Brink of Destruction, page 7
Those canisters were little more than big shotgun shells propelled toward the threat by small rockets before detonating and scattering “sand”—really thousands of small metal bearings—in the direction of any incoming missiles. Or starfighters. They could be immensely destructive if deployed properly, but they were mainly for missile interception, not anti-starfighter use.
They could also indicate where some of the beam weapons were being used, as evidenced a moment later as the cloud of sand flared with brilliant green light, a laser vaporizing several of the fragments immediately. That beam wasn’t going to hit any of the starfighters currently, but that would be quickly remedied by the enemy gunners if any of the Zolarian pilots got slack on their maneuvering.
Sometimes it was only a matter of luck, too. Another flash of light bloomed out in the distance, and Anvil Seven blinked out on Early’s tactical display. The closer they got to the Mytunese formation, the worse it was going to get.
The tactical display was getting busier as the computer extrapolated more and more of the enemy fire. Those lines were more like cones of probability, projected out from Mytunese weapon emplacements as the computer continued to analyze the ships and their vectors. While they were approximate, they helped the fighters weave through the web of beam weapon vectors, though they weren’t nearly so useful against missiles.
After hours of rapid closure that still seemed achingly slow, now that the fighter formation—the starships not far behind, already launching salvos of missiles while trading raking barrages of beam fire with the Mytunese ships—was getting closer, everything appeared to be moving much, much faster. Audio cues began to pile up, adding to the sheer information overload in the cockpit. Early had enough hours flying a starfighter that it all came together into a symphony of combat for him, but he could still remember his first run in a simulator, and how overwhelmed he’d been.
He checked on his Adder. Sure enough, it had missed, running out of delta-v before it could reverse its vector from the hurtling trajectory that his starfighter had already been on and then overtake the Scimitar in its orbit. It was in freefall now, unpowered, arcing toward the moon’s surface below while its target neared the horizon beyond.
Then he had no attention to spare for that formation of Scimitars anymore, as Anvil sped across the bows of the Mytunese formation, less than a thousand kilometers away.
Beams flickered across space, sometimes wasting their energy in the void, sometimes connecting with ships. The Zolarian fighters cut thrust, if only because they had to turn toward the enemy ships, presenting the smallest targets possible while also bringing their beam weapons fully to bear.
The thrusters were still hammering them on slightly transverse vectors, though nothing nearly strong enough to arrest their momentum. More sand canisters were fired, putting up almost a wall of ball bearings between the starfighters and the rounded cylinders of the Mytunese starships.
Flashes strobed in the night as missiles sailed away and point defenses picked them out of the sky. Not all of them, and not always thoroughly enough. A detonated missile still had enough fragments remaining that they sleeted through a Hunter II’s wing, doing significant damage to the starfighter and sending it into a tumble. That tumble wasn’t arrested before it sailed right into a particle beam that punched a glowing hole through it, eviscerating the cockpit and killing the pilot instantly.
The Mytunese weren’t having it all their own way, though. Despite the squadron that had entered low orbit over the moon, the starships still had their own fighter screen out, and the Zolarian fire was taking its toll among them. Early locked onto a Tulwar X and triggered a series of laser pulses, rotating between all six of his ship’s emitters, the beams chewing away the chisel-nosed craft’s frontal armor before penetrating into the magazine in its underbelly. Charges detonated, ripping the craft open with a soundless flash.
The starships were exchanging fire as well, and most of the bigger flashes out there were heavy ship-to-ship missiles detonating as they were pinned by lasers or particle beams. Some were evading most of the beam fire only to slam into a sand canister with enough relative velocity for a kinetic kill. The starfighters and starships were armored. The missiles were not.
Anvil Three detonated. Anvil Twelve took a series of kinetic hits from a missile. Most of them were stopped by the armor, but two struck compromised plating and penetrated, slamming into Lieutenant Forster and killing him instantly.
