, looped about on the guidance of their malignant programming, kept coming.
Tim clenched his teeth till pain slivered into the jaw bone. He held onto the trigger until the feeling left his fingers and only the steady walk of the targeting halo across one missile after another told him he still had control. White-fire blisters burst closer and closer. Off Tim’s port wing, Cory’s Hellhound dazzled, glowed, looked like the fury of her defense would consume her as well.
And then there was just silence and void before them, and the battle being left behind.
“That got it!” the voice of the Panther’s captain burst in Tim’s earbud. “You got them all! Thank God!”
Tim peeled a shaking finger from the trigger, then the whole hand from the stick, working it furiously to get the blood flowing again. The discomfort of it was the most surprising thing he could remember. He was alive. Still.
“They’re just flying on,” Cory called to him. “The Alliance, they’re not giving chase.”
Scanning the tactical, Tim could see that was only half-true. The Alliance fleet was pulling by the demolished counter-attack, stretching its deadly arm out for Surigao to savage the support ships. But they were also pummeling the survivors of the forlorn hope as they streaked by, slamming what were little more than wrecks with contemptuous energy bolts and parting sprays of missiles the mauled ships could no longer evade.
Tim touched the icon of the Panther. “Captain, you can’t do anymore good in your shape. Keep going. Get clear. We’re heading back to see if there’s more we can do.”
“Roger, Jesters.” A heartfelt pause. “Good luck.”
“You, too.”
Tim scanned the tactical for some sign of Kelly, then. Futile, he knew. All was anarchy and death. He was pretty sure he didn’t want to find her. Better to just hope or pretend.
It was all done, all shot to hell. He could see it, letting his gaze pan across the entirety of the scene. No way to be sure how many of the other Panthers had punched through and lived. But the Alliance stragglers were taking a beating that only worsened by the moment. That heavy cruiser forming the nucleus of the scratch defense before Surigao shivered with almost continuous hits, its consorts the same. Far flung from the disaster, it looked like the Union Fleet was rushing back for them. But they’d be too late.