One of the Mytunese ships began to break apart under the pounding it was taking, glowing shards flying off its hull as kinetic and beam strikes eroded its armor and structural integrity. Weapons fire penetrated deeper and deeper into the superstructure until reactor containment was breached, sun-hot plasma sheeting through the hull.
There was very little left after the burst of light tore the ship apart. Nearby ships had probably gotten a good dose of radiation, higher than their shielding could entirely filter out.
The Mytunese weren’t the only ones taking a beating. Weapons strikes were hammering at the Nebulon and the Fearless, and the latter was taking some heavy damage. Nothing as catastrophic as what had killed that Mytunese starship so far, but the damage control teams were going to be busy.
Then the distance was opening up again, and the Mytunese outgoing slackened considerably as the second Zolarian squadron cleared the moon and opened fire. The Mytunese formation was suddenly flanked and fighting for its life as the Zolarian ships crossed its orbit and headed toward the massive face of the gas giant.
Early took stock of his losses while still engaging dwindling Mytunese fighters. The toll had been high. At least four Anvil fighters were gone, destroyed outright. Many of the others were damaged. But this phase of the fight was over, as the starships crossed the Mytunese orbit and command issued the fighter recall.
Soaked in sweat, he looked down at his weapons readout. He’d barely had the attention to spare to count his shots. His missile banks were empty, and while the laser capacitors were recharging, they were severely depleted. His reaction mass was getting low, too.
“Anvil Squadron, by twos, return to the Inspiration.”
He tried not to think too much about the pilots who couldn’t hear, who would never hear anything again, what was left of their corpses drifting through space until the debris of their ships burned into the gas giant’s atmosphere, or the star burned out.
CHAPTER 9
“The Thunderer just went to active scanning.”
Bannon felt his eyebrows climb toward his forehead. Something had indeed changed, if Captain Tomas was risking open detection like that. Standard operating procedure for a retrieval in hostile space—or semi-denied space, like the Eredin system—called for as much stealth as possible. A starship couldn’t hide in the black the way an Infiltrator could, but low-energy maneuvers that might get lost in the background radiation and passive scanning only were the usual modus operandi.
But if the ghost ships could appear anywhere, he reasoned, then it probably wasn’t a bad idea to try to get the most warning possible. Any Zolarian ships in the system were still a long way away. And the ghost ships were much, much closer.
Kowalski brought a telescopic view of the starship up in the main tactical display, its conical lines faintly lit against the starfield by the dim star of the Eredin system. After a second, he zoomed out again, his fingers dancing over the controls to adjust the sensors’ sensitivity and what they would highlight.
From the annotations on the display, the Thunderer was at full alert. She had not launched fighters, but her weapons were armed and her missile launch bays were open.
Tomas was taking no chances. No chances he could avoid, anyway.
Kowalski still had the Infiltrator under thrust. He was going to have to cut the drive and conduct the skew-flip maneuver soon to match trajectories with the Thunderer for rendezvous, but he was going to close the distance as much as he could first.
While their pilot was calm and cool, Bannon could almost feel his own desperation to get out of the Eredin system. What had started as a reconnaissance mission on a suspected Zolarian staging operation had turned into another confrontation with the ghost ships.
An eerie feeling crept over him, along with the memories of the boarding action above Zhogalgan, the desperate fight to break contact from the ghost ship aliens on Thuraban, the devastated Afa Thura megacities, all still fresh in his mind after almost a year. It was as if these things were chasing him across the galaxy.
He knew it wasn’t a rational reaction. Knew that the unknown was mingling with the losses and the knowledge of the advanced tech the aliens wielded to feed the fear. A fear that a Corvanite shouldn’t be feeling.
No soldier worth his salt is fearless. He couldn’t remember which leader had told him that. Maybe it had even been Captain Haarot, though he doubted it. His old company commander—he’d barely seen the captain since being detached to Commander Fox’s direct orders—hadn’t been given to platitudes, even honest ones. He’d been a hard, unforgiving taskmaster, a man who recognized that he’d been promoted past his abilities with people, yet had to accomplish his mission anyway.
Who had said it was immaterial, Bannon reflected as he watched the display, beating back the creeping dread. It was a truth that some of the younger Corvanites had to learn the hard way. Fear was a natural response. It was a warning that kept men alive, if they dealt with it properly.
Yet there was nothing he could do about that fear here, on the deck of an Infiltrator, far out in the dark, with no control over his destiny or that of his men. He could only suppress it as best he could.
He wrestled with his thoughts, keeping his face carefully neutral, as he watched the display, peripherally aware of how Flint was watching it with the same intensity next to him. If anything, the Columbians were even farther out of their orbit than he was. They might have known about the ghost ships, but it didn’t sound like these men had encountered them before, and now they were only passengers, on a Corvanite ship instead of a Columbian one.
He wondered what had happened to the Columbians’ ship. So far as he knew, the Sentinel units didn’t ride along with line starships; they had their own wormhole-capable scoutships.
Kowalski had zoomed out enough that the Thunderer was a tiny mote in the center of the screen, her drive trail a ghostly blue comet in space behind her. The starfield was a splash of illumination, unmuted by atmosphere or the glare of a nearby sun.
The blue flash behind the Thunderer was almost invisible in that ocean of stars.
Bannon wanted to say something, to warn the Thunderer, but that was all on Kowalski. The pilot was reaching for the comm controls, but it turned out to be unnecessary.
Tomas had already been on alert. The starship’s tactical and scanner crews must have already been on the lookout for Cherenkov radiation bursts, because the lidar swept that area of space immediately, and the computer traced the gossamer line of a particle beam stabbing toward where the ghost ship had just appeared.
Both vessels were still too far away for the Infiltrator’s optics to pick the ghost ship out of the darkness of space yet. But they could see the missiles launched from the ordnance bays, flipping around and thrusting hard toward the dark ship in the void between the starship and the wormhole emergence point.
Bannon felt his weight—as light as it had been under the Infiltrator’s low thrust—ebb away to nothing. He grabbed a handhold, knowing what was coming next, keeping his eyes on the optics display.
The skew-flip went slowly. The length of the Infiltrator’s ion drive meant that a quick, violent maneuver wasn’t doable without putting heavy stress on the structure—and the craft hadn’t been designed with those sorts of maneuvers in mind. The telescope stayed trained on the fight out in the distance, at least until the flip necessitated switching to a second sensor. The display flickered, and Bannon was chagrined to notice that he stopped breathing while he waited for the image to come back.
The thought of being stranded out here in the dark, unable to leave the Eredin system because the Infiltrator wasn’t wormhole-capable, haunted him. He’d tell Kowalski to take them back to Eredin IV. Better to fight the aliens and the Zolarians on the ground, even if none of them survived, than to die in space, drifting endlessly.
The Thunderer was still fighting. She’d taken a couple of hits already, glowing wounds on her flank—those energy weapons packed a punch—but a Nike-class starship wasn’t easily defeated, not even by a ghost ship.
The optics were picking out the nested ovoid shape now, in part because the Thunderer’s gunners had scored some hard hits. The glow on the black skin of the ghost ship was less than where its weapons had struck the Corvanite starship’s hull, but the particle beams and lasers were taking their toll.
One of the missiles detonated in space, far from its target, picked off by an invisible beam of energy. The other continued to arrow in, getting closer to the ghost ship’s hull by the second.
Then there was another faint blue flash, and the missile continued on into deep space, still powered but with no target. The ghost ship had slipped into a wormhole that shouldn’t be there.
Again.
If he’d been on the ground, Bannon would have urged greater haste to get to extract. That didn’t really work in space. Orbital dynamics were unforgiving, even under power.
He could only imagine how bad it must have been in the days before constant-thrust trajectories.
No one spoke. There was nothing to do but wait and watch, until either they made rendezvous with the Thunderer, or the ghost ship reappeared.
The Infiltrator and the Thunderer closed on each other, surrounded by the darkness and silence of the outer edges of the Eredin system.
CHAPTER 10
The hours crept by in silence, for the most part. Flint had intimated that their Shihyanese passenger might have some more intel, though how much he’d be willing to give up to the Corvanites was unknown, and he was currently in cryo.
While the initial rendezvous hadn’t been expected to happen for almost a standard month, the Thunderer’s early arrival and full-power approach had cut that considerably. The reality of interplanetary distances still meant it was a long cruise to make linkup.
After a while, though none of them went into cryo, Bannon and the two Columbians who were still up found acceleration couches in the aft compartment and racked out. Once things had gone quiet after the ghost ship’s disappearance, the collective fatigue from the insert, movement, ambush, and evac under fire had finally hit him; he’d been awake for most of three days. There had been time to crash for a few hours here and there once they’d lifted, but the Corvanites and Columbians still weren’t quite friendly enough to be entirely comfortable with sleeping without a watch set. Bannon didn’t think they’d try to hijack the Infiltrator, but he had to be careful.
Now, however, he was so tired that he simply couldn’t stay conscious. He didn’t know how Kowalski did it, but he suspected that their pilot was wired up to receive a jolt when an alert sounded, at least once they were done maneuvering.
His dreams alternated between nightmares where the Thunderer exploded, far out in the endless night, leaving the Infiltrator stranded to cruise out into interstellar space, the men aboard going into cryo until the power failed and they suffocated in the dark, and desperate fights with thousands of the ghost ship aliens.
None seemed to feature the Zolarians.
He awoke suddenly, groping for a weapon, disoriented to the point where he wasn’t sure where he was. The darkened hold was unfamiliar, as was the faint chime of an alarm, but his hand closed around his CR-196 and he settled down a little, until he remembered he was aboard the Infiltrator, heading for rendezvous with the Thunderer.
The sound of the alarm that had awakened him kept him from relaxing too much.
The Infiltrator wasn’t under thrust anymore. He didn’t really notice the zero gee until he unbuckled from his acceleration couch. Grabbing a handhold, he started to propel himself toward the cockpit.
As he looked around in the dimness, he noticed that Flint and Talon were both awake. So was Hern. He hadn’t even realized that his senior squad sergeant had stayed out of cryo. Probably hadn’t been confident about leaving the two Columbians with only two Corvanite officers.
Bannon swam toward the cockpit, pulling himself from handhold to handhold. Kowalski was shifting his attention from display to display, but he still noticed Bannon’s entrance. “It’s back.”
The main tactical display showed the ghost ship, while the secondary was focused on the Thunderer. Both ships were trading fire, though the gossamer lines of energy weapons fire were only traced by the computer, and even then they were hazy possibilities until one of the beams actually touched its target.
At first, it looked as if the fight was going badly. The ghost ship was farther away than it had been on its first attack, but the Thunderer was showing a few wounds, glowing holes punched into the armor of her hull. Even so, glowing patches on the ghost ship indicated that the aliens weren’t getting their way completely.
Kowalski confirmed that a moment later. “Captain Tomas was ready for them. He must have all hands on alert, watching every sector with every sensor aboard. The first shots were already homing in on the ghost ship as soon as it materialized.”
As Bannon watched, the seeming unbalance of the engagement shifted. The ghost ship was taking a hammering. The aliens must have still been susceptible to wormhole shock, plus they might not have expected exactly where the Thunderer would be when they transitioned into realspace. Those few seconds of advance reaction time had made all the difference in the galaxy.
The Thunderer was expending a lot of power, pouring laser and particle beam fire into its adversary. The returning energy weapon fire was slackening as the ghost ship took damage, and the Thunderer’s first missiles were already away, boosting at nearly ten gees for their target.
